Are we doing something wrong? How schools’ policies and practices are related to student dropout.

Abstract

This present study analysed the school policies and practices that seemed to be related to dropout. The purpose of this study was to determine the strongest contributing factors that can explain the risk of students’ dropping out from secondary vocational education schools. A total of 252 students from four different Dutch schools complete a questionnaire about eight different school factors and personal factors. After a confirmatory factor analysis, five of the eight factors remained. In this study only the school factors ‘Rule emphasis’ and ‘SLB’ were significant related to students’ perceptions, and were the factors that explained the most variance in the data. The factor ‘SLB’ explained the most variance in the data and is the factor that contributed the strongest to the risk of students dropping out.