Conference Agenda

During the course of their educational path, children are subjected to a series of critical transitions between one academic level to the next. These include the transition from kindergarten to lower primary school, from upper primary school to lower secondary school and from vocational studies through apprenticeship and into the labour force (Bragdø & Austad, 2022).

Students’ transitional experiences play an important role in dictating their later social, emotional and intellectual development (Hanewald, 2013; Waters et al., 2012). Students with specialized needs are particularly vulnerable to critical transitions and have a higher risk of transitions leading to a negative social, academic or behavioural development (Cantali, 2015; Symonds, 2015). Thus, it is imperative that teachers are conscious of critical transitions and the effect they may pose on some students.

Norway along with the other Scandinavian countries, are repeatedly used as a good example on the path towards an inclusive school and equal participation for all people (e.g. Frønes et al., 2020). The Nordic welfare state model provides free education for all, free parental leave and comprehensive sickness benefits. Still the economic inequality in Norway is rising (e.g. Akerbæk & Molnes, 2021). Repstad (2021) refers to different kinds of inequality. He claims that while the Norwegian society experiences little inequality of opportunity and inequality of treatment, it is still lacking in inequality of outcome – A level playing field does not necessarily lead to an egalitarian society. In the case of public education, it is not enough to accommodate for equal opportunity and treatment as long as the cultural capital of the students is not being taken into consideration.

Both the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research (Meld. St. 6 (2019-2020)) and legal regulations for the Norwegian teacher education highlight the importance of strengthening the bonds between the different academic levels in the educational trajectory. Despite this, there are no clear guidance document on how to strengthen these transitions and there are barely any Norwegian studies considering the transition between primary and secondary school (Strand, 2022, s. 18).

Through a case study, carried out in the context of an EU-funded research project, PIONEERED – aimed at pioneering practices tackling educational inequalities in Europe, – we examine an alternative educational program which aids upper primary and lower secondary students, struggling to stay in school. Once a week, students are brought away from school to conduct non-formal outdoor activities, focusing on mastery and personal development, significantly reducing their chance of dropping out. The instructors teach the students practical vocational tasks, with the eventual goal being regular employment and a satisfactory quality of life.

One of the most striking and successful enterprises of this practice is their ability to prepare at-risk students for potentially difficult educational transitions, namely upper primary to lower secondary school, and lower secondary to upper secondary school. This leads to the following research question: Which tools and techniques used for smoothening transitional risks can be identified in a Norwegian alternative educational program?

Further research objectives include:

1. arguing for the value of researching transitional tools and techniques for vulnerable students.
2. identifying tools and techniques utilised by an alternative educational program.
3. reflecting on how these techniques can be applied to the ordinary school system in the Norwegian educational context and may serve as incentive for other European contexts as well.

We assume a sociocultural perspective on education, which asserts that learning is a social process mediated through communication with a more knowledgeable other (Vygotsky, 1978). We also assume a Bourdieuan sociological perspective, contending that educational qualifications are domestically inherited and thereby reproduced in the form of cultural capital (Bourdieu & Richardson, 1986).

This study examines the effect of absence patterns over the course of a pupil’s entire academic career on achievement in the final year of compulsory schooling in England. There is abundant evidence of the negative consequences of school absenteeism on children’s achievement (Aucejo & Romano, 2016), which subsequently translates into lower educational attainment and poorer labour market outcomes (Cattan et al., 2022). However, most existing research consider the effects of absences over a single year and the limited studies exploring absences across time only examine whether yearly changes in absences result in varying achievement progress. Additionally, existing studies disregard the cumulative measurement of dynamic absence trajectories over time, which may conceal meaningful differences between pupils and likely results in an underestimation of the degree to which absences influence achievement. A holistic measurement of pupils’ absences across their academic careers is crucial to assess whether the timing of absence severity matters for achievement.

Theoretically, there are arguments for early absences being more important for achievement as well as arguments for late absences being more important. On the one hand, we could assume that early absences are more harmful to children’s achievement because skill formation is path dependent: children who lack basic skills will have difficulty acquiring more advanced skills. On the other hand, we could assume that late absences have a greater impact on children’s achievement, given that the content being evaluated on tests is the content taught in the last few years before the test. Existing research overwhelmingly concludes that later absences are more important for academic success (Ansari & Pianta, 2019).

The extent to which absence trajectories influence achievement may not only be influenced by the frequency of absences but also by the type of absence. For instance, unauthorised absences become much more prevalent during later school stages (Department for Education, 2011) and seem to be more detrimental to school performance than authorised absences (Gottfried, 2009). This could be due to teachers being less motivated to support pupils with numerous unauthorised absences (Wilson et al., 2008). Nonetheless, the larger effect of unauthorised absences may also reflect differences in pupils’ school-related attitudes (Hancock et al., 2013), which are rarely measured by surveys. This claim is supported by Klein et al. (2022), who found that sickness absences and absences due to exceptional domestic circumstances are just as damaging to achievement as truancy.

Some studies have examined trajectories of overall absences (Benner & Wang, 2014; Simon et al., 2020) or truancy (Schoeneberger, 2012), but none have jointly investigated type and temporal dynamics across children’s schooling. Moreover, the research on absence trajectories is largely limited to the United States, only considers absences over a few years of schooling, and does not account for all pertinent school absenteeism risk factors which likely also affect academic achievement.

Our study draws on linked school administrative and survey data from England to examine the association between absence trajectories and achievement. Specifically, we address two research questions that enable us to overcome the limitations of previous studies:

1. Which absence trajectories emerge across entire school careers?
2. How do these absence trajectories affect achievement?

The paper presents some of the results of my upcoming dissertation about young mental health rehabilitants’ school experiences and educational trajectories in Finland. This paper focuses in school dropout at the upper secondary education from the viewpoint of young people with the background of psychological disability. A psychological disability refers to a spectrum of mental disorders or conditions that influence our emotions, cognitions and/or behaviors.

Transition from comprehensive school to the upper secondary level is associated with several challenges (Hjort et al 2016). For vulnerable groups, e.g. adolescents with psychological disabilities, these challenges are even more difficult (Lamb 2011). Especially depression affects the psychosocial and school-related development of adolescents in a major way (Dupere et al 2017; Schulte-Körne 2016). They increase the risk of having to dropping out of school before achieving any qualification, which is a serious problem both at an individual and societal level (Ramsdal et al 2018). Depressive disorders are also one of the most significant contributors to work disability and premature exit from the labor market (Maynard, Sala-Wright & Vaughn, 2015). Mental health problems are increasing worldwide. In Finland, about 20 % of all young adults are diagnosed with a psychological disorder, of which diagnoses of depression and anxiety are most usual (OECD 2019).

The purpose of this study, framed within a mixed design, concern to one part quantitative aspect of the associations between mental health problems and school dropouts, especially factors that increase the risk to drop out of school were explored. Another area of interest was to explore the experiences of dropping out of upper secondary education (qualitative aspect). The data consisted of quantitative survey data (n=121) as well as qualitative data from interviews (n=28) and open-ended survey responses (n=113). The analyses were conducted with logistic regression analysis and qualitative content analysis. When analyzing the data, a special interest was paid to school dropouts. The data were categorized into three essential categories (individual, family and institutional) according to Vincent Tinto’s explanatory model of the dropout process (Tinto 1973; Tinto 1975; Tinto 1997).

Both, quantitative and qualitative findings show that school dropout and mental health problems are strongly connected to each other. About one-fifth of the respondents had dropped out of upper secondary school. Based on the data, diagnosed mental health disorders by age 18, loneliness in upper comprehensive school, lack of social support and family background significantly increased likelihood of dropping out.