The European Union is about to achieve three of the six education targets it set itself in 2010 in the EU2020 Strategy, according to the sixth monitoring report on education and training published by the European Commission on Thursday 9 November.
The Education and Training Follow-up Report of 2017 discusses changes in education and training systems in the EU, including a large amount of data, some of it country-by-country. Education Commissioner Tibor Navracsics says it reports on progress in the fight against school drop-out but also notes confirming trends in terms of basic skills and the influence of the social and economic backdrop.
EU 2020 Targets
In 2010, heads of state set a ten-year deadline for reducing the proportion of 15-year olds with poor levels of reading, maths and science to below 15%, but the report says that the latest figures from Eurostat show that in 2015, 19.7% of young people have problems with reading, 22.2% with maths and 20.6% with science. For science, this is a four percent rise on 2012. The EU28 is also far from reaching its employment target since 78.2% of recent graduates (aged between 20 and 34) who were not in education or training had a job, compared with the target of 82%. Only 10.8% (compared with the target of 15%) of adults aged between 25 and 64) were involve in formal or informal education or training.
The report notes good results for reducing school dropout rates and an increase in higher education gradates and the number of children being educated. In particular, the share of young people who drop out of the school or training system stands at 10.7% (compared with a target of 10%), the proportion of 30 to 34-year-olds with a higher education degree is currently 39.1% (target of 40%). In parallel, 94.8% of children aged between four and the age of compulsory schooling who are in education stands at 95%.
Inequalities
Like last year, the report shows that social and economic status is key to pupils’ success: 33.8% of pupils from the most deprived backgrounds obtain mediocre results, compared with only 7.6% for the pupils from the most privileged backgrounds. Young people from immigrant backgrounds also run a greater risk of doing badly at school and leaving school relatively early. In 2016, no fewer than 33.9% of people aged 30 to 34 and living in the EU, but born outside the EU had low qualifications (only going as far as the age where secondary education is compulsory) compared with just 14.8% of their counterparts born in the EU.
Investment in education has returned to the pre-financial crisis level and has risen slightly (1% annual slippage in real terms). Four countries, Estonia, Malta, Romania and Slovakia, even increased investment by more than 5%. The report can be found at: https://ec.europa.eu/education/sites/education/files/monitor2017_en.pdf. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)