This study is a part of the project Life Pathways of Unsuccessful  Graduates (CZ.02.3.68/0.0/0.0/19_076/0016377). The project's main objectives were to gain in-depth insights into the (insufficiently researched) phenomenon of failure in the Matura examination and its consequences for the future life pathways of the students concerned and to formulate evidence-based recommendations for education policies.

In the Czech Republic, the format of the Matura examination changed in 2011. Since 2013, it has been roughly stabilised into two essential parts: a common and profile parts. The Centre for the Measurement of Educational Outcomes (CERMAT) is responsible for setting and evaluating the common part of the exam. The profile part consists of 2 to 3 exams based on the field of study, and in the case of secondary vocational schools, it includes a vocational qualification.

The objects of the research were the reasons for failure in the Matura examination itself, i.e. what led to the failure, and the further life pathways of unsuccessful examinees, especially regarding the educational path over two years. In drafting the research intent, the main research question was formulated: How do psychosocial stress and social exclusion in institutional settings affect the subsequent life and educational trajectory of unsuccessful secondary school examinees over the two years following the experience of failure?

Several specific questions arose from qualitative data analysis as a part of the project. One of them forms the axis of this paper: What is the role of workplace training in the course of study which leads to failure in Matura exam? Specific research questions are: What workplace experiences shape a student's path to failure in Matura? Can signals of future failure be identified in informants' retrospective narratives? What inputs improve or decrease the chance for success?

The theoretical framework of the analysis consists of three theoretical concepts. First, failure in the Matura exam is interpreted as one form of school dropout; the reasons for failure are comparable but not identical to reasons for various forms of dropout (conf. Battin-Pearson et al, 2000; Bowers & Sprott, 2012). Second, the interaction of structure and agency is used to interpret the student's school experience (conf. Heinz, 2009). The school, the workplace, and the Matura exam itself form the structure that determines, stimulates, and limits the agency, respectively, the bounded agency (Evans, 2017). Third, the concept of school engagement enlightens the student's participation and identification with the school environment (Rumberger and Rotermund, 2012).

The research was conducted through qualitative inquiry and the chosen research design was a combination of a multiple case study and a biographical design (life history) with regard to the research objective and research questions. In the combination of the two designs, it is possible to talk about a specific research design of case history (Thomson, 2007), which is mainly used in longitudinal studies. Since it involved following informants and the development of their life histories over time, albeit only two years, the research can also be described as a quasi-longitudinal investigation. The data corpus for this concrete study consists of biographical interviews with 46 VET students. As these were biographical interviews exploring informants’ life paths, the interview scheme was based on a biographical narrative approach. Thus, biographical narrative interviews were based on the biographical narrative interview method (BNIM; Kutsyuruba & Mendes, 2023), which was originally introduced and developed primarily by Schütze (1992) and Rosenthal (2004) and later developed by Wengraf (2001). The interview scheme used in this study was in line with Rosenthal’s (2004) conceptualisation: 1. an initial narrative assignment, 2. internal narrative questions based only on the informant’s narrative response to the initial narrative assignment, 3. external narrative questions (pre-prepared questions, semi-structured interview type). The analysis of the repeated biographical interviews was followed by a comparative cross-case analysis aimed at the empirically anchored identification of key themes and types within the life stories (Kluge, 2000).

In the student’s narratives presented in the paper, workplace training as a part of secondary education plays the role of a centripetal and/or centrifugal force. Student workplace engagement, which we understand as the degree of participation or identification with the workplace, is an essential factor concerning the risk of failure. Positive engagement can be described as student interest and active involvement in workplace activities. Insufficient engagement, on the other hand, is manifested by disinterest and a desire to avoid participation. In some cases, we identify a disjuncture between the workplace experience during the study and plans for future working life. The level of engagement during study can also be reflected in the preparation for the Matura examination with the consequences concerning success or failure.

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