In 2005, the first mother to be sentenced to jail because her eldest daughter persistently truanted was sentenced for a second time because she "failed" to stop her younger daughter from missing school. This story certainly exposes the links between education and punishment for working-class children and families, and the ways in which "failure" is made to circulate between and be contained by children and parents. More than this, it signposts "the psychic stakes in place and at play within and across the matrixes of personal lives": to the different identifications with schooling that can emerge amongst siblings, the intersubjective and emotional content of those identifications, the power of relationships with others to shape educational pathways, and the importance of generation in educational biographies. This article places identification at the centre of a discussion about sisters, families, shaky class locations, and resistance and conformity towards schooling. Drawing on ideas from group psychology, and placing sisters centre stage, it seeks to shed light on some of the push and pull of unconscious processes and flows of affect across and between generations and groups, and their place in the educational identifications of working-class girls. (Contains 7 notes.)