Our research is driven by a strong belief that the stories of young people gathered through ethnographic interviews can generate awareness not only of the complexities, uncertainties and possibilities of young people's lives but also the ways in which their identities and life chances are shaped by broader structural, institutional and historical…

In Australia, like many western countries, there has been a convergence of education policy around a set of utilitarian and economistic approaches to vocational education and training in schools. Such approaches are based on the assumption that there is a direct relationship between national economic growth, productivity and human capital…

The persistent failure of contemporary policies to improve school retention rates and close the achievement gap between students from low and high socio-economic (SES) backgrounds should be a matter of grave concern. In this article, we set out to show what it means to be educated in a context of disadvantage from the perspectives of young people…