Guilty of Success and Failure: Permeability Struggles of Unsuccessful Upper Secondary VET Examinees in the Czech Republic

Petr Novotný, Katarína Rozvadská and Martin Majcík
Additional contact information
Petr Novotný: Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Czechia
Katarína Rozvadská: Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Martin Majcík: Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Czechia

Social Inclusion, 2025, vol. 13

Abstract: This article examines upper secondary vocational education students who have failed the exit examination ( Matura ) at least twice. Repeated failure leaves such students with only a basic education certification, restricting their access to higher education and limiting their labour market prospects. Although most of these young people wish to make another attempt to pass the Matura , they have lost their formal student status, along with its associated benefits, and most are compelled to seek employment. Academic failure, particularly at these critical transition points, can have profound implications on students’ educational and professional trajectories and their identities. The research question we posed here, therefore, is: How do the identities of upper secondary vocational education Matura examinees evolve during the two years after they fail the final examination? The data corpus for this study consists of biographical interviews with 46 informants who failed the Matura . The data analysis reveals that they struggled to anchor their identities through study, work, or family, with some exploiting non‐systemic permeability mechanisms.

Keywords: anchoring struggles; feelings of failure; identity struggles; Matura; permeability; upper secondary exit examination; vocational education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/article/view/9785 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:socinc:v13:y:2025:a:9785

DOI: 10.17645/si.9785

Access Statistics for this article

Social Inclusion is currently edited by Mariana Pires

More articles in Social Inclusion from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().