This article examines the institutional transformations of language-in-education programmes in Madrid, linked to wider socio-economic processes of change. Drawing on a research team's ethnographic revisit, we explore how wider processes are impacting everyday discursive practices in the Bridging Class (BC) programme, first implemented in 2003 to teach Spanish to the children of migrant workers in state schools. We focus on the coexistence of this programme with the recently implemented Bilingual Schools Programme, aimed to equip students from working-class areas to compete in global markets. Based on the analysis of interviews and classroom interactions with BC students at one secondary school, in connection with the wider socio-historical processes underlying language-in-education policies, this study reveals a process of discrediting of the BC that contributed to a local hierarchisation of programmes (and its participants). Further implications are discussed regarding how individuals collaborated with each other under these institutional conditions.