Although in fundamentally different framings, the comprehensive school as an institutional model of more socially just education had emerged both on the education policy agenda of Western European states and in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries after WWII. While the social justice framing of education policies had been gradually dismantled from the eighties on (Seddon, 2014), this rhetoric still seem to be an influential legacy and normative principle in the political imagery of schooling.

In Hungary, the eight years long elementary school (for 6-14 years olds) was explicitly introduced with the social justice incentive to provide general access to all social strata to the basic curriculum. However, in the eighties, with the thaw of the State Socialist regime, the social intake of elementary schools increasingly diversified by means of offering various specialist classes and hence selecting students by status. In the early 2000s, the PISA survey highlighted the extreme inequalities of the Hungarian education system in comparison to other nations. In response to the PISA, between 2004 and 2010, the incoming flows of European development funds were channelled into national policies that primarily aimed at introducing less teacher-centred and less factual-knowledge based classroom methods (“competence-based education”) as well as with special regards to Roma students, at increasing the social mixing in schools and closing down segregated schools (“integrated education”). All this was framed in the narrative of modernization and “catching up to Europe” (Berényi and Neumann 2009). In this context, integrated education and mixed ability classrooms were integrative parts of the modernization agenda and practices of early selection, specialisms and ability setting became associated to the “backwardness” (Chirot, 1991) of the education system. 

Theoretical framework

The ethnographic fieldwork and the analysis was informed by classic British ethnographic literature discussing subtle practices of selection and ability setting (Ball 1981, Beynon 1983, Hargreaves 1967, Lacey 1970) as well as the critical sociological literature on the practices and effects of ability setting (e.g. Abraham 2008, Reay 1998, Van Houtte et al. 2012). The analysis of the Hungarian case relies on the literature about the characteristic features of public service provision in post-Socialist countries (Silova, 2010) and about the regional specificities of localizing the European policy agenda in Central-Eastern Europe (Rostas and Kostka, 2014). 

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