Conference Program

Educational transitions represent a crucial moment in the reproduction of social inequalities (Tarabini, 2018), particularly for young people with a migrant background. Across contexts, research (Stevens & Dworkin, 2019) consistently shows that students of migrant origin are disproportionately channelled into less prestigious educational pathways, even when they hold high educational aspirations. While quantitative studies (Contini & Azzolini, 2016; Kilpi-Jakonen, 2011) have documented these structural patterns, they often provide limited insight into how young people themselves interpret, negotiate and experience these transitions. This paper addresses this gap by examining how children of migrants navigate the transition to post-compulsory education within a context marked by school and urban segregation.

The paper draws on qualitative longitudinal research conducted with seventeen students of Moroccan and Pakistani origin in Barcelona. Over the course of one year, participants were followed during their transition from compulsory secondary education to post-compulsory pathways through a combination of semi-structured interviews and visual methods. This approach enables an in-depth exploration of how students articulate their educational choices through their identities and aspirations, and how these evolve throughout the transition process. The study situates these subjective processes within broader structural and institutional contexts, including school composition, teacher expectations, educational guidance and the spatial distribution of educational opportunities.

The analysis identifies two distinct patterns of transition. The first, described as transitions by ambition, occurs when students select demanding academic pathways oriented towards prestigious long-term professional goals, such as medicine or engineering. These trajectories are often shaped by what the literature describes as migrant optimism, whereby educational success becomes part of a broader family project of social mobility. However, these ambitious transitions are frequently destabilised during the first months of post-compulsory education through academic difficulties, shifting school identities and processes of “cooling out” mediated by peer networks and local opportunity structures.

The second pattern, referred to as transitions by alignment, is characterised by choices based on perceived alignment between students’ abilities, interests and available educational pathways. In these cases, decisions are strongly influenced by naturalised understandings of ability and by institutional classifications of knowledge that differentiate between academic and vocational pathways. These transitions are typically accompanied by more limited or vague aspirations and are shaped by the constraints of class position and segregated educational environments.

By focusing on the subjective dimensions of transitions, this paper highlights the heterogeneity of experiences among children of migrants and challenges essentialist explanations that attribute educational outcomes primarily to cultural background. Instead, the findings demonstrate how educational inequalities emerge from the interaction between structural conditions, institutional practices and young people’s own processes of identity and aspirational negotiation. In doing so, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on the role of educational systems in either reproducing or challenging inequalities affecting migrant-background youth.