For years, early school leaving has been a silent wound in our education system. Every year, thousands of young people drop out of school before completing their post-compulsory education, closing doors to their future.
UNESCO reminds us that education must guarantee lifelong learning opportunities; in other words, simply ensuring compulsory schooling is not enough. Having only a secondary school diploma is no longer sufficient: those who do not continue their studies face a higher risk of unemployment, lower incomes, and poorer health and well-being. All of this translates into fragile life trajectories and greater vulnerability for the country.
Early school leaving, therefore, is not just an educational problem. It is a loss of talent, opportunities, and hope that jeopardizes equity, competitiveness, social cohesion, and the country's future prospects. It is a collective challenge.
Although it has significantly reduced dropout rates in recent decades, Catalonia remains among the European countries with the highest percentage of young people aged 18-24 who are poorly qualified and without post-compulsory education: 13.7%, above the European average and far from the target of being below 9%.
The cracks in the system are clear and localized: thousands of young people disappear from the educational landscape between the fourth year of compulsory secondary education (ESO) and the first year of post-compulsory secondary education. Most drop out during or immediately after finishing ESO. In 2019-2020 alone, nearly 10,000 boys and girls stopped studying after the fourth year. If action had been taken in time, many would have continued. The problem persists in post-compulsory education: in the 2020-2021 academic year, more than 9,000 students in intermediate vocational training programs and nearly 5,000 in upper secondary education (Bachillerato) dropped out, most in their first year. With better guidance and support, many of them would have continued.
Dropping out of school is rarely an individual decision. School dropout rates highlight the shortcomings of Catalonia, which lacks a good guidance system, support for students facing educational difficulties, and scholarships. With a meager 3.4% of public spending on education allocated to scholarships, we are at the bottom of the European rankings, and only 17% of students receive them, far below the percentage of young people at risk of poverty. The imminent transfer of the post-compulsory education scholarship program to the Generalitat (Catalan government) is, therefore, an opportunity that cannot be missed.
In Catalonia, thousands of young people want to continue their studies. They all have a duty to strive to achieve this, but also the right to do so with the appropriate support and conditions.
We know what to do to reverse this: identify at-risk youth as early as possible and intervene, prioritize schools with the greatest vulnerability, ensure that a lack of economic resources is never an obstacle, and strengthen guidance, support, and mentoring programs. While countries like Portugal, Greece, and Ireland have far exceeded European targets, Catalonia risks falling behind.
There is reason for hope. The Parliament of Catalonia, together with hundreds of initiatives from civil society and with the leadership of local governments, has helped to place school dropout, until recently invisible, on the political and social agenda.
This is how we arrived at the presentation of an Action Plan against Early School Leaving, such as the one the Department of Education has made public. An important first step, undoubtedly, that points in the right direction but will at the same time require resources, ambition, and, above all, greater specificity. For it to be meaningful, for it not to be reduced to a mere announcement and a missed opportunity, and for it to rise to the challenge we face as a country.
