This paper aims at analyzing young people views and expressed voices. The ways sixth form students build their citizenship and interpret the social educational policies surrounding their daily lives, school rankings in particular, constitutes its nodal point. Gender and achievement specificities and continuities are emphasised. It focuses a population from mainstream humanistic scientific courses in Portuguese relatively disadvantaged schools and region, taking into account the intersection of region, gender, social group and school achievement.

I argue that the lack of attention to young voices constitutes a lacuna in democracy: it raises strait boundaries to young people citizenship and may result in the development of reproductive, non-transgressing thought, which contributes to the reproduction of an uneven social order; and it rules out young people contribution towards the construction/improvement of their ways of life including school.

Citizenship is figured within a horizon of interdependence and solidarity, interweaving between voice and equality of condition. The debate about young people citizenship, which became pertinent in Europe more than twenty years ago, was recently introduced in the Portuguese educational agenda by diverse social actors - decision makers, teachers and scholars (Araújo, 2008) - who express and struggle for distinctive sometimes conflicting interests (Barroso, 2006). A focus on what young people have to say becomes pertinent. They experience an unhinged educational system whose expressed aims are to promote school access to more people for larger period, with a view of equal opportunity but where the focus on results and lack of capacity to deal with student diversity may discharge new mechanisms of school/social exclusion. Even though school efforts to comply with central challenges/impositions must be recognized, citizenship dimensions might be in conflict. The democratic pedagogic rights – enhancement, inclusion and participation (Bernstein, 1996) help theorize this concern.

Embodying citizenship, voice is signified as expression, legitimation and action; standing for young people’s right to express and be heard; the recognition of their voice(s) – which implies valuing their experiences, histories and views of the world; and the enactment of their fruitful views – which implies the possibility to make a difference and to discuss and deconstruct possible features of reproductive, non-reflective thought. Hence voice builds on the emancipatory traditions identified by Arnot (2006) and benefits from the bernesteinian discussion of pedagogic voice and sub-voices (Bernstein, 1990). It stands on Arnot (2006) and Arnot & Reay (2006, 2007, 2008) formulation of a typology of voice, which emphasises the need to deal with a differentiated notion of voice that accounts for the differentials of power inherent to young people diverse allocations, which inform the ways they signify and (re)construct the pedagogic voice within and through school (Bernstein, 1990). Standing as prerequisite for the emersion of voice and citizenship in education, equality of condition (Baker, Lynch, Cantilon & Walsh, 2004) helps theorize the claims for cultural respect and recognition, access to resources, care and solidarity, the power to have a say in decision making processes and of informed choice of work and learning, as a means for personal fulfilment within a collective view.

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