The majority of the ethnographic study took place in the Randstad in the Netherlands. The Randstad is a metropolitan region consisting of the Netherlands’ four largest cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht) and the surrounding areas. It has a population of more than seven million people. Within this area I chose two schools that fitted within my study’s empirical and theoretical design. Holland
High (pseudonym) is a comprehensive public secondary-
level school offering all Dutch educational tracks from pre- vocational to pre-academic education. This inner-city school has several buildings in and around a large city in the Randstad. It is common in the Netherlands for different educational tracks within comprehensive schools to be housed in separate buildings. Although they are part of the same comprehensive school, these often physically segregated buildings each have their own management and staff tailored to the pupils they serve. I focused on the school building housing the bottom two educational levels: basic and advanced pre-vocational secondary education (known as VMBO Basis and VMBO Kader in Dutch). The second school in my ethnographic research was Randstad School (pseudonym), a large regional senior vocational education centre (MBO) that provides numerous lower and middle vocational and adult education programmes for students over the age of sixteen. My study centres on the MBO level 2 Social and Health Care programme, which primarily trains female students in aged-care. The third and last school in my study was a large state-funded comprehensive secondary school located in a deprived area in the northeast of England. This English school was chosen as a
contrast to the Dutch schools in order to better understand how national institutional arrangements in education determine education and occupational opportunities. All three schools were carefully selected from a range of schools in the Reducing Early School Leaving in Europe (RESL.eu) project that funded my doctoral study. For the RESL.eu project both quantitative and qualitative data were collected in nine European countries, including the Netherlands. Most of this data collection took place in schools with young people at risk of early school leaving. In the Dutch context these are predominantly lower and middle vocational secondary schools (VBMO and MBO) as dropout rates peak in the first year after the compulsory transition from VMBO to MBO (Elffers, 2011). Within the RESL.eu project I was responsible for data collection (both quantitative and qualitative) in the Netherlands. To do so, I visited over thirty Dutch VMBO and MBO school locations in the Randstad, which provided me with a detailed overview of these schools. In order to follow the challenging educational transition in the Dutch lower vocational track I selected both a VMBO and a MBO school. Ideally, I would have liked to have followed the same students from VMBO to MBO, but given the limited time available for this doctoral study, this was not practically feasible. I therefore carefully selected a VMBO school and MBO school with comparable student populations and related study programmes and conducted the ethnographic study simultaneously in both schools.
I first gained access to the selected schools during the presentation of the first results of the RESL.eu survey data. Several school principals invited me to stay in their schools for a longer period, instead of only “taking a one-off questionnaire”. As an educated anthropologist, it was my intention to carry out an ethnographic study, something that depends on the full co-operation and support of those on the site. Troman, who conducted his study in British primary schools, explained a similar process as follows: “The selection of a case
to research was more a matter of the school choosing me, than me choosing the school” (Troman, 2002, p. 110). In my case,
it was an appreciated coincidence that the school principals of the carefully chosen schools were among those who had invited me to stay in their schools for a longer period. The empirical chapters, chapters three to six, also discuss specific methodological elements, such as full descriptions of the three schools under study.
I will now move on to elaborate when, with whom and how the data were collected. The data collection consists of primary data, including participation observation, biographical interviews and focus group discussions and secondary data, such as national and local education policies, school documents and students’ school records. In spring 2014, I thus visited over thirty Dutch vocational schools to conduct the RESL.eu questionnaires. From September 2014 to May 2015, I engaged in extensive participant observation and conducted biographical interviews simultaneously in two Dutch schools. This also included fieldwork at the various internship places that are a compulsory part of senior vocational training. From May to July 2015, I conducted fieldwork at a British school that had been identified through the RESL.eu survey project by our British partner at Middlesex University. Two years later, between September 2016 and February 2017, follow-up interviews were held with all the key research participants. Finally, from May 2017 until February 2018, I re-visited the same Dutch schools on a monthly basis and observed new school classes with the same teachers in order to validate my initial data.
The key research participants in my ethnographic study are ‘white’ Dutch girls with low-educated parents in multi- racial lower vocational schools. During the fieldwork, I did not inform either the schools or the participants that I was only studying ‘white’ Dutch female students. The literature has suggested that it would be methodologically prudent
not to inform the students that the research specifically involved a subset, as it might run the risk of sabotage from the other students, due to jealousy or other barriers. Even though only ‘white’ Dutch female students with low-educated parents were studied, I also gathered data on their peers and fellow classmates from other racial and/or ethnic and gender backgrounds. At the time of the study, there were ten ‘white’ Dutch female pupils out of a total of one hundred pupils in the senior year at Holland High, divided over several lower vocational programmes and classes. These ten ‘white’ Dutch girls all had low-educated parents and were between fifteen and seventeen years old. I also selected ten British counterparts: ‘white’ female learners of ‘white’ British descent who were receiving Free School Meals. The Free School Meal is an indicator of parents with a low income and low level of education. The British girls were in Key Stage four, Year ten, and were fifteen years of age. The Randstad School also had around one hundred students, sixteen of whom were ‘white’ female students of Dutch descent, all with low-educated parents. In all three schools, I conducted intense participant observation, which is a critical part of an ethnographic study (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994). I followed my key research participants around and documented their ordinary and sometimes extraordinary daily life at school. I observed them interacting with their peers and teachers during classes. I also participated and observed during school breaks, activities in the school cafeteria, examinations, staff meetings, intake interviews, internship placements and graduation celebrations. I conducted biographical interviews and follow-up interviews with the 36 key research participants. Biographic interviews are a powerful tool for exploring the relationship between agency and structure, the ways in which contexts and situations shape human agency and how human beings act upon and shape the world around them (Wengraf, 2001). I also conducted 16 informal interviews with their parents. At each school, I held
three focus group discussions: two with six to eight classmates each and one with six to ten school staff, including teachers, a school social worker or the school nurse, the study career counsellor and a school administrator. During both the interviews and the focus group discussions, detailed themes were not imposed beforehand but were generated from data using grounded theory (Glaser, 1998). Although I entered the field with a broad interest in students’ aspirations guided by the fieldwork data, other issues, such as race and ethnicity, appeared to be of significant importance for my key research participants both in behaviour and expressions. Individual interviews and focus group discussions lasted between 50 and 120 minutes. These were recorded and fully transcribed in the original languages. The quotes were written in full to preserve their meaning and when quoted I translated them from Dutch to English.