Study title

Qualitative interviews and survey undertaken as part of a wider ethnographic project focused on the relationships between aspirations and education. In each country, a researcher spent nine months conducting research in two remote rural communities. Respondents were selected purposively and included school children, school dropouts, parents, teachers and community leaders from the six communities and the schools that served them. The survey was conducted with young people aged 12-22 both in and out of school in the same locations (200 per country).Although there have been major advances in school enrolment in the past two decades, the outcomes of education are often poor, especially among girls, young people from indigenous groups and ethnic minorities, those of lower socio-economic status and in remote rural areas. The World Bank and other globally influential agencies have recently been promoting the view that this is partly due to the limited aspirations of such children and their parents. There is certainly some evidence that disadvantaged groups have lower aspirations, and consequently achieve less in school. Yet paradoxically, there is also evidence that many youth from structurally disadvantaged groups have unattainably high aspirations, a situation that leads to disillusionment and large numbers of young people leaving school without the skills and knowledge to participate in rural livelihoods which they see as representing the failure of their aspirations. There are two key problems with much of the current academic and policy discourse concerning education and aspiration. First, the conceptualisation of aspiration is very narrow. Interventions aimed at 'raising aspiration' assume it is one-dimensional, yet aspirations may be more or less concrete, more or less stable; they are emotionally imbued and value laden and may relate to very different types of imagined future. Little is understood of how aspirations function to produce change, individually...