Previous research has identified two main individual-level determinants of school outcomes: cognitive ability and socioeconomic status (SES) indicated by parental education, occupation, or income (Marks, 2013). Cognitive ability is the strongest predictor of school achievement, with correlations around .60-.70 (Gustafsson & Balke, 1993), while SES typically correlates around .30-.40 with school achievement (Sirin, 2005).

However, there are substantial country differences in these relationships, and longitudinal investigations of the strength of the associations have also been observed, and Marks (2013) concluded that the influence of SES is declining. On the contrary, for Sweden an increase in the strength of the association between SES and achievement has been observed during the last decades (Gustafsson & Yang Hansen, 2018), suggesting that equity of schooling outcomes has deteriorated. Moreover, gender differences have been observed in Sweden in terms of grades in line with international trends (Dwyer & Johnson, 1997), and boys are more at risk of dropping out of school in Sweden (World Bank, 2024).

Recently, much attention has been devoted to personality characteristics as determinants of success and failure in school, such as conscientiousness (Almlund et al., 2011), grit (Duckworth et al., 2007), and growth mindset (Dweck, 2008).

Other individual characteristics too have been shown to contribute to school achievement. Prominent examples are self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997), self-concept(Bong & Skaalvik, 2003), and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000).

In Sweden, compulsory education involves school years 1 to 9, while in the optional upper secondary school, there are eighteen regular national programs of three years to choose from, six of which are preparatory for higher education such as university, and twelve of which are vocational. While entrance requirements vary between programs, all of them demand students to have passing grades in Swedish/Swedish as a second language, English, and mathematics from their final year of compulsory schooling.

The main aim of this study is to investigate individual and social determinants in the development of school failure using a longitudinal approach for two birth cohorts that have followed the same curriculum, born in 1998 and 2004.

We define four levels of school failure: premature failure, i.e., no grades or low grades in year 6; early failure, i.e., no grades in year 9; midway failure, i.e., not eligible for upper secondary school, and late failure, i.e., no final grades/exam within three years of finishing upper secondary school. Information about gender and SES will be used to explain individual variation in cognitive abilities in school year 6. This model will be extended with results on national tests and will be used to predict achievement and school failure in school year 9. Next, explanatory variables derived from the student questionnaires (e.g., self-concept/self-efficacy, achievement goal preferences, motivation, coping, self-reported mental health) and registers (e.g., school relocations, participation in special needs education, mental health problems) will be added to the model to investigate to what extent they affect the risk for school failure. For upper secondary school, a similar approach will be taken, starting with a basic model including grade point average (GPA) from compulsory school, along with cognitive abilities from school year 6 and background variables, predicting school failure in the form of dropout or low grades. The differentiation of students into different programs will be dealt with through a dummy variable approach and/or through fitting separate models for different programs or groups of programs.

In combination, the results from the models for compulsory and upper secondary school will provide good coverage of individual and social determinants of school failure.

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