Ethnography has come a long way since the days of Malinowski and Fraz Boas - particularly within its 'home' discipline of anthropology but also within education, where ethnography seems to have become a preferred methodology within critical sociology and what has generally become known as policy sociology. Critical versions of educational ethnography, informed by theories of class, feminism and poststructuralism, have been particularly significant. However, the critical dialectic between data and theory, the key feature of versions of critical ethnography, would seem, according to some commentators, to be losing its edge. For example, Stephen Ball, one of the early prime-movers in advocating theoretically-informed ethnographic work, and one of the founders of 'policy sociology', has recently been critical of the state of theory in much education research. The point that is emphasised in the proposed paper is that understanding and exploring complex and protracted social questions requires sophisticated investigative approaches that take theory seriously but that do not simply apply a pre-conceived theoretical template. I outline a set of arguments about the relationship between theory and critical ethnography, and then present an ethnographic research approach that is capable of providing a better understanding of what is going on in schools, students and communities that have, as a result of wider social forces, been historically placed in situations of disadvantage.My particular interest in the proposed paper is in methodologies that incorporate both empirical and theoretical insight into the relationship between schooling and social class - the latter term which, as Ball has emphasised, is in urgent need of renovation for contemporary times. Such methodology needs to allow examination and understanding of how schools work in ways such that "class is achieved and maintained and enacted rather than something that just is!" (Ball, 2006, p. 8). Ball (2006) has summarized neatly the urgent necessity for research approaches that are theoretically able to explore and explain the complex and uncertain relationship between education, society and young people's lives with sufficient "conceptual robustness" to move us beyond the moribund situation educational research is now in. Drawing largely on Ball, Willis and other critical ethnographers, I argue for such a sufficiently tobust approach. Ball's arguments have prompted much of the thinking in the paper and have forced me, a self-styled 'critical ethnographer', to reflect upon my own emergence as an ethnographic researcher. I try to highlight some of the key theoretical issues that the field of educational research, if it is as described by Ball (2006), will need to consider. I conclude by drawing on the reflections of one of the pioneers of theoretically-informed, critical ethnographic research, Paul Willis. There will be approximately 50 references including 6 to the author, 6 to Ball and 6 to Willis. The reference above is to Ball, S. (2006). The necessity and violence of theory, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27(1), 3-10.I intend to submit to the jourbal 'Ethnography and Education'.