Navigating inequalities and shaping aspirations: The role of supplementary education in low-income immigrant youth's transition to selective secondary school

Research within the geographies of education and related fields has advanced our understanding of how family, school and policy shape young people's educational aspirations, emphasising that these processes often reflect middle-class norms. This paper furthers this debate by examining how young people's aspirations are shaped at Chance4You; a private, non-profit supplementary education programme for low-income immigrant youth that aims to address the social inequalities reproduced at the transition to selective public secondary schools in Zurich, Switzerland. Despite the growing importance of supplementary education, its role in shaping young people's aspirations is underexplored. Using Appadurai's concept of the capacity to aspire and a Bourdieusian sensitivity for social class, the paper analyses data from a six-month ethnography with three ninth-year students (aged 14–15) and their coaches at Chance4You. The analysis revealed that students viewed the programme as enhancing their capacity to aspire, while coaches framed Chance4You's practices in a way that implied parents faced challenges in appropriately managing their children's aspirations. This paper posits that using aspiration as a lens has helped to identify the tension between Chance4You's efforts to counter inequalities created by systemic privilege at this transition and the programme's inherent dependencies on the hegemony shaped by the middle-class norms embedded in the transitions' admissions process.