Leaving school without a qualification

Notes & caveats

• Shares are our calculation from Destatis counts: leavers with the given outcome ÷ all leavers from general schools (all school types including evening schools and external candidates, both sexes) × 100. East, West and Germany are computed from summed state counts.
• "2024/25" is the school year at whose end pupils left, i.e. mostly summer 2025.
• General schools only: many young people who leave without a certificate (or without the Abitur) obtain one later at a vocational school, which this table does not count.
• 24,340 of the 64,935 leavers without a certificate came from special schools (Förderschulen), 4,808 of them in the eastern states. How far special-school pupils are led to a certificate differs between states, which limits strict comparisons.
• Bavaria had far fewer leavers in 2024/25 (97,173, against 124,861 a year earlier) because its return to the nine-year Gymnasium left almost no Abitur year group; this raises its share without a certificate. Without Bavaria the western share is 8.0%.
• A year earlier (2023/24) the shares were 10.1% East, 7.3% West and 9.2% Berlin.
• The KMK publishes a different rate (leavers without a certificate as a share of the resident population of the typical leaving age), so its figures are not directly comparable.