Early school leaving is a topic that has long resonated not only in professional discourse but has also become an integral part of strategic documents on education policy and practical efforts in the form of projects related to the issue. Early school leaving refers to those individuals "below the statutory school-leaving age who have withdrawn from or left an education or training programme without completing it" (Jakson, 2015, p. 18). In the Czech context, the rate of early school leaving is defined as the share of the population aged 18-24 who have only achieved primary education. We understand the term early school leaving in a narrower sense when it refers to interrupting a studied programme without completing it. Drop-out can, therefore, occur in individuals who leave primary school before completing the 9th grade or in pupils who have not completed secondary school.

The Czech Republic has long been below the European Union average in terms of the rate of early school leaving (9%). In 2022, 6.2% of students in the Czech education system left education and training. Although the Czech Republic was one of the countries with a very low rate of early school leaving, a year-on-year comparison shows a long-term trend of a gradual increase in the proportion of students who left education early and remained with only basic education. Regional disparity is also significant in this context, as the differences between regions are significant with regard to this phenomenon (Education and Training Monitor, 2023).

Crucial groups of factors playing a key role in students' final decision to leave the education process early and become an early leaver are individual predictors, where educational performance, behaviour, attitudes, and background are included, and institutional predictors involving families, schools and communities to which students belong (Rumberger, 2011). It is worth mentioning that every one of these groups has its own predictors. Therefore, the theory is comprehensive. Based on Gonzáles-Rodríguez et al. (2019), who is partially in accordance with Rumberger (2011), we can divide factors influencing school dropout into two big groups: non-academic and academic. On the one hand, in the first mentioned group, we can find individual characteristics of students (such as personality, behaviour, etc.), their friendships and family characteristics (parents of the student, their family structure, SES). On the other hand, there are academic factors that can contribute to students' early school leaving, for example, classmates, teachers, school environment, and students' academic characteristics (absenteeism, academic performance, satisfaction, mobility, etc.).

The key role in dealing with early school leavers belongs to teachers and other professionals providing career guidance. Career guidance includes services that help people of different ages manage their careers and make the right decisions for them in the field of education, training and occupation. They help people reflect on their ambitions, interests or skills in relation to themselves and the labour market (comp. Cedefop, ETF and European Commission, 2019). Career guidance within the educational system can be associated mainly with the activities of career and academic advisors in primary and secondary schools, where the advice can take place on an individual or group level.

In previous research (Novotný, 2023; Majcík, 2024), we have repeatedly examined the perception of school and its characteristics by failing students who leave school early. Now, we examine the same question from the perspective of key actors in the school's pedagogical and advisory work, which is the perspective of career counsellors. Our research question is: How do schools cope with early school leaving, and how do they deal with early school leavers?

A qualitative methodology was chosen for the research. The approach and applied strategies in relation to students at risk of failure can be understood as an individual complex activity that takes place in the broader context of the setting of the activities of the school guidance office and also against the background of the characteristics of individual schools. For this reason, qualitative research seems to be suitable, because it allows us to understand broader causes and reflect on a number of variables in depth (Bryman, 2001; Šeďová & Švaříček, 2007). The semi-structured interview method was chosen for data collection, which allowed us to gain insight into the perspective of the career guidance counsellors themselves at schools. The interviews were mostly conducted in person at school. Three respondents were interviewed online due to their time constraints. As part of data collection, a total of 10 individual interviews and one pair interview were conducted, in which two pedagogical workers who deal with career guidance at the school participated. Interviews were conducted with school guidance workers who deal with the issue of early school leaving, usually educational or career counsellors. Thematic analysis was used as a method for data analysis, which allows for the identification of key themes that are repeated across interviews (Bryman, 2001). The first step in the analysis was inductive coding, which consists of assigning so-called codes to specific segments of data with regard to their significance (Gibbs, 2007). The resulting codes thus made it possible to draw attention to emerging themes that are important for counsellors across schools. A total of 17 themes were defined, including, for example, cooperation with parents, intervention, class teacher, prevention, counsellor needs, organisational collaboration, etc. A framework approach was used, where individual themes are shown in a table with all respondents. A more detailed analysis was subsequently carried out within individual themes. Appropriate requirements were observed within the framework of research ethics. Participants were informed about the objectives of the research and the methods used. They could also withdraw from the study at any time during the interview. The empirical data was handled in an anonymised form.

The solution to early school leaving is not separated from other educational and extracurricular tasks of the school. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor how the school as a whole and its key components work with this topic and how cooperation between teachers and collaboration at the level of the entire school on these issues works. When analysing, the school can be viewed as a professional community. Thus, we monitor how the school and its main actors build and expand the capacity to solve the problem of early school leaving. Cooperation can be analysed in three dimensions: breadth, or rather, broadening of collaboration; depth, or deepening of cooperation; and further anchoring of cooperation in school structures (cf. Novotný et al., 2014). The core of cooperation in the monitored schools is always the school guidance office. Its staffing varies primarily depending on the size of the school but also on the occupation of individual roles. This also gives rise to the specific risks of such an organisation. More staffed school guidance offices do not guarantee greater attention to early school leaving or better cooperation. If we imagine the degree of organisational anchoring of the topic of early school leaving on an imaginary scale from random structures to ad hoc structures to a fixed organisational structure, how do the monitored schools fare? Although schools generally have a fixed organisational structure of guidance offices, the topic of early school leaving is addressed ad hoc. It is, therefore, more a subject of operational solutions than conceptual cooperation. Tasks, their distribution and the allocated capacity for addressing early school leaving are then the subject of repeated negotiations of a more or less reactive nature.

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