Contrasting what is required of children at school with what is expected of them at home and on the street, Gillian Evans provides an ethnographic analysis of educational failure in white working class neighbourhoods. The reasons for individual children's failure to learn and to behave at school are not, however, explored solely in terms of factors relevant to life outside school. Following the trajectory of particular children's failure at school and explaining the difference between the experiences of girls and boys, the book demonstrates how social class position tends to be reproduced as a function of childhood experience.