“The European Union defines early school leavers as people aged 18-24 who have only lower secondary education or less and are no longer in education or training. Early school leavers are therefore those who have only achieved pre-primary, primary, lower secondary or a short upper secondary education of less than 2 years.)” This definition is available at http://www.eubusiness.com/topics/education/school-leaving.11/

Early school leavers refers to persons aged 18 to 24 in the following two conditions: the highest level of education or training attained is ISCED 0, 1, 2 or 3c short and respondents declared not having received any education or training in the four weeks preceding the survey (numerator). The denominator consists of the total population of the same age group, excluding no answers to the questions "highest level of education or training attained" and "participation to education and training". Both the numerators and the denominators come from the EU Labour Force Survey.

“Early school leaving can take several forms. It includes young people who have dropped out of school before the end of compulsory education, those who have completed compulsory schooling, but have not gained an upper secondary qualification, and those who have followed pre-vocational or vocational courses which did not lead to a qualification equivalent to upper secondary level.” idem

According to the available data http://www.stat.ee/30004

from Eurostat for Greece it seems that the total population the percentage of early school leavers is decreased to the 13.7 %. In terms of gender differentiation it seems that males are more vulnerable to early school leaving compared to females, although the rate for both genders is decreased in 2010 to almost the half of the percentage reached in 1992.

The proportion of NEET out of the total population in the 15 to 24 age group gives an overall measure of the share of youth that are left behind.) The majority of youth in NEET only stay transitorily in that situation (as the turnover of youth in NEET tends to be considerably higher than for adults), although there is evidence that, in several EU Member States, a small share of young people may remain in that situation for too long, suggesting the existence of a group of disadvantaged young people who are difficult to mobilise into work..

In most Member States, a higher proportion of youth in NEET status are reported as inactive rather than unemployed. In most Member States, the proportion of young women in NEET status is slightly higher than that of men. The breakdown of NEET by education level shows considerable variation across countries. In some MS (Denmark, Ireland, Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands, Austria, Sweden and UK), young people with higher education levels have lower NEET rates, while in others (Greece, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Finland) there is a higher NEET incidence for youth with tertiary education. The latter might be related to the problem of under-utilisation of skills, which arises when young people are called upon to perform tasks which require fewer or lower skills that they had acquired in initial education. There is evidence suggesting that the incidence of under-utilisation of skills has increased in a majority of countries for which estimates are available (Quintini et al., 2006).

http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/eie/chap3-5-2_en.html