Transitions from one level of education system to another and from education to work are structured by socio-economic and institutional structure factors, while at the same time they are appropriated by individuals in their biographical constructions. Patterns to career trajectories are also dependent on social class, immigrant origin and level of…

The paper explores factors of importance for young people's choice of upper secondary education and for their future life, from a student perspective. The paper builds on data from a questionnaire study, answered by 1,414 students in grade 9 (age 15-16) in Sweden, prior to their choice of upper secondary school. In addition, data from earlier…

Focus of this article is immigrant youth and Norwegians-born to immigrant parents in upper secondary school in Norway. The study was conducted in a first year of a general study class in upper secondary school, where 11 of 24 students were immigrants. Previous research on immigrants in school tends to show a picture of a marginalized group in…

The present study investigated test responses from 259 immigrant and non-immigrant school year 9 students in Sweden with the focus on how they solved two problems on fractions, one of them halving a fraction, in a test. The authors report three observations. Newly arrived second language immigrants seemed less likely to have the word 'half' in…

In this article we compare research we did 30 years ago in Dutch schools among youth of diverse ethnic backgrounds about their identities with today's research evidence. Taking the position that education is a site for implicit and explicit identity development mediated by the social conditions in which young people grow up and the political…

Drawing on a study of a Swedish secondary school with a heterogeneous intake, this article provides an analysis of the social relations and segregation within an individual school. As shown in the analysis, young people from different socio-economic backgrounds were largely separated in school, differently positioned and in conflict with each…

Children and youth at risk are a major challenge facing education systems in Europe. Some systems seem to be mastering this challenge better than others. Observations of the educational fate of immigrant minority children can shed light on the efficiency and performance of European education systems with respect to their ability to deal with…