This article applies positional conflict theory to investigate how the proliferation of international schools can create a new layer of educational stratification and deepen inequality of opportunity. Data from five international schools in metropolitan centres across southern China were collected through interviews, school visits, and a survey.…

This paper seeks to take advantage of the concept of emotional capital to analyse how class is lived out through a critical educational failure by referring to the experiences of 64 community-college students in Hong Kong from a longitudinal qualitative study. Arguably an analysis of the emotions of middle-class and working-class respondents and…

Mental health problems among young people have increased in recent decades, particularly among middle-class youth, a development often related to increasing achievement pressure. This paper explores how young people from the financial and cultural middle classes in Norway experience school stress and their parents' values and practices concerning…

Much of the literature on social class and language study in schools argues that for middle-class parents and their children, languages are chosen for their capacity to offer forms of distinction that provide an edge in the global labour market. In this paper, we draw on data collected from interviews with parents and children in middle-class…

This paper reports on the patterns of participation in organised sports of youngsters coming towards the end of primary school, with a view to identifying emergent sporting habits in relation to social class gradients. The data for the study were generated via 90 semi-structured interviews with parents and children from 62 families. The data…

Schooling has long been studied for its role in class formation and reproduction, Australian government secondary schools have also traditionally been associated with 'the local' and with 'nation building'. Some schools might now also be engaged with ideas of the 'the global' not only through policy practices and priorities, but also through the…

This paper draws on a three-year critical ethnography which interrogated intersections of social class, school and identity in an urban Irish community. The focus here is on the psycho-spatial disidentifications, inscriptions and class fractioning enacted throughout the school and community of Portown by a cohort of succeeding students from this…

This article employs Bourdieu's conceptual tools to unpack family influences on students' subject and university choices in China. This empirical study employed mixed research approaches, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, to examine students' choices of subjects and universities in a sample of secondary school students from the age…

This article aims to compare and contrast the perceptions of parental influence of indigenous middle-class students and immigrant students in Cyprus, and to investigate how their family's capital mediates students' educational choices for studies in higher education. This study draws on interview data with two students and their parents and…

While a class gap remains in obtaining a degree despite an expansion of higher education, a variety of second chances have become available. How class matters in receiving parental assistance for seeking a second chance is of increasing importance to understanding educational inequality in an altered context of higher education, but it is…

This study focused on household funds of knowledge or "historically accumulated bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household functioning and well-being" (Gonzalez, Andrade, Civil, & Moll, 2001). A Funds of Knowledge approach provides both a methodological and theoretical lens for educators to understand both themselves and…

This article examines the high school search activities, choices, and final assignments of academically similar, but ethnically and socioeconomically different, eighth-grade students attending one New York City middle school. Despite being comparable candidates for admission to academically competitive high schools, the middle-class children of…

Recent UK policy has emphasised both the development of socially mixed communities and the creation of balanced school intakes. In this paper, we use a case study of an area of mixed tenure in eastern England to explore policy in practice and the extent to which mechanisms of segregation impact on both the creation of socially mixed neighbourhoods…

A community-based, multisite study using mixed methods examined the experiences and perspectives of Latino students and families in a low performing urban school district in New York State. This research project was spearheaded by a Latino Education Task Force which brought together multiple stakeholders in a collaborative effort to counteract…

This paper discusses findings from a small-scale empirical exploration of the views, experiences and educational practices of middle-class minority ethnic families in the United Kingdom. It draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with 36 parents, pupils and "young professionals". Analyses consider to what extent generic class…