The Flemish educational system is highly streamed. Aside special education, pre-school and primary education is in principle undifferentiated. However, some larger schools tend to form ability groups in the primary grades. The first two grades (7 & 8) from secondary education are moderately tracked and streamed. There are two tracks, namely A and B. The B-track only gives access to the vocational tracks in the higher grades. The majority of students (85 to 90%) attend the A-track, which gives access to all tracks in the upper years. From the ninth grade on, secondary schooling in Flanders is differentiated in four educational forms:

1. general secondary education,
2. technical secondary education,
3. art secondary education and
4. vocational secondary education.

Policy makers and researchers alike are somewhat disquiet about the so called 'cascaded school carriers' witch seem inherent to highly tracked educational systems as the Flemish. At the beginning of their secondary school carrier most pupils choose for the general track because its prestige is the highest. For some of those pupils however this kind of education is simply not adapted to their needs. These pupils arrive only after lots of failures and detours in technical and vocational tracks. These cascaded and broken school carriers are supposed to be very negative, not only for the concerned pupils, but for the educational system alike. Pupils with broken and cascaded carriers had to repeat years and have been reoriented to different and less demanding or more practical study areas. Generally they arrived too late in the track they finished or they simply drop out. It is therefore very likely that these pupils do have a lower self-esteem, feel less well and less motivated for learning. A found correlation, however, between cascaded school carriers and a lower well being can also be explained in a very different manner. Those school carriers do end - by definition - in the vocational track. It is possible that a relation between school carrier and well being can be explained by the characteristics of the different tracks. For this paper we used data of nearly 5000 pupils in the twelfth grade. For each respondent we gathered complete information of their school carrier and very different measures of well being. By means of multi level analysis we try to demonstrate a relation between school carrier and well being, controlling for social background.

One of the key methodological problems in this analysis is the measuring of the school carrier. Most researchers would use synthetic variables like the number of repeated years or track reorientations. In this paper we will try a different approach by using Abbott's optimal matching method, which is based on the calculation of distances between sequences. In this way we try to use the full pattern of the school carrier.