Abstract: The overall aim of my doctoral study was to uncover important mechanisms explaining student disengagement and hereby address the relatively high levels of early leaving from Flemish vocational education and training (VET). In this effort, the four published studies explored different strategies to move beyond the focus on individual level sociodemographic risk indicators in explaining early leaving, often dominating policy discourses. While my argument is that even though structural and systemic features are indispensable to understand and counter enduring educational inequalities, a sole focus on systemic features of an education system is insufficient. Therefore, in this dissertation I aimed to develop a comprehensive framework starting from the empirically supported rationale that early leaving – in most cases – is an endpoint of a gradual process of student disengagement. Hence, the four studies in this dissertation linked structural or systemic context (macro), learning context (meso) and student – so-called self-system – (micro-) level factors and processes to analyse student (dis-) engagement as a predictor for early leaving from vocational education and training. This is illustrated by the figure below: The first study supported the notion that the systemic and institutional context of urban VET schools in Flanders is a relevant context to study students’ strategies to cope with stereotype threat. This study disentangled if and how VET students who are negatively stereotyped for having low academic motivation and performance levels try to prevent this stereotype threat from harming their academic self-concept by (1) disconnecting their academic self-concept from their actual educational performances, (2) by discounting teachers’ negative feedback for being unfairly biased and (3) by personally disidentifying from the goals set in education. An important contribution of this study was to widen the scope of stereotype threat related studies to a stigmatised group identity that relates to the ...