Conference Agenda

We ask why disorder is something to be eliminated and how disorder is marginalised in the everyday life of the Finnish primary school. We do not ask why or how order is maintained at the expense of disorder, as this would direct our gaze solely towards order itself. Order in the Finnish comprehensive school has been extensively studied, whereas disorder has repeatedly remained in the shadows.

We approach order and disorder in the Finnish comprehensive school as social and societal constructions that would not exist without being actively produced. In this sense, we are not referring to physical disorder or entropy, which may also be visible in school buildings, for instance in the rusting of structures. Nor do we address order and disorder as questions of world order or state borders (see, for example, The British Academy’s Global (Dis)order project). Instead, in this theoretical paper, we examine order and disorder as social, societal, and structural questions of power within the school institution and the comprehensive school.

Order is produced through acts and practices aimed at governance, governability, and control. We do not refer to all forms of order, as order is also contextual and subjective; rather, we focus here on structural order and the oppressive outcomes it produces in primary school. Disorder, in turn, is identified or named as that which is perceived as requiring governance and control, or as that which is excluded from normative orders. In this way, order and disorder appear as unfinished, continuously shaped phenomena that are locally and situationally produced.

Historically, the Finnish primary school has been organised through the construction of order and by invoking the need to avoid disorder. In school practices, order functions as an underlying objective: pupils are expected to behave according to instructions and rules, the structure of the school day and the architecture of the school building enable the pursuit of order, and education aims to produce and reproduce order in society. Order becomes visible in behaviour, in national and international policy documents, in entrenched practices, and in the structures of the school institution. Disorder is often presented as the opposite of order. Because the school institution is oriented towards order, disorder appears as something to be avoided and controlled.

Research question: Why does grade retention persist as an educational intervention in many European educational systems, despite overwhelming evidence of its ineffectiveness and harmful psychosocial consequences, and what functions beyond academic remediation does it serve?

Objective: Grade retention is consistently identified as an ineffective practice with high opportunity costs and harmful behavioral and psychosocial consequences (Goos et al., 2021; Valbuena et al., 2021). It is also one of the strongest predictors of dropping out of secondary education without qualifications, with ethnic minorities and socioeconomically disadvantaged students being up to twice as likely to repeat a grade. Hence, grade retention directly reproduces social inequality. Despite these findings, it remains a common practice in many European countries, creating a paradox of persistence: the policy is firmly embedded in educational systems worldwide despite clear evidence against its efficacy. This theoretical paper aims to reconceptualize grade retention not merely as an intervention for struggling students but also as a mechanism of symbolic violence and biopolitical control that enforces conformity, regulates behavior, and reproduces social hierarchies.

Theoretical framework: Although grade retention has been widely studied, the field remains under-theorized. Current research primarily focuses on its (in)effectiveness and on how overoptimistic teacher beliefs contribute to its continued use. This paper integrates critical sociological perspectives, drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) and Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and disciplinary power (Foucault, 1977; 1982). These frameworks are applied to reinterpret empirical findings, highlighting how retention legitimizes hierarchies under the guise of meritocracy and academic support. The study also underscores how retention targets disadvantaged student populations and enforces obedience and social stratification.

Symbolic violence explains how retention labels students as academically deficient while presenting the policy as fair or meritocratic, masking structural inequities. In addition, it is a form of domination where culturally arbitrary norms are imposed as natural. Biopolitical control frames retention as a subtle form of surveillance and regulation that shapes student behavior, internalizes compliance, and enforces anticipatory obedience. Together, these frameworks reveal retention as a sociopolitical instrument embedded in systemic power structures rather than as an isolated pedagogical intervention. The combination of symbolic violence and biopolitical control leads students to internalize social hierarchies and normalize their marginalization. Consequences include a diminished academic self-concept, reduced sense of school belonging, and an increased likelihood of academic disengagement.

This approach addresses a critical gap in retention research: while learning outcomes, psychosocial effects, and sociodemographic disparities have been extensively studied, the sociopolitical functions of retention remain underexplored. Historically, retention emerged alongside universal education as a means of instilling obedience and social order (Paglayan, 2024). Contemporary discourse on education, rooted in the human capital paradigm, however, obscures this function by framing retention solely as an intervention that aims to increase academic performance.

Outline: The outline of the theoretical section is as following: a) a review of empirical evidence showing that grade retention rarely improves academic outcomes and disproportionately affects socioeconomically disadvantaged and ethnic minority students; b) a critical analysis of retention as a form of symbolic violence; labelling students, fostering self-elimination, and legitimizing inequalities under a meritocratic discourse; c) a conceptualization of retention as a disciplinary mechanism that promotes conformity, obedience, and anticipatory self-regulation; and d) reframing retention as a biopolitical tool that regulates student populations, reproduces social hierarchies and shapes students’ identities.

In many countries, the question of who ought to have access to higher education is a vexed one, for politicians and educational scholars alike. In England, successive governments since the 1960s have followed the principle set out in Lionel Robbins’s 1963 report on the expansion of the higher education sector: that university degrees should be available to ‘all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so’ (Robbins et al., 1963: p. 8). While there have always been dissenters from that principle (and it is of course vague enough to be put into action in various, even contradictory, ways), it remained the governmental consensus until perhaps fifteen years ago. But in recent times, prime ministers have begun to question the principle’s wisdom (for the most recent iteration, see Starmer, 2025). Strikingly, a key plank in this dissent has been a challenge to the assumed relationship between increasing university attendance and social mobility: the idea that more people going to university will make society fairer.

But sociologists of education have been saying for decades that sending more people to university does not make society fairer. As positional conflict theorists argue, in a society where higher education is framed as a private good allowing individuals to compete in the job market, sending more people to university tends to have inflationary effects (Collins, 1979; Brown et al. 2011, 2015). If university attendance is a ‘valuable but rationed resource’ (Boliver and Powell, 2021: p. 9), then loosening the tightness of its rationing will tend also to fray its value. As Bourdieusians and others have shown, when the mere possession of an undergraduate degree no longer makes them competitive on the job market, then the relatively privileged in society will find other ways of signalling distinction from the rest: degrees from more prestigious universities or in more highly valued subjects; the pursuit of internships and extra-curricular activities; progression onto post-graduate courses (Burke, 2015; Bathmaker, Ingram, Abrahams, Hoare, Waller and Bradley 2016). Tholen (2017) refers to this as symbolic closure: when access to the rationed resource itself is opened up to more people, the elite continue to distinguish themselves through their capacity to define value beyond the mere having or not of this or that resource.

According to this critical sociological literature, then, providing access to higher education for more people, without changing anything else about our society (its competitiveness, its focus on rivalrous goods, its way of distributing jobs and incomes) will not make society fairer. Yet taking the opposite tack, and limiting university attendance, will continue to mean that the most privileged are the ones that access it. We are stuck in a situation where both increasing access and limiting access will reproduce rather than transform inequality.

The way of framing the relationship between university attendance and fairness above assumes that we are in the presence of a quantitative problem. How many people should go to university? Should it be more, or less, than it is now? This paper argues that the framing of the problem quantitatively misses part of the point, and leaves us unable to answer the question of the relationship between university access and fairness fully. We need to look somewhere else.