Overview
- Official data show 7,430 of 178,135 school leavers in North Rhine-Westphalia left general education without a certificate in 2025, a rate of 4.2% and the highest in a decade.
- By comparison, the share was 3.6% in 2024 and 2.2% in 2015, while total leavers fell over the decade even as non-completions rose in number.
- Outcomes diverged by citizenship, with 15.3% of foreign-national leavers counted without a certificate versus 2.2% of German nationals.
- Among the ten nationalities with the most non-completions, Ukrainians had the highest rate at 38%, followed by Bulgarians at 21.8% and Romanians at 19.3%, with lower shares for groups such as Turks at 11% and Poles at 6.2%.
- The state education ministry attributed much of the increase to recent migration linked to the war in Ukraine, noting 2,205 students from initial language support left the general system without the first school certificate and that many older arrivals exited before they could earn a German diploma or pursued a Ukrainian one.