Education and the Working Class was one of the first sociology of education books that I read, and the first to have a lasting impact on me. When I read it I was an 18-year-old working-class girl, totally ‘at sea’ in higher education and failing to make sense of my own experience of social mobility at an elite university. There have been few books in my life that have elicited such a shock of recognition, but Education and the Working Class was one. Yet, it clearly was not describing my own working-class experience. Jackson and Marsden’s text focused primarily on working-class students from families that constituted very specific fractions of the working class. They either were part of ‘the sunken middle class’ or came from the respectable, aspirant working class who limited their family size and saved up to buy their own home. Their politics were conservative, with both a small and a large ‘C’, and most of the young adults whom Jackson and Marsden interviewed lacked ‘any radical impulses’. Rather, they were described by Jackson and Marsden as ‘over-accommodating and emollient’ as they struggled to fit in with a new, unfamiliar, middle-class milieu. In contrast, my working-class background provided a counterpoint to the many orthodox analyses of social mobility, including that of Jackson and Marsden. In my family it was not middle-class dispositions and attitudes that facilitated and enabled social mobility, but instead a strong, oppositional, working-class value system and political consciousness. I grew up on a sink council estate, the oldest of eight children, and was a free school meal (FSM) pupil throughout my school education. It is this complexity around the many different ways of embodying working-classness that I hope to capture in the text, and to further complicate through a strong engagement with differences of gender and ethnicity. It is important to recognise that I am also writing this book as a sociologist. This means that I understand social class in terms of relationships; not just economic relationships but, as referred to by Harriet Bradley, a much broader web of social relationships, including those of life style, educational experiences and patterns of residence.