School leadership and students’ decisions about further education: exploring the roles of goal setting and school socioeconomic composition

This study focuses on the relationship between various leadership goal setting and students’ decisions about further education in the context of the Danish educational system. Furthermore, the potential of school leadership to reduce social disparities in such decisions is explored. The data set is based on repeated measurements of school leaders’ attitudes and practices from 819 schools over 4 years, merged with administrative register data. Multilevel multinomial logistic regression and two-way fixed effects multinomial regression were applied. We find no relationship between achievement goals and educational decisions. Depending on modeling choices, results indicate that leadership goal setting concerning transition is associated with a small increase in the chance of students choosing the academic track, and the goal of promoting citizenship among students was associated with a slightly higher probability of choosing the vocational track. Furthermore, transition goals moderate the relationship between school socioeconomic status and students’ probability of choosing the academic track.