The way in which young people's post-school intentions and pathways reflect their social background has been the subject of a good deal of research. However, much less attention has been paid to social differentiation in the amount and kind of career guidance information received by young people and its role in reinforcing or ameliorating social…

Many studies have highlighted the limited 'opportunity structures' of working-class undergraduates. However, there have been few studies exploring how students' agentic internal conversations mediate societal structures. Internal conversation is a reflexive process in which thoughts and decisions are considered in relation to social circumstances.…

Access to early child education services has been proven to be an efficient tool in fighting educational inequalities. However, while wealthier families are likely to use childcare services, disadvantaged children tend to be left out. Research has explained this effect, known as Mathew Effect, and has studied both the constraints in the…

This article seeks to understand how adult students perceived education as disseminated by the Workers' Educational Association (WEA). Evidence will be presented from sources not commonly studied, namely WEA student logbooks of tutorial classes. Adult students attending WEA tutorial classes in the 1920s and 1930s recorded their own personal,…

This article sifts the historical and philosophical soil out of which the comprehensive ideal in education has sprung. England's national school system emerged in the nineteenth century imbued with ruling-class assumptions about the education required for each supposed type of child destined to take his or her place in one of the three broad…

Questions about Sweden's education system often consider the extent to which educational reforms between 1940 and 1990 contributed to social justice, equity and equality, and the extent to which neoliberal market reforms from the early 1990s onwards have reversed this tendency. Using Young's model of structural injustice, Wodak's critical…

This article draws on data from a small qualitative study of men on care-based degree pathways in one university in England. There is little research that specifically considers the experiences of working-class men on these courses. The article explores aspects of men's experiences and responses to so-called 'active learning'. It considers…

This article aims to deepen understanding of the assets within working-class academics (WCA). It is organised into three themes: 1) Class Solidarity, 2) Supporting Students, and 3) A WCA Pedagogy. Within Class Solidarity, the study reveals class unity demonstrated through shared experiences and joint efforts in creating spaces for working-class…

This paper is about social class and initial teacher education, specifically the perspectives and experiences of those from lower socio-economic groups in an initial teacher education programme in Ireland. It draws on a qualitative study employing in-depth semi-structured interviews with 21 'working class' student teachers, exploring their…

This paper extends existing Bourdieusian theorisations of the educational involvement of working-class parents by adding the less-examined axes of rural origin and migration status with an intersectional approach. It focusses on the 'labourer' families involved in internal rural-urban migration in China. Semi-structured interviews were conducted…

This article explores the recent emergence of 'working-class student officer' roles in students' unions associated with elite UK universities. These student representative roles are designed to represent the interests of working-class students within their universities and sit alongside student representatives for liberation groups and/or student…

Children's treatment in the school environment has barely changed over many decades. Norms of obedience, discipline and control persist to define their 'place' in hierarchies of schooling. This is in direct contrast with freedoms they enjoy outside of school from, for example, their use of information communication technology, use of time and…

The paper argues that the mother's association with the child's schooling and educational needs is not just limited and peculiar to the middle-class families, as the literature suggests, but it is increasingly true of poor and working-class families too. This paper discusses how mothers from a poor neighbourhood in India straddle between household…

A central element in the writing of marginal subjects is the personal and autobiographical voice they use to write about themselves and their experiences. This article uses a personal voice- autoethnography - to examine, in a multi-layered manner, one-stop of the author's educational biography and her path, as a working-class Mizrahi woman, to…

Theoretically, education supports improving graduates' socioeconomic outcomes and careers by injecting citizenship values and making sure they are employable. Evidence confirms that socioeconomic background influences the level of education achieved which in turn greatly shapes the careers of graduates. Relevant knowledges and competencies are the…