Description: A large body of research investigates how specific pupil characteristics, such as pupils' ability, school related interests/behaviour, their ethnicity/race, gender or social class informs teachers' expectations of pupils. This paper employs ethnographic data gathered from two Flemish (Belgian), multi-cultural inner-city schools to explore how teachers' social structure informs the development of teachers' expectations of pupils. In so doing, this study follows more recent research contributions from the UK (Gillborn and Youdell, 1999; Youdell, 2004) and USA (Booher-Jennings, 2005) that investigate the importance of school structural characteristics on teachers' allocation of scarce educational resources to pupils. The analysis suggests the importance of school requirements related to the number of pupils enrolled in Flemish schools, colleagues' needs and interests, a curriculum imposed from above and the needs of post-secondary education institutions. Finally, it suggests the importance of teachers' personal standards and beliefs related to their socialisation experiences and structural position in school and parents' and/or pupils' strategies to inform the process of grade allocation. The conclusion discusses implications for future research on the development of teachers' expectations of pupils. Methodology: This paper reports on ethnographic research carried out in two Flemish (Belgian) secondary, multicultural schools. Both schools are situated within the same catchment area but offer different types of education (vocational and technical versus general). Both schools attract a significant number or Turkish minority pupils but differ in terms of gender and social class composition. The analysis is based on ethnographic observations, conducted for more than 3 months in each school, and a sample of 18 in-depth teacher-interviews. Conclusions: This paper describes how teachers in a particular Flemish educational context are informed by their larger social structure in developing pupil expectations. The analysis identifies these structural constraints and suggests that pressures experienced by teachers from their social environment do not always appear to stimulate teachers to either decrease or increase expectations: sometimes such pressures contradict each other, creating a potentially stressful context for teachers in which they have to manage conflicting expectations. This study highlights the need for future research to consider the importance of teachers' particular social structure in understanding how they develop expectations of pupils.