Indicator 10.1 Foreign school graduates

Text from the Indicator Report 2022 

The school statistics, compiled by the individual Länder, form the data basis for this indicator. These statistics are generally derived from a complete count with an obligation to provide information. The Federal Statistical Office combines them to create a federal result based on the catalogue of definitions compiled by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education. The aggregation of the Länder results into the federal result is influenced by the different education policies of the Länder, for example, with regard to admission rules, in setting up courses of education in the area of vocational schools. This can only be partially offset by formal regulations for the respective allocations.

Graduates are pupils who have left the respective type of school with a school certificate. Included are pupils who have changed to another type of general education school in order to obtain an additional certificate. Furthermore, foreigners are defined as all persons who are not German within the meaning of Article 116 (1) of the Basic Law, i.e. who do not hold the German citizenship. This also includes persons who are stateless and persons with undetermined citizenship. Germans who also hold another citizenship are not included in the foreign population.

In 2021, the proportion of all foreign school leavers who obtained at least a lower secondary school leaving certificate was 84.3 %. This represents a decrease compared with the previous year. If one splits the figures by gender, female foreign school leavers graduated at a rate of 87.4 %, while the proportion was lower among their male counterparts, at 81.6 %. The proportion of German school leavers obtaining at least a lower secondary school leaving certificate has remained fairly stable, most recently recorded as 94.9 %. The gap between the share of foreign and German pupils graduating from school was at 6.1 percentage points on the lowest level in 2013, however, the migration of refugees in 2015/2016 caused a significant increase and even exceeded the value 20 years ago (11.9 percentage points in 1996 and 13.0 percentage points in 2017). After a decline in 2020, the gap increased to 10.6 percentage points in 2021.

Both, the target to increase the share of foreign school leavers with at least a secondary general school certificate and to reduce the gap between German and foreign pupils graduating from school, were missed in 2021.

To break the figures down by types of certificate obtained, 30.7 % of foreign pupils who graduated from general schools achieved a lower secondary school leaving certificate in 2021, while 39.9 % completed their schooling with an intermediate secondary school leaving certificate and 13.7 % gained university-entrance qualifications. Among German school graduates, 14.3 % received a lower secondary school leaving certificate, 43.9 % gained an intermediate secondary school leaving certificate and 36.7 % earned university-entrance qualifications. This leaves young foreigners considerably under-represented in comparison to Germans, especially when it comes to the higher-level school leaving certificates.

The synoptic table provides information about the evaluation of the indicator in previous years. It shows if the weather symbol assigned to an indicator was rather stable or volatile in the past years. (Evaluation of the Indicator Report 2022 )

Indicator	10.1 Foreign school graduates
Target	Increase the proportion of foreign school leavers with a least a secondary general school certificate and bring into line with that of German school leavers by 2030
Year	2018	2019	2020	2021
Evaluation