In most European Union countries, compulsory education ends with lower secondary schooling, at the age of 16, as is the case in Spain. However, most young people continue to study in various types of upper secondary schooling (equivalent to the Spanish bachillerato or baccalaureate, or intermediate-level cycles), although with variations. The concept early school leaving is used to refer to young people aged 18 to 24 who have completed, at most, compulsory secondary education and do not continue studying or training in post-compulsory secondary education. This definition spotlights the fact that compulsory education fails to provide the competences required to make a successful entry into the job market: in 2017, more than half of European young people without post-compulsory studies – and who were not studying to complete them – were unemployed.

For this reason, the EU set the objective of reducing early school leaving to a maximum of 10% – in the case of Spain, 15%, owing to the high baseline rate – and getting at least 40% of young people to reach further education. Spain is achieving the second goal, but is bring up the rear in the first, with 18% early school leaving. The project Reducing Early School Leaving in the European Union (RESL.eu) has analysed the problem for five years in nine European countries, in order to determine which factors contribute to early school leaving and which prevent it, with a focus on specific settings and risk groups, including migrant-background pupils.

Average early school leaving in Spain fell from 30.8% in 2007 to 18% ten years later, in 2017, when the decrease levelled off. Its peak value, reached in 2008, coincided with the end of the pre-crisis boom, during which period some young people preferred to get a job rather than continue studying. The subsequent drop may have been due to the reduced opportunities in the labour market, which in 2016 displayed a youth unemployment rate of 44%.

Early leaving from education and training varies considerably in Spain, depending on the autonomous community concerned. The study on which this article is based was conducted in Catalonia, where early school leaving stands at around 18%, which is similar to the average for Spain as a whole. The sample comprised 35 secondary schools and various types of occupational training colleges, with 3,700 pupils and 700 teachers, and quantitative and qualitative techniques were applied from a longitudinal and comparative perspective.

The already high early school leaving rate in Spain soars among foreign-born pupils (it should be noted in this respect that the various ways of designating non-native status – foreign or migrant-background, born abroad and born outside the EU – mentioned in this article are a reflection of the data sources used in the research). One in three young people born abroad leaves school at the end of compulsory secondary education or even before completing it, and this early leaving is more common among males. Furthermore, Spain displays the widest gap in the EU regarding both family origin and gender. With a 7.3% difference in early school leaving between men and women, it exceeds the European average of 3.2%, according to Eurostat data for 2017. Early leaving from education and training renders these young people more vulnerable to unemployment and they run a higher risk of social exclusion than their Spanish-background peers.

It is often thought that the measure of academic achievement for migrant-background pupils is their completion of compulsory secondary education, and in this context the limited resources available to most of the schools they attend are directed towards attaining that end. In this way, the lack of educational continuity of these pupils beyond compulsory schooling is not really seen as a problem. In secondary school, migrant-background pupils are more likely to be placed in low grades and encouraged to take vocational training. While this stage of education has great potential, the range of courses on offer is insufficient and geographically imbalanced, and it accounts for the highest percentage of early leaving in the whole education system.

Although migrant-background pupils finish compulsory secondary schooling much less than Spanish-background pupils do, their educational aspirations and their families’ expectations play a very important part in their remaining in the education system once they have completed compulsory secondary education.

The study reveals that, for migrant-background pupils, successfully completing compulsory secondary education is an indicator of greater protection against early school leaving. The graph above shows that the percentage of early leaving among native-background pupils with further education was higher than among migrant-background pupils with the same educational level.

More than 90% of the total of the pupils in the Spanish sample expressed their desire to study beyond the compulsory level, this percentage standing at 80% among migrant-background pupils. In both cases, these aspirations were the highest in the sample of countries studied, in spite of the high level of early school leaving in Spain. For the pupils, having a horizon in their educational aspirations constitutes an important factor for protection against early school leaving, especially if it comes hand in hand with the perception of high expectations from their teachers and families, according to the research findings.

Most pupils perceive strong support from their families, to whom they attribute high expectations regarding their future educational path, despite the fact that most of the teachers attribute early school leaving mainly to lack of family support.

The study has revealed that teachers are sometimes unaware of the great influence they wield and their capacity to intervene in the event of risk of early school leaving. Thus, it confirms and develops previous research on the effects of teachers’ expectations on the confidence pupils have in themselves and the education system. Pupils attribute to their teachers low educational expectations regarding their studies; lower than those attributed to their families and much lower than their own expectations. Again, the differences are exacerbated in the case of migrant-background pupils. For example, 28.2% of pupils who are taking compulsory secondary education and are born outside the European Union believe that their teachers do not expect them to carry on studying, as opposed to 13.7% of Spanish nationals in compulsory secondary education who likewise perceive low expectations.

The RESL.eu project has identified the crucial importance of pupils’ perception of support from their teachers, along with school engagement, as key factors for protecting against the risk of early school leaving. These factors are even more important than non-school factors, such as pupils’ own aspirations and educational expectations, or their perception of family support towards achieving them. However, in Spain, as this article shows, school factors (school engagement and the perception of support from teachers) obtain lower scores than individual and family factors (aspirations and perception of social support).

The study also analyses the differences between pupils by social background. The situation as regards factors of protection of Spanish-background and migrant-background pupils attending schools where families are exclusively or mostly in low-income brackets hardly differs.

In order to combat early school leaving it is indispensable for teachers to become aware of their role, which is fundamental. To this end, sufficient resources must also be made available to create inclusive pathways to further secondary education, in order to provide active support in the form of individual guidance in all schools and colleges. Only then will it be possible to tackle the problem of early school leaving and harness the potential of education as a tool for social integration.

CARRASCO, S., J. PÀMIES, L. NARCISO and A. SÁNCHEZ (2018): “Abandono escolar prematuro y alumnado de origen extranjero en España: ¿un problema invisible?”,  Anuario CIDOB de la Inmigración, November 2018, pp. 212-236.