Year after year, thousands of young people in Hesse leave school without at least earning a secondary school diploma. This emerges from an evaluation commissioned by the Bertelsmann Foundation. According to this, 3125 young people did not graduate in Hesse in 2021. That was 5.3 percent of the country’s population of the same age.
As the ten-year comparison shows, the proportion of young people without a school-leaving certificate has not improved for around ten years. In Hesse, their share has fluctuated between four and five percent since 2011. It’s similar across the country.
There are clear differences in the proportion of school leavers without qualifications in the federal states. Hesse performs comparatively well: at 5.3 percent, the state has the second lowest rate after Bavaria with 5.1 percent. Most recently, most young people without a degree were in Bremen, where this applied to every tenth school leaver. Nationwide, the proportion was 6.2 percent.
At the end of their school career, boys are much more likely to have no qualifications than girls. Foreigners are disproportionately affected. “Every young person without a school-leaving certificate is one too many,” said education researcher Klaus Klemm, one of the authors of the study. “In view of the growing shortage of skilled workers, our society cannot afford to let these people fall through the cracks.”
