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The poorest learners, living in the poorest areas, have through decades and across nations experienced lower levels of educational attainment than their wealthier peers. This project investigates two "odds-beating" schools – schools which secure better-than-expected outcomes for their disadvantaged pupils. It asks three research questions: 1) How do schools which appear odds-beating understand disadvantage in their local contexts and student populations? 2) How do they respond to this? 3) What is it about the nature of their response that supports their success? I begin this thesis with an overview of ways in which disadvantage ("odds") is understood, or known, in scholarship, policy and practice. I challenge functionalist models of odds-beatingness which rely solely on the redistribution of symbolic and economic capitals without disrupting ingrained systemic equities. Instead, I focus on "lifeworld use value" and the role of relational trust in setting educational agendas and deciding on valuable outcomes, considering opportunities for schools to exercise their agency creatively. I outline a view of socially just schooling based, following Nancy Fraser, on participatory parity, combining redistribution of resources with respect for difference. I propose a framework arising from the themes in the literature comprising four pillars – knowing, value, trust and agency – to construct a new version of odds-beating-ness in which subscription to normative or elite values is not the price of schooling success. Studies of odds-beating schools tend to be quantitative, necessarily imposing pre-ordained criteria about what constitutes disadvantage and what counts as successful outcomes. My qualitative study makes "odds" and "outcomes" – as they are constructed within schools – objects of investigation in themselves. I became an "embedded researcher" in two secondary schools in a large urban area in the north of England, conducting observations, interviews and focus groups. One of these schools was a Research School and the other was a Teaching School. My findings are organised around three "niches" which act as windows into the broader values and practices of each school: these are school-community relationships, vulnerable pupils, and nurture groups. I use each area to explore how odds and outcomes are formulated and addressed by the schools and elaborate empirically the four pillars from my framework. This framework is a key contribution made by my study to the odds-beating field. It places odds and outcomes in a chronologically chaotic cycle, departing from the causal or linear approach taken in previous studies. I argue that schools can shape odds rather than (or as well as) achieving in spite of them. I propose that schools which approach disadvantage in a way aligned towards social justice – combining the redistribution of capitals with the recognition of other value systems – are not only odds-beating but odds-changing. I demonstrate that schools can exercise their agency to depart from the pervasive paradigm of efficiency – where schools work only as utility-maximisers in the educational marketplace, seeking at all costs to grow their assets (such as examination results). This project paves the way for a more context-responsive, hopeful and generous approach to changing, not only beating, the odds for disadvantaged pupils.