Eurostat report breakdowns of early school leaving, broken down by degree of urbanization:
The Degree of urbanisation classifies local administrative units as cities, towns and suburbs, or rural areas based on a combination of geographical contiguity and minimum population thresholds applied to 1 km² population grid cells.
The categories are defined as follows (original source: Glossary of the Eurostat Statistics Explained):
- Cities: at least 50% of the population live in an urban area (alternative name: densely-populated areas)
- Towns and suburbs: less than 50% live in an urban centre but more than 50% of the population live in an urban cluster (alternative name: intermediate density areas)
- Rural areas: more than 50% of the population live in rural grid cells (alternative name: thinly populated areas)
Each urban centre should have at least 75% of its population in an urban setting. This ensures that all urban centres are represented by at least one town, even when this urban centre represents less than 50% of the population of an LAU2.
See more details here: Degree of urbanisation and here Degree of urbanisation classification - 2011 revision
See more Eurostat data by degree of urbanization here: Degree of urbanisation > database
If you are interested in the country context, have a look at into our short report on the basis of the ESLplus Interactive statistics module.