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A growing body of research shows that private tutoring is a globally pervasive phenomenon. A common way in which tutoring provisions are defined is with the use of the metaphor "shadow education", signifying that tutoring centres "shadow" formal schools. Despite the popularity of this metaphor in the field, how "shadowing" occurs as a process and what implications this process has for formal schooling and society have seldom been put through empirical scrutiny. To redress this gap in the literature, this article draws on the data produced through an ethnography of schooling in Dehradun (India) between 2014-15. The discussion on specific ways in which the institutional arrangement of private tutoring aligns with that of formal schooling reveals the socio-educational embeddedness of private tutoring within the mainstream schooling experience in India. The article argues that "shadowing" is not a neutral process, it is executed tactically and strategically with an aim to provide private tutoring a valued, legitimised, and competitive space in an increasingly marketised education sector. Importantly, this analysis of "shadowing" exposes problematic practices within formal schooling and suggests that by mirroring these practices in its structure, private tutoring reproduces social inequality. The insights into understanding the "shadowing process" that this article offers may be of value to the analysis of the organisational arrangements of tutoring businesses within India and in other societies. Through demonstrating that tutoring is part of everyday schooling, this article makes a case for recognising it as integral to mainstream education in India.

Sociological inquiries on parental involvement seldom consider the investments parents make in "themselves" to realise educational advantages in their children's schooling. This gap hides the processes underlying class-making and class-produced privileges. To address this gap, this article investigates middle-class mothers' participation in tutoring and coaching for spoken English in Dehradun, India, focusing on their reasons for soliciting such paid tutoring support. It shows that mothers subscribe to these services to facilitate home-teaching, productive communication with their children, and effective home-school partnerships. Mothers' subscription to private tuition emerges in this context as a source of cultural capital that parents use to unlock their middle-class identity and privilege in the educational landscape. The article argues that English private tutoring is a case of a capital exchange -- economic for cultural and social forms of capital -- which parents may use to accumulate key resources and produce, maintain, and intergenerationally sustain their middle-classness.

This article provides a Bourdieusian analysis of middle-class parents' investment in private schooling and shadow education (tutoring support) in India, thus contributes to the scholarship of class-based educational advantage. It unveils parents' aspirations for their children's education and investigates how these aspirations shape the demand for private education. Bringing into sharp focus the complexity of social privilege, this article discusses how middle-class parents' articulation of their lack of valued cultural capital informs their decision to invest in private schools. However, parents' views on their ineffective involvement in their children's education produce a perceived home disadvantage, which parents compensate for by investing in tutoring services. The article argues that investing in private education -- both in formal educational institutions and tutoring centres -- is a case of 'capital exchange' (transfer of economic capital to secure cultural capital) exercised by privileged social groups to 'purchase' valuable educational resources, thus reproducing their social class position.

While a growing body of research shows the prevalence of private tutoring in India, the ways in which these informal educational setups gain social legitimacy remains largely unclear. To redress this gap in the scholarship, this article investigates institutional and affective tutoring practices, in relation to formal schooling. It draws on the perspectives of tutors, school teachers, teacher-tutors, students and their parents, produced through an educational ethnography conducted in Dehradun (India) in 2014-2015. In so doing, this article shows that strategic adoption (adhering to formal education practices) and tactical deviation (diverging from typical schooling norms) are central to tutoring centres' attempt to project themselves as academically relevant and desirable spaces for teaching and learning. By offering a nuanced understanding of the interactions between formal (schools) and informal (tutoring provisions) educational institutions, it argues that private tutoring serves as a critique of formal schooling in the empirical context.

Private tutoring is a globally pervasive phenomenon. While scholars have explored the demand for and supply of private tutoring, how tutoring centres organise their services, and the role of temporality in this, remains underexplored. To address this gap in the scholarship, this article draws on ethnographic data, produced during 2014-15 in Dehradun (India), to discuss four aspects of a 'shadow education' timescape: how tutoring services are mapped onto the formal schooling structure (Mapping); how tutorial centres benefit from having more time to allocate to educational services over formal schools (Advantage); how tutorial centres diversify the nature of academic support they offer throughout an academic year (Diversity); and, how tutoring services accommodate changing schooling practices over time (Adaptability). This discussion unveils the specific ways in which the temporal facets of private tutoring help tutoring businesses "circumvent" the schooling system to secure their space "alongside" -- rather than by attempting to replace -- the formal institutions of education within the Indian educational landscape. Although this article is empirically grounded in India, the conceptualisation of "temporalities of private tutoring" it generates will be valuable to the investigations of organisational framings, structural arrangements and practices of tutoring provisions in other contexts.

Across Europe, assumptions are often made within the academic literature and by some social commentators that students have come to understand the purpose of higher education (HE) in increasingly instrumental terms. This is often linked to processes of marketisation and neo-liberalisation across the Global North, in which the value of HE has come to be associated with economic reward and labour market participation and measured through a relatively narrow range of metrics. It is also associated with the establishment, in 2010, of the European Higher Education Area, which is argued to have brought about the refiguration of European universities around an Anglo-American model. Scholars have contended that students have become consumer-like in their behaviour and preoccupied by labour market outcomes rather than processes of learning and knowledge generation. Often, however, such claims are made on the basis of limited empirical evidence, or a focus on policies and structures rather than the perspectives of students themselves. In contrast, this paper draws on a series of 54 focus groups with 295 students conducted in six European countries (Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain). It shows how understandings of the purpose of HE are more nuanced than much of the extant literature suggests and vary, at least to some extent, by both nation-state and higher education institution. Alongside viewing the purpose of HE as preparing them for the labour market, students emphasised the importance of tertiary-level study for personal growth and enrichment, and societal development and progress. These findings have implications for policy and practice. In particular, the broader purposes of HE, as articulated by the students in this study, should be given greater recognition by policymakers, those teaching in HE, and the wider public instead of, as is often the case, positioning students as consumers, interested in only economic gain.

This article examines the processes underlying the formation of the identity of teachers as entrepreneurs in neoliberalizing education space in contemporary India. Drawing on interactions with 38 schoolteachers in two private schools in Dehradun, this article explores why and how educators adopt specific entrepreneurial strategies to navigate precarious, competitive market conditions. It subsequently illustrates how, in their pursuit of career advancement, educators commodify their knowledge and skills and promote the market logic of choice and freedom. By elucidating the mechanisms through which educators reproduce the processes and practices that nudge their search for promising career opportunities in the formal education system and the tuition industry, this article argues that teacher-entrepreneurs are both products and carriers of the neoliberal agenda. It introduces the concept of teacher-entrepreneurialism, a manifestation of neoliberalism, which shapes educators' entrepreneurial dispositions; it suggests that teacher-entrepreneurs sustain neoliberalization in its varying forms and bolster its legitimacy. By illustrating the variegated, processual existence of neoliberalism, this article makes a case for investigating education as a neoliberalizing space in the increasingly profit-centric, market-driven, and performance-oriented schooling sector that prevails across societies, particularly in contemporary India.

Drawing on data from students, higher education staff and policymakers from six European countries, this article argues that it remains a relatively common assumption that students should be politically engaged. However, while students articulated a strong interest in a wide range of political issues, those working in higher education and influencing higher education policy tended to believe that students were considerably less politically active than their predecessors. Moreover, while staff and policy influencers typically conceived of political engagement in terms of collective action, articulated through common reference to the absence of a 'student movement' or unified student voice, students' narratives tended not to valorise 'student movements' in the same way and many categorised as 'political' action they had taken alone and/or with a small number of other students. Alongside these broad commonalities across Europe, the article also evidences some key differences between nation-states, institutions and disciplines. In this way, it contributes to the comparative literature on young people's political engagement specifically, as well as wider debates about the ways in which higher education students are understood.

This article offers unique insights into the relationship between education policy and teachers' work. It considers how globally pervasive responsibilising regimes make teachers' work more burdensome. Drawing on interviews with 15 school teachers, this article shows how China's 2021 Double Burden Reduction Policy has reconfigured educators' (class)work practices and pedagogical approaches. Specifically, it unpacks the policy mechanisms that: 1) condense school time and make teachers' work more methodical and 2) prolong teachers' working hours that are dedicated to offering students after-school educational support, thus reducing the demand for shadow education. This article argues that this policy shifts the education burden away from tutorial enterprises and parents and onto the teachers, which illustrates a case of the impact of policy regimes on teachers' work within the broader context of neoliberal globalisation. Moreover, this article produces a novel typological spectrum – submission, substantiation, and scepticism – to capture and understand the diverse ways in which teachers may respond to policy-led changes to their professional work globally. Overall, it generates new knowledge on the impact of homogenising education policies on teachers' work and the heterogeneity of teachers' responses to these policies, thus contributing conceptually to the wider field of policy sociology in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heterogeneity of the contemporary Indian middle-class has been discussed widely. However, the effect of its internal differences on the distribution of educational resources needs to be examined systematically. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with parents in 53 middle-class families in Dehradun, India, this paper explores three aspects of the home-school relationship: how socioeconomic transformations shape parents' aspirations for their children's future, educational decisions parents make to realise those aspirations, and mothers' engagement in their children's everyday schooling. The tripartite analysis reveals that despite sharing common educational goals and strategies with the population in general, middle-class families in India use their class privilege to gain valuable educational resources. The paper argues that the discrepancy in the mobilisation of accumulated resources in the heterogeneous middle-class results in disparate educational advantages across families. It critiques the binary construction of social classes when explaining the processes of social reproduction in contemporary Indian society.

Sociological inquiries on parental involvement seldom consider the investments parents make in themselves to realise educational advantages in their children's schooling. This gap hides the processes underlying class-making and class-produced privileges. To address this gap, this article investigates middle-class mothers' participation in tutoring and coaching for spoken English in Dehradun, India, focusing on their reasons for soliciting such paid tutoring support. It shows that mothers subscribe to these services to facilitate home-teaching, productive communication with their children, and effective home-school partnerships. Mothers' subscription to private tuition emerges in this context as a source of cultural capital that parents use to unlock their middle-class identity and privilege in the educational landscape. The article argues that English private tutoring is a case of a capital exchange – economic for cultural and social forms of capital – which parents may use to accumulate key resources and produce, maintain, and intergenerationally sustain their middle-classness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is now a relatively large literature on young people's aspirations with respect to their transitions from compulsory schooling, the body of work on the aspirations of those within higher education is rather less well-developed. This article draws on data from undergraduate students in six European countries to explore their hopes for their post-university lives. It demonstrates that although aspirations for employment were discussed most frequently, non-economic plans and desires were also important. Moreover, despite significant commonalities across the six nations, aspirations were also differentiated, to some extent at least, by national context, institutional setting and subject of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research shows that private tutoring is a globally pervasive phenomenon. A common way in which tutoring provisions are defined is with the use of the metaphor "shadow education", signifying that tutoring centres "shadow" formal schools. Despite the popularity of this metaphor in the field, how "shadowing" occurs as a process and what implications this process has for formal schooling and society have seldom been put through empirical scrutiny. To redress this gap in the literature, this article draws on the data produced through an ethnography of schooling in Dehradun (India) between 2014–15. The discussion on specific ways in which the institutional arrangement of private tutoring aligns with that of formal schooling reveals the socio-educational embeddedness of private tutoring within the mainstream schooling experience in India. The article argues that "shadowing" is not a neutral process, it is executed tactically and strategically with an aim to provide private tutoring a valued, legitimised, and competitive space in an increasingly marketised education sector. Importantly, this analysis of "shadowing" exposes problematic practices within formal schooling and suggests that by mirroring these practices in its structure, private tutoring reproduces social inequality. The insights into understanding the "shadowing process" that this article offers may be of value to the analysis of the organisational arrangements of tutoring businesses within India and in other societies. Through demonstrating that tutoring is part of everyday schooling, this article makes a case for recognising it as integral to mainstream education in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a Bourdieusian analysis of middle-class parents' investment in private schooling and shadow education (tutoring support) in India, thus contributes to the scholarship of class-based educational advantage. It unveils parents' aspirations for their children's education and investigates how these aspirations shape the demand for private education. Bringing into sharp focus the complexity of social privilege, this article discusses how middle-class parents' articulation of their lack of valued cultural capital informs their decision to invest in private schools. However, parents' views on their ineffective involvement in their children's education produce a perceived home disadvantage, which parents compensate for by investing in tutoring services. The article argues that investing in private education – both in formal educational institutions and tutoring centres – is a case of 'capital exchange' (transfer of economic capital to secure cultural capital) exercised by privileged social groups to 'purchase' valuable educational resources, thus reproducing their social class position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private tutoring is a globally pervasive phenomenon. While scholars have explored the demand for and supply of private tutoring, how tutoring centres organise their services, and the role of temporality in this, remains underexplored. To address this gap in the scholarship, this article draws on ethnographic data, produced during 2014–15 in Dehradun (India), to discuss four aspects of a 'shadow education' timescape: how tutoring services are mapped onto the formal schooling structure (Mapping); how tutorial centres benefit from having more time to allocate to educational services over formal schools (Advantage); how tutorial centres diversify the nature of academic support they offer throughout an academic year (Diversity); and, how tutoring services accommodate changing schooling practices over time (Adaptability). This discussion unveils the specific ways in which the temporal facets of private tutoring help tutoring businesses circumvent the schooling system to secure their space alongside – rather than by attempting to replace – the formal institutions of education within the Indian educational landscape. Although this article is empirically grounded in India, the conceptualisation of temporalities of private tutoring it generates will be valuable to the investigations of organisational framings, structural arrangements and practices of tutoring provisions in other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a growing body of research shows the prevalence of private tutoring in India, the ways in which these informal educational setups gain social legitimacy remains largely unclear. To redress this gap in the scholarship, this article investigates institutional and affective tutoring practices, in relation to formal schooling. It draws on the perspectives of tutors, school teachers, teacher-tutors, students and their parents, produced through an educational ethnography conducted in Dehradun (India) in 2014–2015. In so doing, this article shows that strategic adoption (adhering to formal education practices) and tactical deviation (diverging from typical schooling norms) are central to tutoring centres' attempt to project themselves as academically relevant and desirable spaces for teaching and learning. By offering a nuanced understanding of the interactions between formal (schools) and informal (tutoring provisions) educational institutions, it argues that private tutoring serves as a critique of formal schooling in the empirical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Europe, assumptions are often made within the academic literature and by some social commentators that students have come to understand the purpose of higher education (HE) in increasingly instrumental terms. This is often linked to processes of marketisation and neo-liberalisation across the Global North, in which the value of HE has come to be associated with economic reward and labour market participation and measured through a relatively narrow range of metrics. It is also associated with the establishment, in 2010, of the European Higher Education Area, which is argued to have brought about the refiguration of European universities around an Anglo-American model. Scholars have contended that students have become consumer-like in their behaviour and preoccupied by labour market outcomes rather than processes of learning and knowledge generation. Often, however, such claims are made on the basis of limited empirical evidence, or a focus on policies and structures rather than the perspectives of students themselves. In contrast, this paper draws on a series of 54 focus groups with 295 students conducted in six European countries (Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain). It shows how understandings of the purpose of HE are more nuanced than much of the extant literature suggests and vary, at least to some extent, by both nation-state and higher education institution. Alongside viewing the purpose of HE as preparing them for the labour market, students emphasised the importance of tertiary-level study for personal growth and enrichment, and societal development and progress. These findings have implications for policy and practice. In particular, the broader purposes of HE, as articulated by the students in this study, should be given greater recognition by policymakers, those teaching in HE, and the wider public instead of, as is often the case, positioning students as consumers, interested in only economic gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]