Abstract

Drawing on a qualitative research, this article aims to analyze the implementation of a specific educational policy named, at first, School-Work Alternance (SWA). We consider this policy as a segment of a wider field of educational policies related to the Lifelong Learning. This article aims to develop the sociological and policy debate on the way this educational policy is producing a huge impact in the everyday life of schools. Our objective is to get a better understanding both of internal changes within the school field and of external changes in its relationship with the economic field. The main focus is constituted by teachers’ and principals’ social representations and practices and by adaptation processes they realize to respond to the political, social and organizational uncertainties. In particular, it will be showed as the variability in the form of implementation of SWA depends upon the structure of school field in its interconnection with the structure of the economic field. In this way, the SWA produces its structural effect in a specific way of the reproduction of educational and social inequalities. Students issued from general tracks will be destined to ‘conceptual’ experiences, where soft skills will be privileged, instead vocational students will be destined to activities where the hard skills will be favored.