Share of adolescents who are not in secondary school
What you should know about this indicator
- Many adolescents who are old enough for lower secondary school are not enrolled — this indicator shows how many are missing out on education during this critical stage.
- It captures the share of children in the official lower secondary age range who are not enrolled in any formal education, including pre-primary, primary, secondary, or tertiary levels.
- The indicator is calculated by subtracting the number of enrolled lower secondary-aged adolescents (regardless of the education level they attend) from the total population in that age group, and expressing the result as a percentage.
- These adolescents may have never made the transition from primary school, may have dropped out early, or may be late entrants who haven’t yet re-entered the system.
- A high out-of-school rate signals the need for better policies and programmes that promote continued schooling through early adolescence, particularly in underserved communities.
- The data is drawn from a combination of administrative records on school enrolment by age and household surveys that track participation in education, compared with population estimates for the relevant age group.
- As with all education indicators, results should be interpreted with caution — differences in data sources, how enrolment is defined, and the timing of surveys (especially if conducted late in the school year) may affect the accuracy of estimates.
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Share of adolescents who are not in secondary school”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, Natasha Ahuja, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2023) - “Global Education”. Data adapted from UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/adolescents-not-in-school [online resource]How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in DataFull citation
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Share of adolescents who are not in secondary school” [dataset]. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, “UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) - Education” [original data]. Retrieved May 20, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/adolescents-not-in-school