Accumulating evidence indicates that students’ sense of school belonging has a substantial posi-tive effect on educational attainment. At the same time, life-course and life-span developmental theories suggest that the benefits of a sense of school belonging could be weakened by the channelling effects of education systems that assign students to distinct educational tracks that lead otherwise similar students to quite different educational destinations. The current study analysed the extent to which the sense of school belonging predicted educational trajectories in a system that partially channels students into distinct tracks. It assessed educational trajectories as they relate to transitions at two critical junctures of the system — the transition from lower- to upper-secondary education, and from upper-secondary to tertiary (university) education. The study used data from a panel survey that followed participants from age 15 to 30 (n = 4986). Findings from structural equation models indicated that students with a stronger sense of school belonging were significantly more likely to continue in or transition into academic tracks, but that the benefits of students’ sense of belonging were bounded by the system’s channelling structure. While, for students in academic tracks, the sense of school belonging strongly predicted the probability of continuing in academic tracks, it only marginally predicted the probability of moving into academic tracks for those whose educational career began in more vocationally oriented tracks. Hence the sense of school belonging may influence academic trajectories only inasmuch as institutional structures allow it to, because these structures differentially enable and constrain such trajectories
