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The papers making up this Special Section reveal important findings and begin to fill gaps in existing literature about children's and young people's understanding and developing beliefs about socio-economic inequality and poverty. We draw on our research experience with children growing up in poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam (Young Lives) from the perspective of sociology of childhood and social anthropology. The commentary discusses the papers in the Special Section and calls for policies and practices that argue for social justice for children and young people in political and economic terms and emphasizes the importance of including children's views and descriptions of their experiences in research about poverty and inequality.

Due to the rarity of longitudinal data, evidence on the benefits of education across the life-course is relatively sparse in developing countries. Young Lives is the only comparative dual-cohort study to combine data collection using mixed-methods at child, household, school and community levels, following 12,000 children in two cohorts across four countries since 2002. This article outlines the conceptual and analytical framework and the key methodological features of the Young Lives study, and the unique potential of the data for analysis of educational trajectories, and of the influences that shape them. It discusses the challenges associated with a cross-country interdisciplinary study of children, their families and schools and examines how these were addressed. These include the logistical, epistemological and ethical challenges of ensuring the integrity of the panel data and cohort, maintaining an appropriate degree of consistency across countries in terms of design and measurement, without compromising policy relevance at the national level, and balancing the sometimes competing demands for cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence.

This article examines the association between formal education, social mobility and independent child migration in Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh), Peru and Vietnam and draws on data from Young Lives, a longitudinal study of childhood poverty and schooling. It argues that among resource-poor populations, child migration sustains kin relations across generations and households and also facilitates children's progression through the life-course, thus it is fundamental to social reproduction. It reasons that formal education has greatly amplified this trend. Schooling has acquired symbolic value as the prime means of escaping household poverty and realising ambitions for social mobility. As such, elevated educational aspirations combine with systems shortcomings to stimulate school selection, school transfer and school-related child migration. The article concludes by examining the implications for children, for social reproduction and for policy.

In this response to the article by Madeleine Arnot, Halleli Pinson, and Mano Candappa the author explores three issues that are key to the current refugee and education regimes in Britain. She addresses the association between the British state and the children living within its dominion, the role of education in contemporary British statecraft and the core values of the education system insofar as it concerns asylum-seeking and refugee children. Building on the authors' discussion of the role of compassion in education around non-citizens, the author problematises this concept and examines some of the political and popular perceptions that are brought to bear in relation to this topic. In particular, she highlights how the interests of the modern state are vested in children and how, in line with this, government attention to instilling public morality in school pupils has centred on a nationalist ideology which excludes forced migrants. She argues that in a context in which a persistent moral and instrumental case is made against asylum-seekers and refugees, teachers struggle against the odds to achieve the successful integration of these children within British schools.