Abstract
The study analyses the results of a large survey conducted within the project HELP by the Centre for Evaluation of Educational Achievement (CERMAT) in uppermost forms of secondary schools in December 2009. The aim of the survey was to find out the actual performance level of their students in mathematics, the Czech language and a foreign language by means of tests corresponding to those to be used for the state examination of secondary education, as well as to try to discover various causes of their varied performance at individual, institutional and system levels.
The study´s main finding is that a comparatively large proportion of secondary students will be threatened by failure focused on certain types of schools and/or fields of education. Education policy tools used at system and institutional levels have only a limited effect on altering the fact that various types of schools and fields of education attract, and are entered by, students with very different levels of their scholastic aptitude.