Conference Agenda

The transition from primary school to secondary school is a stressful situation for children and their parents (Karagiannopoulou 1999, Storck 2015). In the german federal state Baden-Württemberg, in addition to the teacher's assessment and performance tests, the parents' wishes are also decisive in determining the type of secondary school their child will attend (KM 2025). Since the choice of secondary school has a significant influence on a child's future life (career choice, academic studies, etc.), this decision is very important for families (Clausen 2006).

When choosing a secondary school, parents are expected to choose the type of school for their child for which they have high expectations of success, taking into account the costs involved (Jurczok 2019, Junkmann et al. 2010, Baumert et al. 2011). One indicator of potential success is previous performance (Junkmann et al. 2010, Jurczok 2019), which parents learn about through the performance feedback practices of the respective primary school. In addition, the decision is influenced by other factors, such as the educational background of the parents (Büchner and Koch 2002). Thus, in addition to the performance of schoolchildren, there are many other factors that influence the decision on the type of secondary school (Clausen 2006, Roos and Schöler 2013, Baumert et al. 2011).

In Baden-Württemberg, 35 primary schools are currently participating in a pilot project entitled ‘Learning-promoting performance feedback in primary schools’. As part of the pilot project, no numerical grades are given. Instead, alternative forms of performance feedback are used, such as competency grids, grid reports and learning development discussions. The pilot project is not being implemented at 40 primary schools, which therefore serve as a comparison group.

After primary school, secondary school in Baden-Württemberg begins in the fifth grade. The evaluative monitoring of the school trial provides an opportunity to consider parents' thoughts on the transition to secondary school, given that the pilot project has fundamentally changed one of the factors that is important for their decision (the form of performance feedback). Since the decision on the type of secondary school is essential for the child's further educational path (Dumont et al. 2014), the evaluation also provides insight into a previously under-examined aspect of the discussion about schools without grades – the transition to secondary school and the concerns and fears associated with this transition. These considerations give rise to the following research questions:

1) Are there differences in the reasons for choosing a school between parents whose children attend a model school with alternative assessment and feedback practices and parents whose children attend a comparison school?

2) Do parents' concerns about the transition to school differ between model and comparison schools?

This study expands our understanding of how parents negotiate with children around educational opportunities and the role of these negotiations in parents' opportunity hoarding practices. Opportunity hoarding is a key mechanism of educational reproduction, focusing on the actions and practices of socially and economically advantaged parents to place their children in special programs and secure resources (Posey-Maddox et al., 2025).

The literature on parents' opportunity hoarding focuses extensively on parents' race and class (Diamond & Lewis, 2022; Lewis & Diamond, 2015) and their intersection with educational policies (Roda & Wells, 2013; Sattin-Bajaj & Roda, 2020; Smyth, 2018). Scholars have documented how privileged parents hire consultants to screen the best schools and programs and prepare their children for admission tests (Sattin-Bajaj & Roda, 2020). They visit potential schools and gather information from staff and other parents(Roda & Wells, 2013). They confront school staff and administrators to enroll their children in Advanced Placement programs, even if their children do not meet selection criteria (Lewis & Diamond, 2015). Parents also make life-changing decisions, such as moving close to preferred schools to secure advantages for their children (Sattin-Bajaj & Roda, 2020). However, existing research pays considerably less attention to how parents negotiate with children regarding these educational opportunities and how these negotiations shape families' decisions and practices. This paper highlights how children's cooperation or lack thereof shapes parents' opportunity hoarding and how parents utilize cultural and economic capital to influence their children into hoarding available opportunities.

While the literature on opportunity hoarding focuses primarily on parents' dispositions and practices, it focuses less on children's part of the process. Yet children in modern societies are socialized through democratic ideology, including openness to hearing and considering their thoughts and preferences (Lareau, 2003; Nelson, 2010), as well as through negotiations (Klimor Maman et al., 2024). Research shows that children actively participate in school choice processes (Hegna & Smette, 2017; Mandic et al., 2018; Phillippo et al., 2021) by being exposed to adult discussions and engaging in peer conversations about educational options (Reay & Lucey, 2000). Similarly, middle-class students compare their achievements with peers' when making informed decisions about higher education, while considering parental perspectives (Brooks, 2003).

However, middle-class parents typically pre-screen schools based on their criteria and use persuasion or bribery to minimize conflict, allowing children input mainly on peripheral matters such as friends, commuting, and sports facilities rather than on core schooling decisions (Reay & Ball, 1998). While research shows that middle-class educational decisions involve both parents and children, we know remarkably little about how they negotiate during opportunity-hoarding processes.

This study addresses this gap by examining parent-child negotiations during enrollment in a selective STEM program in Israel. We draw on Tilly's (2009) concept of opportunity hoarding as a mechanism underlying long-lasting patterns of group-based inequality in life chances, explaining how bounded social categories sustain crucial resource differences over time. When new categories of differentiation emerge, socially privileged groups take advantage of them and hoard the opportunities they afford. Privileged parents have clear expectations for a life course that includes higher education. When a hierarchy of educational choice options is available in a competitive system with a limited number of seats, opportunity hoarding is heightened because advantaged families feel compelled to give their children the "best" education possible (Posey-Maddox et al., 2025).

Our research questions are: How do parents and children negotiate enrollment in selective educational programs? What negotiation strategies do parents employ to encourage their children's participation? How do these negotiations shape opportunity hoarding practices?

Transitions during one’s life course are increasingly considered as a research subject in educational research (Jindal-Snape et al., 2020). The transition from primary to secondary school represents an example that might become critical to the whole educational biography and, therefore, to both children and their parents (Benner, 2011). In particular, the transition from primary to secondary school can be seen as a source of parental vulnerability. In the case of Berlin (Germany) parents must select “preferred schools” for their children, although they cannot influence whether their preference is granted – rather, they depend on administrative decisions. In such a complex situations, trust is seen as a social mechanism allows to remain capable of acting (Luhmann, 2014). In this regard, parental experiences during their own school time potentially emerge as a biographical reference point to normative expectations about institutional trustworthiness of schools and interpersonal trustworthiness of teachers and pedagogical professionals.

Against this background, the proposal deals with the complex relationship between parental experiences during their own school time, their normative expectations about institutional trustworthiness of their children’s school and the perceived trustworthiness of teachers and other pedagogical professionals. Based on episodic interviews (Flick et al., 2011) with 41 parents whose child had to pass over from primary to secondary school, parents talked about their attitudes towards trust to school and teachers as well as their subjective perception of the transition process. Key research questions include:

a) How do parents refer to experiences during their own school time at the school transition of their children?

b) In what ways are normative expectations about schools’ and school professionals’ trustworthiness based on biographical experiences of parents?

The individual capacity of biographical reflection is characterized by the concept of ‘biographicality’ by Alheit and Dausien (Alheit, 1996; Dausien, 2011; West et al., 2007). During the interaction with other subjects or with institutional structures people resort to existing interpretation patterns as well as knowledge horizons – with other words they do biographical work (Dausien, 2011). In the biographical processing of experiences and the construction of identity people strive to retain a feeling of individual meaningfulness and autonomy regarding the creation of their own life course (Alheit, 1996; Grimmig, 2022).

The educational relationship with parents is one of the central challenges of pedagogical professionalism for teachers (Gartmeier et al., 2017). In this connection, the importance of trusting parent-school relationships has been emphasized for several years (Adams et al., 2009). A widely cited definition of interpersonal trust is the idea of one’s willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another party (Dietz, 2011; Mayer et al., 1995). Besides dispositional factors of a trustor (Alarcon et al., 2018), the willingness to be vulnerable to another party seems to be predominantly driven by facets of perceived trustworthiness of a potential trustee which include competence, benevolence and integrity as well as honesty, reliability and openness (Hoy & Tschannen-Moran, 1999; Mayer et al., 1995).