This article studies variance in the political participation of adolescents depending on achievement in civic education. The aim is to discover whether low achievers represent a distinctive pattern of political participation, and whether this varies across participation types (i.e. horizontally) and across current participation in school and expected future participation (i.e. vertically). Cluster analysis of ICCS 2009 data revealed that modest school participatory inequalities tend to raise in the future. Moreover, countries with low shares of underperforming students have higher participatory inequalities characterised by concentrations of high achievers in the 'good citizen' group and low achievers in the 'alienated citizens' group.