In France, for the 2022-2023 school year, 51% of young people aged 14 to 29 were in education, whether as pupils, students or apprentices. The average length of study has increased since 2015, driven by the rise in enrolment in higher education, itself driven by the growing number of baccalaureate holders. In forty years, the share of baccalaureate holders in a generation has risen by 50 points, reaching almost 80% in 2023. In 2023, 52% of 25 to 29 year-olds had a tertiary education diploma, an increase of 11 points in twenty years. Conversely, the share of early school leavers has fallen by 4 points over the same period, reaching 8% of people aged 18 to 24 in 2023. Significantly, the number of apprentices has more than doubled in five years, driven by the 2018 law “for the freedom to choose one's professional future” (« pour la liberté de choisir son avenir professionnel » in French) and the exceptional financial aid granted from 2020.

Nearly one in four young people who left initial education between one and four years ago was constrained in their labour supply, either by the absence of a job (unemployed or halo around unemployment), or in a situation of underemployment. For those in employment, the rate of fixed-term or temporary contracts was higher than for older employees who entered the labour market earlier. However, young people who left initial education between one and four years ago benefited more from the improvement in the labour market between 2015 and 2023: their unemployment rate fell by 6 points, more sharply than that of working people who have been out of initial education for 11 years or more (-2 points). Similarly, the share of fixed-term contracts and temporary work in young people's employment fell over this period: -9 points. However, the situation of young people leaving initial education still depends heavily on their level of qualification: the gap in unemployment rates between young tertiary education graduates and those with few or no qualifications remained very high, with a ratio of 1 to 5.

In 2022, almost half of all people aged 18 to 69 who left initial education participated in at least one education or training activity in the last twelve months. Compared to 2016, the use of job-related training remained stable for people in employment, but increased for the inactive and unemployed. In fact, the development and easier use of the Personal Training Account, named « compte personnel de formation (CPF) » in French, since the end of 2019 have contributed to the very sharp rise in the number of training entries for jobseekers.