The last decade has seen a rapid growth of research interest in elite education, leading to new insights into how elite groups are being educated and the role schooling and higher education choices play in maintaining or destabilising the groups considered ‘elite’- be they elite in economic terms, socially, or culturally, amongst others, or elite in different contexts and societies.  While many recent publications have focused on Anglophone countries – the United States, England, Scotland, and other places with historic educational links to the UK as well as France, there is currently little focus on the situation more widely across Europe and in non-Anglophone countries.

The proposed symposium intends to fill this gap by bringing together a set of papers from various colleagues currently exploring broader questions surrounding private and elite education (understood as school and higher education) in different European countries. The symposium papers have been chosen to introduce and explore elite education in a range of European polities, at a variety of levels (primary, secondary, tertiary) and applying different theoretical orientations to examine the issues.

Main symposium aim: What are the education choices made by elite groups, what are the effects of these choices for local education systems, and what implications does this have for social, economic, intellectual and other forms of stratification in schooling systems and thereafter across societies?

Additional questions explored within the symposium are substantive and methodological in nature:

• What constitutes elite schooling and/or higher education in the particular European country studied? What are some of the specific social, economic, cultural and historic characteristics and contexts of elite schools and/or higher education institutions within the particular countries discussed?
• What changes, if any, are evident in the users/consumers of elite schooling in the country studied?
• What evidence is there of the effects of elite education in the countries studied in terms of the re/production of social and economic influence and networks? To what extent do the secondary and higher education systems in different European states structure the formation and (in)stability of elite groups in-country?
• Methodologically, what orientations and innovations have provided analytical insight in the studies discussed? What has the application of particular methodological perspectives revealed about the constitution, processes and societal effects of elite schooling and/or university education? In particular, what have the chosen methodologies found about equalities issues pertaining to different social fractions and the intersectional nature of these in elite education?