Andalucía reduced the early school dropout rate in 2024 by 1.3 points to place it at 15.54% according to data collected in the active population survey by the National Statistics Institute. This means that from 2018, the cumulative decrease in the dropout rate in the community is almost 6.5 points (from 21.9% to 15.54%), while the national average shows a decrease of almost 5%.
This trend in recent years assumed that the gap in relation to the national average (13%) is at 2.5 points, when in 2018 it was 4. In two of the last three years, Andalucía placed the dropout rate at 15.5%, the lowest in the historical series.
The Minister of Educational Development and Vocational Training, María del Carmen Castillo, believes that these figures «confirm a trend that corroborates the fact that We are on the right path in Andalucía, although there is still room for improvement. To provide more future opportunities for our youth and ensure that fewer and fewer of them abandon the essential education for their life projects.»
The Andalucian government increased the budget of the Ministry of Educational Development for 2025 to 9.167 million euros, which represents 2.8 billion more than in 2018, a 45% increase and 3.53% compared to 2024, with an additional 374 million. This increase in investment allowed the Andalusian educational system to hire 6,000 more teachers, almost half of them in vocational training, adding 47,000 new spots, for a total workforce of 107,000 teachers and educators, 125,000 including those in the publicly funded concertada network. All of this in a context of declining birth rates, which has reduced the number of students in the Andalusian educational system by 107,000 in recent years.
Educational dropout rates record the percentage of individuals between the ages of 18 and 24 who have not completed secondary education (vocational training, primary or secondary school) and have not pursued any further education.