Low-Achieving School-Leavers in Germany: Who Are They and Where Do They Go?

Abstract

AbstractIn light of educational expansion in Germany, school-leavers with a lower secondary school certificate or less are at risk of being left behind. In this chapter, we first compare their parental resources, cognitive skills, and non-cognitive skills to those of school-leavers with an intermediate school certificate. Second, we investigate whether these low achievers can improve their educational attainment after school by either catching up on school certificates or entering vocational training. We analyse their transitions to vocational education using “With” hier streichen sequence analyses. Using data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we show that although low-achieving school-leavers are, on average, not as well-endowed with agentic and social resources as other groups, they are otherwise quite heterogeneous. Many have similar cognitive and non-cognitive skills to school-leavers with an intermediate school certificate who usually manage to enter vocational training. However, this potential often remains undiscovered, because considerable proportions of low achievers do not improve their school certificates and do not manage to enter vocational education—even several years after leaving school. We also show that transition patterns vary by school type, with students from special needs schools being especially disadvantaged compared to those from regular schools.