This paper examines how high achieving Swedish students from families with low socio-economic background and low educational capital embark on a successful educational career. The specific focus is on the support they can mobilise in their social networks. The parents of these students are unemployed or are employed in low skill service sectors or single parents on welfare. While by lower educational levels we mean students from a household with caretakers with no tertiary education.  High achievers in this study are students that have above the average score in key subjects in Maths, Swedish and English at the end of the first year of their secondary school.

Theory holds that students from adverse conditions have difficulty to hurdle school practice (Biddle, 2000) and to embark on a successful academic career because of their poor cultural capital or wrong habitus (Bourdieu 1977, Coleman, 1988). The educational difficulties these students encounter in the educational system (in Sweden and in other countries) are well documented; however, far less attention has been given to student success. Hence, in this paper we focus on the support these students mobilised to access higher education. Departing from this aim this paper addresses the following research questions:

• What types of social resources did these students access from their social network?
• How did the students’ social resources interplay with the students’ specific background to embark on their successful educational career?

Literature on school achievement shows that there is a range of factors within the institution’s control that affect the retention of students, such as personal tutoring, institutional and peer support (Cotton, Nash, & Kneale, 2017). The analytical framework of this study, builds on studies using Coleman´s (1988) and Bourdieu´s (1986) understanding of social capital (Lin 2001; Stanton-Salazar 1997; Portes & Fernandez-Kelly 2008; Portes & Rumbaut 2001; Prado 2009, Osman 2012, Osman & Månsson 2015; Månsson & Osman 2017). These analytical frame are: Ideational support, material support and bridging support. Ideational support refers to the ability of parents and significant others to inculcate a pro-academic norm in these students. Material support is intended in this study to capture the impact of unequal material resources and how underprivileged students compensated for their lack of material resources in order to successfully “get ahead” in a competitive institutional school practice.  These can for example be tangible support in the form financial support for tutors. Bridging support denotes the linkage between the ideational and material support. Both Bourdieu (1986) and Coleman (1998) stress the significance of others in the social networks and how networks are vital in the competition for limited institutional coveted resources. Hence, bridging support points, for instance, to parental abilities to link their child to individuals that can provide their youngsters with ideational and material support. This can involve parents linking their child to the third person that has institutional expertise in the educational system.

The data analyzed in this paper is based on interviews with students attending their second and the last year of their secondary schooling. That data analysed in this paper consists of ten males and thirteen female students, with different national backgrounds (seventeen immigrants and six native Swedes) were recruited for interviews. Their parents of the immigrant students came from countries like Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, Somalia, Philippines, Thailand, South Korea, Finland, and Austria. This category of consists of students with poor socio-economic background. In this context, it important to stress that, a substantial number of students in this group are of Somali national group. The semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2018 and took approximately 45-60 minutes each, where the informants was asked to describe their family situation and their everyday life in and outside the school, their school situation and school performances, and what kind of support that they perceive contributed to their successful educational career.

In this study we identified four types of themes, which the students stressed were critical in their schooling success. These are 1. Family support, 2. Peer support, 3. School support, and 4. Other types of support. These types of support are primarily ideational support, but also concrete support such as tutorial support. In the end, we conclude that the students have capitals on the individual level by which they can actually mobilise their support differently. What we identified and surprised us in this study was that these students did not identify material support as an important factor, or of import in their study. The important factor this students identified that they attributed to their success emotional support by the family-particularly the parent and the teacher. In this context, it is important to point out that the descendant of immigrants stressed the economic or social situation they’re embedded in as motivating factor and migration, particularly the parent’s narrative that they migrated to give them a better life. This we will like to stress is a particularly powerful motivating narrative and only functions if the students have a close relation with their parents. Hence, a caring family, has the emotional capital to “blackmail” their children to work hard in school. This factor alone is not enough, it also requires a supporting school environment, and a peers that that share a similar educational ambition

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