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Rural Vision
News article24 January 2023Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy

Education - Early leavers and further indicators

On 24 January, we celebrated the International Day of Education. One of the actions under the prosperous pillar of the Vision is to encourage education, training and employment opportunities for young people in rural areas.

To this end, the Commission collaborates with Member States, other countries and stakeholders via the European Education Area strategic framework Working Groups. We would hereby like to present one of the seven key targets outlined in this initiative: the early leavers from education and training. The EU has set a goal to reduce the proportion of early leavers to less than 9% by 2030.

These are individuals aged 18–24 years who reached at most a lower secondary level of educational and who were not engaged in any further education and training.

But where do we currently stand in Europe?

In 2021, 9.7% of young people aged 18-24 in the EU were early leavers from education and training. While cities were below the EU average (8.6%), the share of early leavers was higher in towns and suburbs (10.7%) and rural areas (10.0%).

The rural observatory has made a data set available, allowing to take a closer look at the state-of-play in the 27 Member States.

Feel free to check out additional indicators related to education.

Graph of early leavers from education by country in 2021