Early school leaving, record decline: 8.2 per cent in 2025

For a country like Italia, grappling with a high birth rate and many young people who historically leave school early, any improvement in school dropout rates is news in itself. All the more so when we reach international targets years in advance, doing even better than Germany and the Nordic countries, which are often benchmarks in education. But it becomes even more so considering its indirect effect on Neet, which are themselves decreasing.

Let us start with the so-called Elet (Early leavers from education and training). The data just published by ISTAT show that in 2025 early school-leaving in Italy will drop to 8.2% (6.7% considering only students with Italian citizenship). A result never achieved before. In one fell swoop we have hit the Pnrr target (reducing early school-leaving from 13.5 to 10.2 per cent) and we have also exceeded, five years ahead of schedule, the 9 per cent target set by the EU's Agenda 2030. Reversing the trend of the recent past which, for example in 2020, had led us to miss the target by more than four points: we were at 14.2 per cent instead of 10 per cent.

For the Minister of Education and Merit, Giuseppe Valditara, this is a 'great result for the whole of Italia and for our young people'. From 2022 to today,' he adds, 'the Meloni government's school policy has made it possible, starting from 11.5 per cent, to go down to 10.5 per cent in 2023, to 9.9 per cent in 2024 to arrive at the current figure of 8.2 per cent, which sees Italia bucking the positive trend compared to other countries. Let us remember that in 2024 Germany had a dropout rate of 12.9 per cent and countries such as Estonia, at 11 per cent in 2024, Denmark at 10.4 per cent and Finland at 9.6 per cent, have recorded a negative trend in recent years with an increase in school dropout rates'.

The reference is to the South and North Agendas (funded with a total of more than EUR 1 billion) and the Caivano decree launched in recent years. In Campania alone, in the 2024/25 school year, about 8,000 students who had dropped out of school were recovered; the region drops below the 10 per cent dropout rate for the first time (9.7 per cent - it was 19 per cent in 2020) and even does better than Tuscany. Calabria is also doing well: 6.5% against 16.9% in 2020. In the South, early school leaving is at 10.1 per cent (in the South, without the Islands, 8.4 per cent - in the Islands 13.7 per cent). In the North it is 6.9 per cent, in the Centre 7.7 per cent. The region with the lowest dropout rate is Umbria (4.9 per cent), the highest values are in Sicily (13.7 per cent) and Sardinia (13.6 per cent). Above the national average there are also Valle d'Aosta (10.4 per cent), Tuscany (9.8 per cent), Campania (9.7 per cent), as mentioned, and then Liguria (9.3 per cent), the province of Bolzano (9 per cent) and Apulia (8.6 per cent).

Of course, not all problems are solved. The data on drop-outs reintroduce the theme of gaps related to migration background. In 2025 early exits of students with foreign citizenship are still at 26.2 per cent, an improvement on 2022 when they were 30.1 per cent. This figure, for the head of MIM, 'demonstrates the necessity of the measures we have launched this school year to strengthen the teaching of the Italian language with an investment of over 13 million euro and the specialisation of 1,000 teachers to teach Italian to students who have just arrived in Italy'.