In this paper we offer a unique contribution to understandings of schooling as a site for the production of social class difference. We bring together the rich body of work that has been conducted on middle-class educational identities, with explorations of the centrality of the feminine in representations of class difference from the field of…

Over the last decade it is young women who have come to be widely understood as the bearers of educational qualifications. It is girls who are now seen to have "the world at their feet" and to be able to attain the glittering prizes of academic success associated with elite universities and top occupations. And it is upper-middle-class…