Does school shape upper secondary educational transitions? Exploring the relationship between students’ trajectories and educational choices

Abstract

This chapter analyses young people’s upper secondary education transitions as intrinsically related to their previous school trajectories and experiences in lower secondary education. Drawing on quantitative data of students from Barcelona in their first year of upper secondary education, the chapter demonstrates the central role that schools play in the construction of educational opportunities. It specifically shows how certain institutional devices (mostly repetition, suspension and ability grouping), and also the subjective experience of them, facilitate or inhibit different upper secondary educational trajectories for different youth profiles. One of the most important contributions of the chapter is the construction of a typology of school trajectories – the ‘good students’, the ‘hard workers’, the ‘troublemakers’ and the ‘misfits’ – that, through the mediation of structural variables and particularly social class, deeply conditions the choice of upper secondary tracks.