South African national education policy is committed to promoting gender equality at school and to facilitating the successful completion of all young people's schooling, including those who may become pregnant and parent while at school. However, the experience of being pregnant and parenting while being a learner is shaped by broader social and…

Schools are obliged to support young women who become mothers. Drawing from an interview study of young women in a Durban school, this article shows how their experience is situated within discourses of shame and stigma. Such shame works to reduce their agency and increase their vulnerability to drop out of school. Both teachers and peers are…

This article presents elements of an ethnographic study of gendered identities among boys and girls in the early years of primary schooling. Foregrounding group work in mathematics as a key arena for the production of young masculine identities, this article goes some way to addressing what is absent from sociological portrayals of young children,…