What is early school leaving? Spain against the EU, with the 2025 data

Early school leaving is one of those terms that sounds self-explanatory and has a precise definition. The EU indicator counts people aged 18 to 24 who have completed at most lower secondary education, in Spain at most the ESO, and who have not taken part in any education or training in the four weeks before the survey. It is measured with the Labour Force Survey, the same survey that measures unemployment. A 19-year-old who left after the ESO and is now on a short course does not count. A 22-year-old with the ESO and a job in a warehouse does.

The definition frames the problem. The indicator asks one thing: whether, at an age when most of their peers are still building skills, a young person has stopped.

Spain's numbers

Spain's rate in 2025 was 12.8%, according to the Ministry of Education's analysis of the Labour Force Survey, summarised by the economist Ismael Sanz in a February 2026 report for Funcas. That is the lowest figure on record. In 2002 the rate was 30.9%, fourteen points above the EU, and in 2008 it was 31.7%. In 2015 it was 20.0%. The fall since then, 7.2 points, is one of the three largest in the EU, behind only Malta and Portugal, according to the Eurostat figures for 2025 reported by the Brussels Times.

Spain is still near the top of the table. The EU average was 9.1% in 2025, almost on the 2030 target of below 9%, and 17 member states were already there. The highest rates were in Romania (15.5%), Germany (13.1%) and Spain (12.8%); the lowest in Croatia (2.1%), Greece (3.0%) and Ireland (3.6%). Sanz points out that at the current pace of about 0.2 points a year Spain will miss the target: it would need to cut almost four points in five years, four times faster than now.

Who leaves

The averages hide a few very sharp lines.

Boys. In 2025 the rate was 15.9% for young men and 9.5% for young women. The gap has narrowed since 2015, but in 2025 the men's rate rose slightly while the women's kept falling. Sanz notes that Spain is short of young men in intermediate vocational training: they stop after the ESO.

Family origin. This is the strongest predictor. Among young people whose mother has at most primary education, 32.9% left early; with a mother who completed lower secondary, 17.5%; upper secondary, 8.7%; higher education, 2.4%. A fourteen-fold gap.

Nationality. Foreign nationals aged 18 to 24 left early at a rate of 30.7%, up 1.1 points, against 9.8% for Spaniards.

Region. The Basque Country (3.6%), Navarre (7.8%) and Cantabria (8.9%) are already below the EU target. Murcia (20.6%) is far above it, followed by the Canary Islands (15.9%), Castilla-La Mancha (15.7%) and La Rioja (15.5%). Same basic education laws, and a gap of seventeen points.

There is a European pattern worth knowing too. Across the EU, Eurostat finds 46.2% of early leavers in work, 30.8% unemployed and looking, and 23.1% neither. Spain is among the countries where at least half of early leavers have a job, Euronews reports. Many Spanish early leavers are working, which means the second chance has to fit around a job.

Vocational training, and where it leaks

Spain's progress owes a lot to vocational training (FP). Sanz's report shows that basic FP works as a bridge: 64.4% of its 2019-20 graduates went on to intermediate FP. And FP pays: four years after graduating, 66.8% of intermediate FP graduates of the 2019-20 cohort were registered with Social Security, and full-time employees from intermediate FP had average annual contribution bases of €22,739 (2020-21 cohort).

The leaks are large, though. Of students who entered basic FP in 2019-20, 36.1% had neither finished nor were still enrolled five years later; in intermediate FP, 25.4%.

The radical-centre response

The left is right that leaving follows origin, and Amartya Sen's capability approach explains why that matters: a 17-year-old who walks out of school loses options for decades, and the options were unequal before they walked out. So resources should go first to the schools and pupils who start with least, from early years onwards. The market-liberal tradition is right that a visible payoff keeps people learning: FP with real jobs and wages at the end does more for a bored 16-year-old than any campaign.

What fits neither camp is to treat early leaving as reversible. The EU indicator itself points the way: anyone who takes up training stops counting. The European Commission reports, as Sanz notes, that one in three early leavers would like to return to education and runs into entry requirements, a lack of support or bad memories of school. So give every 18 to 24-year-old without upper secondary a standing right to return: an offer, sent automatically, of modular FP courses in the evenings or at weekends, each module accredited and counted towards a full intermediate qualification, with the employer able to host the practical part. Pay the provider per module completed. Publish, by region, how many people come back and finish.

Murcia and the Basque Country work under the same basic laws with a seventeen-point gap, which shows how far a region can move. A right to return gives every region a way to win back the pupils it has lost, and Spain can count the results, region by region, from the first year.