Based on a four-year qualitative study of the organization of educational services in two Hungarian towns, the presentation aims to compare the policies and technologies of guiding six years olds in the education system of two Hungarian municipalities. While ‘Birdtown’ conceptualizes education in the wider framework of consumer-driven public service provision, the municipality of ‘Parktown’ initiated major reorganizations in its school system according to the principles of accountability, transparency and equity. In the past five years, both municipalities have initiated coordinated interventions to regulate the pupil’s pathways from kindergarten to primary schools.

From the perspective of employability in the knowledge economy, in the past decade, the EU has increasingly paid attention to the governance of educational trajectories (Dale et al., 2012). Post-SocialistHungary has seen the emergence of one of the most selective early tracking systems in all ofEurope. In the quasi-market system that has developed since the transition, each year, primary schools are competing for particular segments of pupils and parents by offering various special programs. The proposed presentation argues that in such selective educational systems where the first major point of selection is at the entrance to primary school, guidance practices of the transmission from kindergarten to primary school hold particular importance in terms of subsequent educational trajectories. Moreover, it is argued that next to the structural features, the exploration of the governance of individual educational trajectories should consider refined, often hidden strategies of pupil’s setting and streaming.

Qualitative investigations of the dynamics of urban education governance in relation to school choice (Maroy 2006, van Zanten 2009) have inspired greatly our research. The research questions aim at the municipal policies concerning primary school entrance: what policies and practices are implemented to regulate primary school catchment zones, schools’ market-activities and specialized profiles, the setting and streaming of students at the lower grades, as well as the professional cooperation between kindergarten and primary school teachers in the two towns? Moreover, inspired by studies applying actor-network theory in education contexts (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010; Fenwick and Landri, 2012), we attempt to map out the multiple ontologies that form guiding practices and fabricate inequalities. In this vein, the paper will investigate how the networked, systematic linkage between geographies and material conditions of schooling, medicalisation practices, statistics and testing technologies takes form at the practices related to primary school entrance. 

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