In accordance with the principle of Lifelong Learning promoted by the Lisbon Strategy (EU, 2000), Education and Vocational Training Policies seek to guarantee social cohesion and the well-being of all through various actions. Some of these actions are intended to promote active citizenship and greater employability, while others are oriented towards improving equality and the quality of education and professional training.

In this sense, early school leaving (ESL) is one of the primary challenges of the European Union’s policy regarding education and professional training. The European labour market report: Employment in Europe 2010 (EC, 2011a), highlights the worsening of young people’s employment difficulties in the current context of the financial crisis. On the international level, moreover, there exists a special concern for those young people with severe difficulties, who are “Not in Education, Employment or Training”, due to the fact that they can find themselves permanently excluded from the labour market and from access to professional development (OECD, 2010).

So that, in June 2010 the European heads of state and government adopted the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. Setting a strong priority for Member States they decided that reducing the share of early school leavers to less than 10% Europe-wide by 2020 is one of the headline targets underpinning this strategy. In June 2011 the Education Council adopted a Council Recommendation on policies to reduce early school leaving, proposing a framework for comprehensive, cross sectoral and evidence-based policies to address the problem of ESL (

EC, 2011b).

What is needed, then, are studies that provide evidence for the decision-making process at different levels of action: European, national, and local (Lyche, 2010).  In this vein, this paper shows the main results of a study on the policies and programs dedicated to reducing ESL in Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). The study was funded by the Spanish Labour and Immigration Ministry’s Administrative Unit for the European Social Fund and carried out between March and October of 2011.

The study identifies the set of programs and actions for the reduction of ESL that both the educational and the labour administrations conduct in this territory and pays special attention to the response given to this phenomenon at the local level based on factors such as financing, coordination, and evaluation (Manzanares Moya, 2011).

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