Academic second-chance education (SCE) provides young adults with the opportunity for upward mobility. However, many young people in academic SCE have unfavourable prerequisites, which make it difficult for them to meet academic requirements. In this article, we explore how teachers respond to this challenge in their practice and the extent to which teacher practice matches learner expectations. We look at formal academic SCE and the following aspects of teacher practice: supporting weak learners, applying rules on discipline and grading, and building teacher-learner relationships. Our basis is a dataset of 176 teachers and 600 learners in 9 schools of academic SCE in Germany. The results show that a majority of teachers report that they support weak learners and address learners' personal needs whilst insisting on general rules for discipline and grading. However, almost half of the learners want more recognition of their adult status -- more that is than their teachers perceive -- by being granted autonomy, professional relational distance and more flexibility on absence rules. This article discusses the extent to which structural features of academic SCE make it difficult to perceive the adult needs of learners and at the same time to pursue challenging learning goals.