Reducing the EU average share of early leavers from education and training to below 10% of 18- to 24-year-olds was one of the specific objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy.
The ‘early leavers from education and training’ indicator is defined as the percentage of the population aged 18 to 24 who have attained, at most, lower secondary level education (ISCED 0-2) and who are not involved in formal or nonformal education or training. The EU achieved its objective of reducing early leaving in the 2020 policy cycle. The EU has set a new quantitative target.
Early leavers from education and training (%)
Source: Eurostat, EU Labour Force Survey (LFS).
Key points
In 2020, early leavers from education and training accounted for 9.9% of the population aged 18 to 24 in the EU. This represented a drop by 1.1 percentage points since 2015 and allowed to meet the EU average target. Levels of early leaving at 5% or less were in Croatia, Greece, Slovenia, and Ireland (flag indicates low reliability of estimates for Croatia). The highest shares of early leavers from education and training (above 15%) were in Spain, Malta, and Romania.
Many countries have set their own national target, sometimes more ambitious than the overall Europe 2020 target, in other cases less so. By 2020, 15 countries had reached their national target (Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, France, Croatia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Austria, Portugal and Slovenia).
In most Member States, the percentage of early leavers from education and training fell or remained the same between 2015 and 2020. The exceptions are Cyprus (+6.3 percentage points), Czechia (+1.4%), Austria (+0.8%), Slovakia (+0.7%), Hungary (+0.5%), and Lithuania (+0.1%). A break in time series for data for 2020 for Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands Poland, and Sweden means that they cannot be reliably compared with data for 2015. Data for Germany in 2020 are flagged as provisional.
Among non-EU countries, early leaving from education and training in 2020 was highest in Turkey (26.7%) and lowest in Montenegro (3.6%). Only Turkey and Iceland have a share of early school leavers that is higher than the EU average. All the early leavers rates fell in non-EU countries between 2015 and 2020, major decreases were in Turkey (-9.7%) and North Macedonia (-5.7%).
Table 21. Early leavers from education and training (%)
Source: Eurostat, EU Labour Force Survey (LFS). Notes: (b) ‘break in time series’; (p) ‘provisional’; (u) ‘unreliable’, data are not presented when they are not available and/or do not support sufficiently reliable comparisons across countries or over time.
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