Concerns have been raised internationally about whether alternative learning programmes are producing low-skilled labourers for rapidly disappearing twenty-first-century jobs. Researchers claim that learners in alternative programmes are more at risk due to the focus on low-level vocational and basic skill attainment, with a lack of formal academic pathways available to them. This article questions whether and in what ways an alternative learning programme supports young people to achieve successful transitions to sustainable social mobility for informed citizenship through a holistic approach to learning; or if class stratification is being re/enforced through systems' accountability discourses. Hesitant hopes in alternative learning are explored through an ethnographic study of one alternative learning programme across five sites in regional Australia. Contextually, not-forprofit community agencies provide physical infrastructures as well as youth workers and volunteers, while a publicly funded School of Distance Education provides teacher oversight of the curriculum. Findings suggest that the theme of 'hesitant hope' is constructed through the analysis of the discourses of supporting wellbeing, life skill development and academic learning. These discourses facilitate further analysis of the concept of social mobility, suggesting a conceptual starting point for an engaging critique of the differing perspectives on how support could be providing these marginalised young people with a sense of hope for a socially mobile future.

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The rigid architectures inherent within formal schooling continue to influence young people’s disengagement from education. Globally and locally, policy makers have proposed education reform and innovation, politicians have legislated for education change, yet still the problem of disengagement remains. This paper investigates one community’s effort to support the reengagement in learning of young people aged 15–18 years in regional Australia through a flexible, online, community-based education program. Theoretically, this study used critical discourse as a way in to expose so as to explain dimensions of power and ideological positions as to what counts as learning. Critical ethnography as a methodology extended critical discourse’s explanatory authority to a naming of spatial and social architectures and their impact on the young people’s lives. Discourses of a braided curriculum, structural conviviality and emotional well-being were found to reduce some barriers to reengagement in learning; develop a shared, multi-disciplinary approach to reengagement; and be inclusive of young people’s emotional well-being as central to the reengagement process. At this time of pandemic induced online learning as the new normal on a global scale, young people who are already vulnerable due to individual, school, and socio-cultural marginalising conditions deserve research processes with outcomes valorising their voices and those who work with them.

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