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Young people go through several transitions in their path from childhood to adulthood: in education, work, family formation, health and citizenship. This paper focuses on the transition from school to the labour market for the generation of young people in CEE/CIS who experienced the most turbulent years of the transition during their formative years.

Using administrative data on school enrolment as well as data from labour force surveys, the paper tracks the main trends in education enrolment at the primary, lower and upper secondary levels, showing that the impact of the economic difficulties of the early 1990s was greater in the poorest countries of the region, and was reflected in particular in falling enrolment for the non-compulsory levels of education. The post-1998 period of economic recovery brought with it a marked divergence between upper secondary education enrolment in the Central and Eastern European countries and the rest of the region. However, data on enrolment provide only a partial picture of what happened to the school system during the transition; statistics on attendance and achievements from other data sources suggest that inequalities in school access and quality increased both across the region and within countries.