Helping member states in achieving that the more than six million young people in the EU who leave education and training with no more than secondary level qualifications, stay in school and improve their labour chances, is one of the key objectives that the Commission aims to achieve with its new action plan to reduce early school leaving. This action plan puts forward some concrete strategies aimed at reducing EU average rate of early school leavers to under 10% by the end of the decade, from the current level of 14.4%.

The new Commission's action Plan to reduce early school leaving outlines the situation across Europe regarding early school leaving, its main causes, its risks for future economic and societal development, and proposes ways to tackle the problem more effectively. This Commission's plan is also accompanied by proposal for a Council Recommendation containing some guidelines to help Member States develop comprehensive and evidence-based policies to reduce early school leaving.

Commission's plan aims to reduce the average rate of early school leaver to 10% by the end of 2020, as set by the Europe 2020 Strategy for sustainable growth, a target that, although already achieved by some member States such as Austria, Czech Republic, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, it is still quite far for some others which currently register early school leaving of up to 30%, like Spain, Malta or Portugal.

Low levels of education do not only have severe consequences for the young people concerned, but also high economic and social costs for society as a whole. In addition to current demographic changes, European countries cannot afford this enormous waste of talent.

Proposed Strategies to reduce early school leaving

As highlighted by Commission's Communication "Tackling early school leaving. A key contribution to the Europe 2020 Agenda", there is not a single solution which can tackle this complex problem as a whole. Efficient strategies to reduce early school leaving must address education, youth and social policies and need to be tailored to local, regional and national conditions. They should include:

• Prevention of early school leaving needs to start as early as possible by supporting children in their learning and by avoiding conditions which may trigger early leaving, such as making a pupil repeat a school year and failing to properly assist children with different mother-tongues.
• Intervention measures need to quickly and effectively address emerging difficulties such as truancy and low performance levels.
• Compensation measures need to offer 'second chance' learning opportunities including additional classes in school and possibilities for young adults to re-enter education and training.

Furthermore, Commission's Proposal for a Council Recommendation on policies to reduce early school leaving is expected to be discussed by Education Ministers during their Council meeting on 2-4 May in Brussels and Member States will be invited to adopt comprehensive strategies based on this framework by the end of 2012 and to implement them through their national reform programmes.

The Commission, for its part, will target funding through the Lifelong Learning Programme and the Research Framework Programme to create innovative ways to tackle the problem, and through the European Social Fund to finance national and regional measures to reduce early school leaving.