Conference Agenda

Right-wing populist and liberal political figures internationally have recurrently claimed that freedom of speech is under threat from progressive student movements in higher education contexts (Titley 2020; Ward 2022). In recent years, white Christian nationalist movements internationally have manufactured campaigns alleging the need to protect children various from anti-racist and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) inclusive education, with little regard for young people’s freedom of speech (Pollock et al. 2022; Estellés et al. 2023; Neumann and Rudnicki 2025). While attempts to ban such teaching in schools by alleged ‘free speech’ defenders are not new (Bonnett and Carrington 1996), claims about the alleged dangers of CRT and so-called ‘gender ideology’ in schools have been remarkably impactful. They have led for example, to bans on CRT in several US states, and a US federal order to defund alleged ‘radical indoctrination’ programmes (Sutton et al. 2025; World Population Review 2026).

This paper presents an empirical analysis and conceptualisation of the actual conditions of ‘free’ speech and (self-)censorship on race equality issues for youth across different urban secondary schools in England, where bans on CRT and teaching about gender identity education have been threatened, but not legally enforced (Gillborn 2024; Sutton et al. 2025). The literature has long demonstrated the disciplining of racially minoritised youth expression in schools, and of critical youth voices more generally (Gillborn 1990; Cunningham and Lavalette 2016). However, it has generally not offered a spatially focused empirical account of the differing conditions of speech on race across schools – what is speakable, who is free to express themselves, and where.

The paper presents an analysis of in-depth case studies (including lesson observations, teacher interviews, youth focus groups and photovoice activities) across four secondary/high schools in Birmingham and London, UK conducted over 18 months. London and Birmingham are two of the four English cities out of 55 cities overall whose population is not majority (more than 50%) white British (Harris 2024). Expanding Lipsitz's (2011) theorisation of a white spatial imaginary, I argue that spatial dynamics of race and class play a key role in constructing racially minoritised youth in different school communities as more or less fit or unfit for speech on race and faith equality issues.

The paper offers a novel account of the (un)availability of reflexive anti-racist speech and impact available to minoritised urban youth, and their expectations that their school will critically engage race and intersecting social justice issues. Drawing on Soja's (1996) theory of space as represented, material and lived, I contend that spatial inequalities arise both in the ways different school communities are represented as more or less of a political threat (e.g. to ‘British values’), and in the differing degree of material space that minoritised youth are afforded to safely express themselves, and be persuaded it will make a difference. In terms of youths' lived experience of school spaces, I demonstrate how race and class inequalities arise in the extent to which youth view race talk in schools as worthwhile. Dynamics of both race and class play out in variety of forms of youth speech and silencing in each context, including forms of (a) youth self-censorship (e.g. due to fear of being judged or disciplined, or feeling one needs to have a ’thick skin’), (b) official silencing (e.g. on specific political issues like Israel-Palestine), (c) the production of ‘good’ youth attachments to schools that are ambivalent about, avoidant, or absent of race speech, and (d) ‘voiceless’ (embodied, and symbolic) forms of race expression.

There is currently an abundance of literature analysing the school pathways and results of students with foreign ancestry in European host societies. Most studies compare immigrant (or foreign) and native students, concluding that the former come from generally more disadvantaged social backgrounds and lead school trajectories that are more marked by school failure (Ferrara, 2023; Gabrielli et al., 2021). However, a consensus on how to name and identify these students is yet to be reached. This precludes the accumulation of reliable knowledge about these populations, while also perpetuating the use of dated and inadequate classification frameworks among decision-makers and social scientists alike (Cândido & Seabra, 2023). Although there is no such thing as a perfect classification system, migration and educational researchers should be particularly mindful of the ethical and empirical implications of the criteria used to ‘label’ the subjects they study, given their heightened vulnerability as both children and national or ethnic minorities (Mugge & van der Haar, 2016; Bonnett & Carrington, 2000).

Research conducted in Portugal showed how focusing on citizenship to identify students with foreign ancestry warps our portrait of these populations. Compared to those with an immigrant background (i.e., whose parents were born in another country), foreign students are less numerous, come from families with lower educational levels, and have worse academic results (Seabra et al., 2023; Seabra & Cândido, 2022). This leads to a constant underestimation of the global contingent of students with foreign ancestry in both official statistics and scientific research, while also contributing to a homogenising, negative portrait of their social origins and school pathways. There is, however, a need to update these studies, since Portugal is among the European countries who experienced an expressive boom in immigration in the last few years, having over 137 thousand permanent migrants residing in the country in 2024 – an increase of 23% since 2019 (OECD, 2025).

The rapid pace of this change, which happened concurrently to the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, poses pressing challenges to the national educational system for the promotion of inclusive education and of equal opportunities to learn. Because most immigration to Portugal used to be from other Portuguese-speaking countries, the diversification of national origins has resulted in a lack of sufficient resources and policy responses to adequately deal with the increase in linguistic diversity in schools (Oliveira, 2024). Another change was in the geographical location of immigrants: whilst previously concentrated in and around urban centres, there is now evidence of growing dissemination throughout the territory of particular diasporas, meaning many schools are welcoming significant contingents of immigrant students for the first time (Seabra et al., 2023). Finally, the dynamic nature of immigration flows means more pupils are arriving during the school year, making it difficult for schools to ensure a proper social and academic integration and making these students more vulnerable to academic failure.

Given the ubiquitous presence of this phenomenon in the country, an extensive analysis is needed to provide a cross-cutting assessment of the current state of equal educational opportunities for foreign ancestry students in Portugal. Hence, this paper analyses the evolution of foreign citizenship and immigrant origin students in the Portuguese school system between 2018/19 and 2022/23. Specifically, we seek to understand whether the considerable rise in their global contingent was also accompanied by a change (i) in their social profile and (ii) in their academic results.

Literature on classroom composition has established that choices concerning the distribution of students within the same school have significant implications for learning opportunities, pedagogical dynamics, and ultimately academic results. Concentrating students from disadvantaged social origins, with an immigrant background or a history of academic underachievement in the same classroom, for instance, is known to worsen academic performance (Dewulf et al., 2017; Rjosk, 2014). This happens due to more than a simple aggregated effect. Research shows that teachers usually adapt teaching methods and curriculum contents to the predominant social groups in the classroom, effectively teaching to the majority of students (Thrupp, 1999). Hence, teacher expectations are crucial to understand the impacts of student grouping: if a classroom is perceived to be mainly composed of students who lack the ‘ability’ to succeed in school, teachers will tend to teach a less demanding curriculum and mobilize less instructive methods for teaching, bringing down academic results (Dewulf et al., 2020; Boone et al., 2018; Rjosk et al., 2014). As some argue, a significant amount of ‘ability groupings’ are academically heterogenous classrooms, whose students were grouped together because their shared social or ethnic backgrounds lead them to be perceived as having the same academic ability (Connolly et al., 2019).

Interestingly, findings on heterogeneous classrooms are mixed. While some studies support the notion that mixed-ability grouping helps failing students and does not harm the progress of other students (Duru-Bellat & Mingat, 1998), others find that these classrooms are more susceptible to strategies of educational triage in the face of school accountability pressures, which end up transferring pedagogical resources from students at risk to those perceived to be ‘salvageable’ (Bradbury et al., 2021). Such inconsistencies in the literature point towards the classroom composition problem not being reducible to individual teacher perceptions or to a social engineering problem. Changing the composition of a classroom is not enough to change the way school agents behave in the face of diversity, in part, because of issues that are intrinsic to teachers’ position as intermediary agents of cultural domination and social reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970). This role and the functions it entails leads them to struggle with teaching approaches that are more suitable to respond to diverse classrooms in a way that promotes inclusivity (Tomlinson, 2004; Boone et al., 2018).

This calls for a need to consider teacher beliefs and rationalities in the context of the broader school environment, organizational culture and educational policies. Specifically, school mix has been shown to impact teacher beliefs, practices, and the broader organizational culture of the school (Thrupp, 1999). However, its impacts on how teachers think about, organize, and teach their classrooms is an underdeveloped issue in the literature. Do teachers in more diverse schools also favour more diverse classrooms? Are they more or less likely to adopt differentiated teaching methods? How important is the school’s organizational culture in explaining different levels of adherence to mixed classroom composition and differentiated teaching?

This paper proposes to answer these questions through a mixed-methods doctoral study conducted in the Lisbon area, Portugal (funding by FCT, ref.: SRFH/BD/135970/2018). Portugal is a valuable case study, since not much is known about processes of classroom formation in Southern Europe – who differs from Western Europe in relevant educational policies. ‘Ability grouping’, for instance, is an extra-legal practice in Portugal, while grade repetition is still expressive. Additionally, most state schools are organized in ‘clusters’ that comprise several levels of education. Hence, school transitions at the end of primary education – where students move to another level and change schools for the first time – play a major role in classroom formation.

Besides promoting success in their studies, perceiving study engagement also promotes psychological and social well-being in other areas of life (Wang & Fredricks, 2014) and later engagement in society as an adult (Upadyaya & Salmela-Aro, 2013). Study engagement is defined in this research in terms of energy, dedication and absorption to studies (Salmela-Aro & Upadyaya, 2012). Accordingly, study engagement is crucial not just for success in schoolwork but also for success across the life course. However, study engagement has been found to decrease even in primary school (Salmela-Aro et al., 2016). Accordingly, a better understanding of the determinants of study engagement are needed to create school environments that enhance such experiences.

Social support for studies from teachers, peers and guardians each play an important and distinctive role in promoting students’ study engagement process (Rautanen, 2025; Vollet, 2017). However, previous research has mainly explored support from teachers, peers and guardians separately although there are interrelations between support from different sources (Ertesvåg et al., 2024; Dempsey et al., 2024; Rautanen, 2025). Moreover, previous research has mainly studied social support as a resource for study engagement, although there is tentative evidence that the interrelation is bidirectional (Nurmi & Kiuru, 2015). Social support from teachers has been found to play a particularly important role in students’ engagement in studies. Hence, teachers’ ability to support their pupils is vital. However, extant research that examines how teachers’ resources and contextual factors relate to the support that students perceive from teachers is sparse.

This research combines the key results of three part-studies that constitute a PhD dissertation and presents the main idea of a postdoctoral research building on the dissertation. The aim of the doctoral dissertation was to examine social support for studies in Finnish primary schools as a relational system and the relations this support has with students’ perceived study engagement. The relational social support system in primary schools includes students’ perceived social support for their studies from teachers, peers and guardians, as well as the professional support that teachers perceive from colleagues. The teacher’s perceived resources are studied as predictors of the emotional and informational support students perceive from the teacher (Bakker et al., 2007; Cipriano et al., 2019). However, social support is a dynamic interaction process between the student and the teacher in which both have an active role (House, 1981). Thus, besides the teacher’s abilities to provide support, also the student’s willingness and ability to perceive and utilize the available support determine the quality of the interaction. The reciprocal interrelations between the student’s perceived emotions and attitudes towards studying (i.e. study engagement) and perceived support for studying from teachers, peers and guardians are studied. Gender differences in the perceived support from teachers, peers and guardians and study engagement are also studied.

The aim of the postdoctoral research is to create understanding of student’s perceived social support for schoolwork from teachers, peers and guardians as a dynamic system and the relations this support has with students’ study engagement in Finnish, Norwegian and English primary schools. The PhD theses focused only on Finnish primary schools that represent a specific kind of version of the Nordic Educational Model (Blossing et al., 2014; Tröhler, 2023). The role primary schools have within a society and the structures of the educational system influence the roles social support from teachers, peers and guardians have in supporting primary school students’ engagement to their studies. However, international comparisons of the dynamics of social support for studies and the relations this support has with students’ study engagement have not been done before.