Teachers’ guidance, family participation and track choice: the educational disadvantage of immigrant students in Italy

In Italy, as in other European countries, students of foreign origin are over-represented in the vocational school tracks, with relevant consequences on their limited chances of attaining a university degree. While research has long underlined the weight that a family’s social, cultural and economic capital has on a child’s school performance, educational expectations and choices, the role that school and teachers themselves play in the transition from lower to upper secondary school has been rarely explored in Italian sociological research. The present study aims to bridge this gap in the literature, showing how teachers’ orienting practices, interacting with highly differentiated patterns of family participation in the school guidance process, can play a relevant role in reproducing foreign-origin students’ segregation into the lower tracks of the school system.