Young people from working-class backgrounds are feeling increasingly insecure in school, and for good reasons. The institution of schooling is being converted into an instrument of neoliberal control. In this paper, I discuss how schools are becoming increasingly insecure places for working-class young people, and how they are responding, and I do this in four parts; first, through the construction of a particular kind of classed learning identity; second, I make the case for why we need a more explicit focus on social class in schooling; third, I pursue how working-class students are being taught to "learn their place" in school, and what this means for sociological analysis; and finally, in moving beyond a bleak and deterministic interpretation, I provide some examples of counter-storytelling to illustrate how working-class culture "speaks back" to the institution of schooling. [This paper was originally presented as a keynote address to the 'Youth, insecurity and education' international seminar, University of Huddersfield, UK, 16th June 2015.]