Education has to be socially just. This injunction is present in every education system, at every stage of its development. Who would argue for a socially unjust education? However, researching e.g. the press, we can find different positions towards social justice in education. The difference is not that some people argue for justice and other for injustice, but rather that their ideas of social justice in education differ.
There are many works about ideas of social justice in education, among which some former work of the two authors of this contribution (Friant, 2012, 2013; Friant, Demeuse, & Laloua, 2008; Sanchez Santamaria, 2014; Sánchez Santamaría & Manzanares Moya, 2014; Sánchez-Santamaría & Espinoza, 2015; Sánchez-Santamaría & Vila, 2016) but also a series of other work on which each of the authors has leaned upon, be them specifically applied on education (Baye et al., 2005; Baye & Demeuse, 2008; Bolívar, 2005; Demeuse & Baye, 2005, 2007, 2008; Espinoza, 2007; Herrera, 2007; Matoul et al., 2005a, 2005b, Meuret, 1999, 2000) or works of moral philosophy aiming at devising theories of justice (Miller & Walzer, 1995; Rawls, 1999; Sen, 2000; Walzer, 1983).
The abundance of these works shows how much this is a crucial question, important as much for the scientific community as for the society in its entirety. Why be interested to such an extent in ideas of social justice in education? Why formalize them? A sequential vision would say that it's all about defining what is a socially just education system in order to organize one's system to closely match this definition of social justice. This vision however forgets the history of education systems, their evolution, their legacy. As several authors have shown (Demeuse & Baye, 2005; Rochex, 2008; Sánchez Santamaría & Manzanares Moya, 2014), there are historical trends in social justice models in education systems: the dominant idea evolves from a period to another, each education system resulting in an overlapping of different ideas of justice.
We therefore think that formalizing ideas of social justice in education is also done a posteriori, after that some intuitive arguments have been formulated. These intuitive arguments could be, e.g compensation or merit: we have to "give more to those who have less" or "reward those who merit" because intuitively, we have the feeling that it is the right thing to do. A posteriori, stakeholders of education systems present their arguments about the intuitive position they have adopted in the first time.
Developing analytical frameworks enabling researchers to identify ideas of social justice in education has a strong heuristic interest. A good analytical framework could be used to analyse discourses about an education system, to compare education systems with each other, or to make diachronic comparisons of the same system. It could enable researchers to show that in a certain education system, an evolution is going on from one idea of justice to another one, and thus to deduce probable consequences; or that an educational policy is criticized in the name of a certain idea of social justice in education. In order to do so, researchers and stakeholders at the level of education systems need some analytical framework enabling them to precisely draw ideas of social justice from discourses about education. But the existing analytical frameworks could still be improved. Improving them and devising a more satisfying analytical framework is the aim of our contribution.

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