The rate of high school students dropping out without a diploma or qualification jumped 2.5% in one year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, ending a downward trend that had been underway for two decades, show data from the Institute of Statistics of Quebec (ISQ) made public this Monday.
Between the 1999-2000 school year and that of 2019-2020, this rate went from 21.9% to 13.5%, thus following a downward curve, which was however reversed in the context of the crisis health, which has disrupted the education sector. This was particularly affected by a series of containment measures which forced it to make a temporary shift towards online teaching, in order to limit the risks of contagion of COVID-19.
Thus, the proportion of students who left secondary school without having obtained a diploma reached 13.8% in 2020-2021, before climbing to 16.3% in 2021-2022, indicates the ISQ, which does not have more recent data. The pandemic had also been associated with an increase in the high school failure rate in certain disciplines.
A narrowing gap
For more than 20 years, this rate, which includes cases of school dropouts, but also students who left the Quebec school network because they moved to another country or due to death, has been year to year higher among boys than girls.
The 2021-2022 school year is no exception to this trend, with the ISQ reporting a percentage of departures without a diploma amounting to 20% for boys and 12.7% for girls, which represents a gap of 7.3 percentage points. In 1999-2000, this difference was closer to 12 points. It has since shrunk over the years.
We also have to go back to the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 school years to obtain such high departure rates for boys and girls, respectively.