Abstract:

Education is an esential pillar for reducing poverty and promoting a more sustainable, pacific and equitative world. To assess the quality of education and the success of the educational policies, several countries and institutions use as indicator the Early Leaving from Education and Training (ELET) rate. ELET is a very complex phenomena with a wide variety of causes, in most of the cases related to personal, social, economic, academic and family circumstances, and its reduction impacts directly in the success of the entry of youth into the labour market, the promotion to higher education, the reduction of the unemployment rate, poverty and risk of social exclusion while strengthening the european social model.

The European Comission fixes in 10% the desirable maximum ELET rate for 2020. However, spanish ELET rate is far from this percentage, with a value of 22,3% in the third trimester of 2014, being the second country in Europe, only after Turkey, with higher ELET rate. So it becomes essential to design strategies to promote its reduction. The objective of this work is to contribute to improve these strategies by analyizing how ELET is characterized in the frame of the european context with the aim of proposing improvements based on strategies carried out by other european countries with lower ELET rates. A comparative analysis has been carried out regarding to the definition considered by the different european countries, the age of ending of the compulsory education, the different typology of data used to characterize the phenomena, the frequency of anaysis and the agregate level (national, regional, local, school) to which data are available.

Results show that improvements should be done in order to a better characterization of this phenomena, according to strategies used by other countries. ELET characterization is a complex issue, but essential to develope actions to reduce the existance of this phenomena, to detect situations of vulnerability, and to design more effective educational policies.

Keywords:

Early Leaving From Education and Training, spanish ELET rate, compulsory education, education, educative policies.