The paper will analyse official discourses around young people’s educational aspirations with a focus on the United Kingdom and Germany. It will draw on first findings in a PhD project on young people’s negotiation of aspiration discourses in Scotland. The background of the dissertation are recent debates in the United Kingdom on raising aspirations among young people. They are reflected in official reports and strategies such as the government’s ten-year programme “Aiming High” which was released in 2007 (Department for Children, Schools and Families 2007). Aspirations are seen as a crucial factor for academic success and are supposed to influence young people’s academic attainment and post-school careers to a great extent. First, the paper will trace the generation of present public discourses in the United Kingdom. It will be asked which societal and institutional developments have fostered the shift towards aspiration in the educational discourse. The underlying assumption is that aspirations have replaced the concept of “innate ability” as an explanation for differences in educational attainment. Looking at the historic and institutional context of this change, we can see that it took shape after the introduction of comprehensive schools from 1965 onwards. The change from the tripartite to the comprehensive system was accompanied by the idea of opening educational opportunities to all young people regardless of their social background. Conceptually, ability had therefore become more malleable and was detached from social class. Regarding factual attainment, however, social inequalities in education have not changed considerably since the times of the tripartite system. Is the emphasis on young people’s aspirations a consequence of the failure of comprehensive schools to equalise educational outcomes? In order to answer this question, the paper will look at the developments in the educational sector in Germany over the last 40 years. Here, the tripartite system has been held on to until very recently in most of the federal states. Only after the results of the first PISA study in 2000 attested Germany a high correlation of academic performance and social class, the tripartite system was publicly challenged. Having analysed the major themes of the educational debates in Germany, the paper will show to which extend the “aspiration discourse” in Britain has been shaped by the institutional developments taking place over the last 40 years. It will also be pointed out which other, possibly nation-spanning processes have influenced the present discourse on educational (in)equality.

A critical discourse analysis approach will be used which goes beyond the analysis of textual structures but sees discourses embedded in power relations. It will be assumed that social structures and discourses are entangled in a complex interplay (Mills 2004). In more concrete terms, a documentary analysis of policy documents such as statements, speeches, and reports will be undertaken. This will be supplemented by an overview over thematic focuses within educational and social research. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of dicsourse, "rules of formation" and the historical background of these texts will be analysed (Howarth 1998). As a tool to undertake this, content analysis will be used to identify the relevant themes of the discourses as well as its scope and limits.

The analysis of public documents on educational discourses will supposedly find some differences between the United Kingdom and Germany. In Germany the structure of the school system has been repeatedly debated and is currently on the agenda again as some federal states are introducing a two-track system. In Britain structural debates are concentrated on the reform of examinations and qualifications. Yet, in both countries a shift from “innate ability” towards cultural explanations of educational differences can be noticed – aspirations being one of them. This is possibly due to the failure of widening participation in education in both countries and the subsequent shift of responsibility to the individuals. In the wider context theses discourses have gone along with a successive withdrawal of the welfare state and political “activation” strategies such as “Lifelong Learning” by the European Union.