Conference Agenda

The extent to which education systems should select students for particular types of education and/or institutions is a recurrent theme in political debate across many European countries. It has also been an important focus of the sociological literature. Scholars have sought, for example, to assess the impact of selection – at different points in the education system – on social mobility and processes of social reproduction. In this symposium, we showcase four contemporary studies of selection in different parts of Europe (England, Spain, France and Denmark) and across both the school and higher education sectors.

Sociological studies of school-level education have typically indicated that early selection into different ‘tracks’ or types of school can have a negative impact on social mobility, with those from lower income families typically over-represented in lower status forms of schooling, from which progression to higher education and well-paid employment is often more difficult (e.g. Berends, 2015; Wells et al., 1999; West, 2014). Moreover, they have shown that ‘school choice’ policies, often popular with politicians in some European nations, typically advantage the middle classes, who have more cultural, social and economic capital to draw upon when making their decisions (e.g. Bunar, 2010; Butler and Hamnett, 2012). The first two papers in this symposium extend further debates about selection within the school sector. Drawing on evidence from England, the first paper explores whether a school system can ever promote excellence without also promoting elitism. The second examines tracking in the upper secondary sector in Spain, considering the extent to which being selected into either an academic or vocational track impacts on both social inequality and the subjectivities of individual students.

With respect to higher education, extant research has demonstrated that, across Europe, higher education has, historically, excluded many social groups – particularly those from low-income families, without parental experience of higher education, from particular ethnic backgrounds, and who are older than average (e.g. Thomsen, 2023). Moreover, even when such students secure access to higher education, they can often feel ‘out-of-place’ and excluded from practices both within and outside of the classroom (e.g. Gregersen and Nielsen, 2022). Over recent decades, the higher education sectors in many European countries have massified, student populations have become increasingly diverse, and attempts have been made – in some nations at least – to better support applicants from under-represented groups (Harrison, 2019). Nevertheless, there is evidence that entry to highly selective universities has not diversified to the same degree (e.g. Boliver, 2013). Building on this body of work, the third and fourth papers in this symposium consider contemporary evidence about higher education selectivity. The third examines contextualised admission policies that have been put in place to widen participation to a selective French institution. It assesses the efficacy of such initiatives by drawing on the narratives of applicants, as well as those of higher education staff involved in assessing their applications. The final paper draws on data from a selective degree programme in Denmark to examine the ways in which gender interacts with both social class and academic attainment in the formation of social and symbolic boundaries.

This symposium has been organised by the executive editors of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. The chair of the executive editors will chair this symposium, and another executive editor will act as discussant. In addition, two of the four presenters are members of the journal’s editorial board.

School systems must provide enough convenient school places for the population. There is no need for the system to provide different kinds of schools and school places for different parts of the population. Yet this is what most developed school systems do. The claim is regularly made by policy-makers that different types of school are more or less effective, or more effective for certain types of pupils – selective grammar schools for the most able, or technical schools for the less able, for example. There is little evidence for these claims (Gorard and Siddiqui 2018, 2019). Diversity of schooling make no clear difference to differential attainment. Selective systems are not more successful with equivalent students. But they do tend to segregate students by background – academic selection also segregates by poverty, faith-based schools segregate by ethnicity, and so on. Such diversity in the type of schools provided in one system is strongly associated with the increased clustering of poorer children within schools, and between economic areas. This kind of clustering, of students with indicators of potential disadvantage, is then linked to further undesirable school outcomes. Exposure to a less varied set of possible friends at school leads to reduced role models for lower attaining pupils, less tolerant wider pupil attitudes, and higher degrees of social reproduction (Gorard et al. 2022). Equivalent student behaviours, interactions and achievements are interpreted differently in different settings as defined by the peer group. Going to school in segregated settings is therefore potentially damaging in a variety of ways – such as lowering aspiration, expectations, and participation for individuals. It reduces national and regional social and ethnic cohesion, and decreases trust in public institutions. Similarly to widening participation to prestigious universities, access to selective schools could be increased for poorer students by reducing the test threshold for entry, or using some form of contextualised admissions (Boliver et al. 2002). But given that there is no overall gain and considerable harm done, it would be simpler and fairer simply to abolish selection at a young age. Of course, schools could still offer bespoke programmes and activities, including gifted and talented, for some sessions in the week. In all-ability schools, the provision does not have to be uniform for all sessions. But these programmes must be robustly evaluated for benefit, and take place in a wider setting wherein students of all types can interact for most of the week.

Boliver, V., Gorard, S. and Siddiqui. N. (2022) Who counts as disadvantaged for the purposes of widening access to higher education?, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 43, 3, 349-374, https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2021.2017852 Gorard, S. and Siddiqui, N. (2018) Grammar schools in England: a new analysis of social segregation and academic outcomes, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 39, 7, 909-924 Gorard, S. and Siddiqui, N. (2019) How trajectories of disadvantage help explain school attainment, SAGE Open, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244018825171 Gorard, S., See BH, and Siddiqui, N. (2022) Making schools better for disadvantaged students, Abingdon: Routledge

The expansion of the neoliberal paradigm has brought with it the proliferation of individualistic and meritocratic discourses. In education, this has meant placing on students the full responsibility of their academic trajectories and results, which, in the long term, will explain their social locations (Vieira et al., 2013). As a consequence, the distribution of social positions appears as the natural distribution of abilities, skills, and talents (Furlong, 2009). In this context, educational choices and transitions play a key role in the distribution of social opportunities (Tarabini & Ingram, 2018; Tarabini, 2022). Students are supposed to make free and well-informed choices aligned with their tastes, abilities, and aspirations. Despite this rhetoric, sociological research has demonstrated how students’ choices are deeply embedded in social dynamics and particularly influenced by the structure of capitals and the working of the habitus (Ball et al., 2002). In Spain, transitions to upper secondary education are the first moment when students are separated into different tracks -academic and vocational-, with substantive differences in the supply, the curriculum, the pedagogy, and the future opportunities and prospects. Based on 68 in-depth interviews with first-year students in the academic and vocational upper secondary tracks we will explore their representation on the way tracking contributes to (re)reproduce social inequality. This will allow us to study the embeddedness of educational selectivity and inequality in individuals’ subjectivities (Nylund et al., 2017).

Ball, S., Maguire, M., Macrae, S. (2000). Choice, pathways and transitions post-16: new youth, new economies in the global city. Falmer Press. Furlong, A. (2009). Revisiting transitional metaphors: reproducing social inequalities under the conditions of late modernity. Journal of Education and Work, 22 (5), 343-353. Nylund, M., Rosvall, P., & Ledman, K (2017). The vocational-academic divide in neoliberal upper-secondary curricula: the Swedish case. Journal of Education Policy. 32 (6), 788-808. Tarabini, A. (2022) (Ed). Educational Transitions and Social Justice: Understanding Upper Secondary School Choices in Urban Contexts. Policy Press. Tarabini, A., Ingram, N. (2018). Educational choices, transitions and aspirations in Europe. Systemic, institutional and subjective challenges. Routledge Vieira, M. M., Pappámikail, L. &; Resende, J. (2013). Forced to deal with the future. Uncertainty and risk in vocational choices among Portuguese secondary school students. The Sociological Review, 61 (4), 745-768.

HEIs around the world are introducing contextualised admissions that is selection procedures not only based on grades, exams or general aptitude tests but including the examination of personal data, ‘personal statements’ and, less often, interviews to evaluate non-academic factors (Bastedo 2021). This trend has notably been driven by policy pressures to reduce social and ethnoracial inequalities in access to HE. As a result, much of the research on this topic has explored whether consideration of these data makes admissions fairer (Boliver et al. 2015) and under which conditions (Bastedo et al. 2018; Boliver and Gorard 2020; Mountford-Zimdars and Moore. 2020). The focus of this presentation is different. Considering the increasing level of competition among disadvantaged and diverse applicants to gain access to selective institutions, it focuses on how they use the requested personal writings to ‘stand out from the crowd’ (Jones 2013) of similar students. In addition to exploring differences on the number of interests and activities mentioned and on students’ level of aspiration and HE plans, we consider two types of qualitative differences. We draw on Phil Brown’s (2000) distinction between three idealtypical principles of social organisation (‘membership’, ‘merit’ and ‘market’) to show the degree to which these students tend to present themselves as similar in their cultural interests, activities and aspirations to traditional elite students or to emphasize their scholastic or non-scholastic merit or to put forwards qualities and ‘talents’ rewarded in job markets (Brown and Hesketh 2004; Author 2023). We also focus on the degree of elaboration of these students’ ‘storytelling’ (Polletta et al. 2011) and the extent to which it highlights their disadvantage or diversity to justify benefiting from a compensatory institutional sponsorship (Grodsky 2007). We examine applications to Sciences Po, a selective French HEI that in 2021 introduced contextualized admissions for all candidates including those from disadvantaged ‘partner’ secondary schools who, since 2001, had been admitted through a special procedure called ‘convention education prioritaire’ (CEP). The latter are nevertheless still evaluated by a different jury, compared among themselves only and ranked in separate admission and waiting lists. Our interpretations are based on the analysis of the personal narratives of 100 candidates (20 ‘traditional’ and 80 CEP with equal proportions in each group of admitted and rejected applicants) out of a total number of more than 10 000 applications to Sciences Po’s Bachelor’s program in 2021, as well as of interviews with evaluators and admission officers.

Bastedo M. 2021. Holistic admissions as a global phenomenon. In H. Eggins et al (Eds.), The Next Decade: Challenges for Global Higher Education. Leiden: Brill. Bastedo M. et al. 2018. What are we talking about when we talk about holistic review. Journal of Higher Education 89: 782-805. Boliver V. and Gorard S. 2020. The use of evidence from research on contextualised admissions to widen access to Scottish universities. In Getting evidence into education: evaluating the routes to policy and practice. London: Routledge, pp. 166-177. Boliver V., Gorard S., Siddiqui N. 2015. Will the use of contextual indicators make UK higher education admissions fairer? Education Sciences 5: 306-322. Brown P. 2000, Globalisation of positional competition, Sociology 34 (4): 633-654. Brown P. and Hesketh A. 2004. The Mismanagement of Talent. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grodsky E., 2007. Compensatory sponsorship in higher education. American Journal of Sociology, 112 (6): 1662-1712. Jones S. 2014. ‘Ensure that you stand out from the crowd': A corpus-based analysis of personal statements according to applicants' school type. In A. Mountford-Zimdars, D. Sabbagh (eds). Fair Access to Higher Education. Chicago: Chicago UP. Polletta F. et al. 2011. The sociology of storytelling. Annual Review of Sociology 37: 109-130.

International research into stratification in and through higher education (HE) emphasises the interconnections between high selectivity within admission processes and stratification of universities, and how these in turn (re)produce societal elites (e.g. Bourdieu and Passeron 1979; Stevens 2009; Karabel 2005). Studies in Scandinavian contexts, emphasised processes of horizontal stratification, (i.e. differential access to study programmes) despite strong discourses around meritocracy and egalitarian structures (e.g. Börjesson et al. 2016; Munk and Thomsen 2018). This research tends to focus on social class reproduction, demonstrating how academic attainment and parents’ socioeconomic status strongly shape access into programmes. Meanwhile, other studies concentrate on how gender shapes HE, in relation to choice of study (e.g Kriesi 2019), as well as the formation of gendered student identities (e.g. Archer and DeWitt 2015). However, such research often focuses on a particular institution or programme, without situating it within the national field. This paper sets out to examine the relationship between gendered horizontal stratification in a national field of HE and the processes of gendering at the intersubjective level of a programme’s study culture. Firstly, the stratified nature of the Danish field of HE is established, considering gender, academic attainment and socioeconomic background. This is done via Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) using register data from Statistics Denmark from 2021 on HE applications. Secondly, the processes of gendering at the highly selective Cognitive Science programme at Aarhus University are examined. The programme is interdisciplinary, ranging across philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence and psychology and there is an overrepresentation of women. Drawing on the MCA and, Bourdieu’s (1998) and Lamont and Molnár’s (2002) work on social and symbolic boundaries, I examine how hierarchies between the disciplines are mirrored and maintained, and how this shapes understandings of the ‘ideal (gendered) student’. To do so, I analyse interviews with 10 cognitive science students, and observations from the first day of induction week. The study sets out to more fully integrate gender into research on stratification and elite HE. Gender, academic merits and socioeconomic class are shown to intersect in the formation of social and symbolic boundaries both at the structural macro level of the field of HE, but also at the cultural micro level of study programmes. This challenges the perception that the academic achievement of women, their growing participation in HE and their presence in elite study programmes (i.e. the feminization thesis), have eliminated gendered barriers in HE.

Archer, L., and J. DeWitt. 2015. “Science Aspirations and Gender Identity; Lessons from the ASPIRES Project.” In Understanding Student Participation and Choice in Science and Technology Education, ed. Dillon, Henriksen, and Ryder, Springer. Börjesson, M., Donald B., T. Dalberg, and I. Lidegran. 2016. “Elite Education in Sweden: A Contradiction in Terms?” In Elite Education: International Perspectives on the Education of Elites and the Shaping of Education Systems, ed. Maxwell and Aggleton. Routledge Bourdieu, P. 1998. State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Standford: Univ. Press. Bourdieu, P., and J.C. Passeron. 1979. The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture. University of Chicago Press. Karabel, J. 2005. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Houghton Mifflin. Kriesi, I. 2019. “Gender Segregation in Education.” In Research Handbook on the Sociology of Education, ed. Becker, Elgar Publishing. Lamont, M., and V. Molnár. 2002. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28 Munk, M.D., and J.P. Thomsen. 2018. “Horizontal Stratification in Access to Danish University Programmes.” Acta Sociologica 61(1) Stevens, M.L. 2009. Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Harvard University Press.