ABSTRACT
Based on the RESL.eu project’s quantitative survey of almost 20,000 young people across seven EU countries, this chapter presents an overall analysis of findings, focusing on the key risk and protective factors associated with young people’s educational outcomes. We focus on the key concept of school engagement to explore patterns of socioeconomic and attitudinal variables and to present a statistical model to explain some of the differences seen between students who are disengaged and their more engaged peers. In particular, our data analysis reveals the important role of self-perceptions and key personal relations in the individual pathways determining levels of school engagement, irrespective of the national contexts and school settings and beyond the predictive power of specific demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Our analysis explores profiles of young people across the international dataset as a whole before examining in greater depth the commonalities and differences that exist within and between the seven national samples. Finally, we discuss what these empirical findings say about the nature of early school leaving across Europe and about the importance of implementing measures to (re)engage young people while they are still at school.
