This paper argues that the consideration of educational disadvantage should go beyond the micro-scale contextual level of individual students, and explore eventual connections with hybrid forms of disadvantage in the social field. The paper draws on the capability approach and the concept of dwelling to introduce dwelling in time as functioning. This refers to students' abilities to position themselves in an engaging and meaningful relationship within time, and depends on students first achieving the previous functioning of dwelling. Research results from 222 14-15 year-old vocational education students from Italy, France and Greece using the Future Time Perspective Scale for Adolescents and Young Adults (FTPS-AYA), revealed four main findings: a measurement error in four factors of the scale, an almost systematic lack of correlation of the future-planning factor with the other factors, a significant percentage of students who do not have a clear position on the future and an invisible correlation between the future-positive and future-negative factors and students' opportunities to choose their specialisations. The paper argues that these four findings should not be seen in isolation and concludes that widening the spectrum of the origins of educational disadvantage facilitates both more effective education policy making and localising conversion factors that can boost students' resilience.