Much research has already been done on the aspirations of young people in lower (vocational) education. As a result, we have learnt more about why students may have high or low aspirations, and to what end their aspirations may lead them. However, there are still some crucial elements missing from the existing academic framework around pupils' aspirations, which deals with the realisation of pupils' ambitions. Through the study of ethnographic cases of native Dutch white girls in a lower vocational school, voicing their aspirations, two new concepts will be introduced: reasons and resources. With these two additions, it is hoped that this article will contribute to the existing academic literature on pupils' ambitions, and it also endeavours to provide useful input for school staff to help them deal with the complexity of the formation and realisation of pupils' aspirations in vocational schools.

Purpose This article explores how newly-arrived children with a refugee background describe their everyday lives in the Netherlands, with a focus on how they perceive their peer relations and the broader social climate in the host country. Methods In this case study, focus groups were conducted with 46 Syrian-born children with a refugee background, ranging between the ages of 8 to 17 years old. All participants have a temporary residence permit and live in Rotterdam together with (part of) their family. A board game was developed as a research tool to stimulate children to share their perspectives on their friends and experiences with inclusion and exclusion. Results An important finding is that all of the children have friends in the Netherlands. The majority of their friends have an Arab background, and different reasons for this composition are discussed. Furthermore, although all of the children expressed that they feel welcome in Dutch society, they had also encountered exclusion, which generates emotional responses. Conclusion Using a theoretical boundary perspective, we show that children are involuntarily subjected to symbolic boundary drawing by others, while taking part in boundary work themselves too. Within the domains of the children’s social networks and the broader social climate in the Netherlands, we further examined the relations between symbolic and social boundaries.

Much research on the role of race in education focuses on young people with a migrant background. The racial experiences of 'white' children are under-researched, especially in the Netherlands. This article examines whether 'white' Dutch working-class students experience white privilege and if so, how they make use of it as a 'resource' in their school settings. Most studies on 'white' workingclass students do not take white privilege into account, and most work on white privilege has inadequately disentangled the impacts of race and social class. The ethnographic findings from a Dutch senior vocational school where the vast majority of students are of colour suggest that the whiteness of working-class 'white' Dutch students may or may not act as a form of white privilege, depending on their interaction with their middle-class teachers. Due to its intersection with social class, white privilege in this setting appeared to be conditional upon meeting teachers' expectations.

In this study, we focus on the role of Dutch Level 2 senior vocational training in care work in relation to the prospects and options it provides for students who follow this programme. Similar to the 'care girls' from previous studies our participants are young women from lower-class backgrounds who aspire to various jobs in the care sector, but are steered away from their original aspirations by their vocational training programme. The major difference between this research and previous studies is that we examine the Dutch institutional and broader structural context of care work. In the Netherlands, there is a lack of job opportunities for Level 2 graduates. This enables us to study the impact of limited job opportunities in the making of 'care girls'. We explore whether this situation results in the reproduction of inequalities (and if so, how), or whether it represents a window of opportunity through which these girls can escape from their initial cycle of disadvantage if their goal of becoming a 'care girl' does not materialise.

This chapter addresses the experiences and realities of young people who are studying in increasingly “superdiverse” educational institutions. It first provides a brief overview of the workings of superdiversity in the field of education, and then presents two case studies from two majority-minority cities in the Netherlands to illustrate how the concept of superdiversity can be used to overcome the homogenizing perspective that lumps students with various characteristics into one uniform category of “ethnic other”. Although the cities and the schools can be described demographically as ethnically “hyperdiverse,” the multiplicity of characteristics in the research population begs to go beyond the ethnic lens to understand the comparable experiences young people from varying backgrounds face in their pathways through the education system.