Secondary level education by region Europe 2021| ��ƽ��

Share of young people in Europe who have achieved secondary-level educational attainment in rural and in urban areas in 2021, by country

Characteristic	Urban	Rural
Bulgaria	92%	74%
Romania	91%	75%
Belarus	93%	79%
Denmark	81%	69%
Albania	85%	72%
Hungary	88%	76%
Lithuania	95%	86%
Austria	82%	91%
Luxembourg	75%	84%
Sweden	83%	75%
Latvia	93%	86%
Belgium	87%	94%
Norway	83%	76%
Estonia	88%	82%
Switzerland	92%	96%
Portugal	91%	88%
Slovenia	94%	97%
Finland	90%	93%
Greece	93%	95%
Italy	84%	86%
United Kingdom	84%	86%
North Macedonia	82%	84%
Germany	78%	80%
Spain	75%	77%
Croatia	98%	97%
Poland	94%	93%
France	91%	91%
Russia	90%	90%

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Release date

October 2023

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Region

Europe

Survey time period

2021

Supplementary notes

Data for the following countries comes from the 2021 EU Labor Force Survey (LFS): Denmark, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg, Norway, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Latvia, Belgium, Lithuania, Finland, France, Greece, Poland, Switzerland, Slovenia, Croatia.

Data for the UK comes from the EU LFS for 2019.

Data for the following countries comes from the 2019 UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys: North Macedonia, Belarus.

Data for the Russian Federarion comes from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey published by the Higher School of Economics in 2021.

Data for Albania comes from the World Bank's Demographic and Health Survey from 2017.

Citation formats

The countries in Europe with the greatest disparity in secondary-level educational attainment between their urban and rural areas in 2021 were Bulgaria, Romania, and Belarus. In Bulgaria, while 92 percent of young people in urban areas graduate from upper secondary school, less than three-quarters in rural areas do so. There is variation between European countries in whether it is rural or urban areas that have higher educational attainment - for instance, in Austria, rural areas show over 90 percent of young people attaining secondary level education, while in urban areas this rate falls to around 80 percent. Regional disparities may be driven by relative deprivation of certain areas or by cultural differences, particularly the likelihood of young people to leave school to work in agriculture in rural areas.