New counter‐school cultures: female students' drug use at a high‐achieving secondary school

We draw on case-study research at a high-achieving secondary school in London to illustrate how school experiences may influence drug use and reproduce inequalities in reconstructed ways in late modernity. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, and observations. We focus in particular on the accounts of three female students expressing a shared counter-school identity and style to explore how drug use has become an important source of bonding, identity construction, coping and excitement for young women from disadvantaged families at high-achieving schools, including as part of strategies to resist the narrow focus schools can place on academic attainment, monitoring and discipline. We propose that, in late modern times, class-based counter-school cultures are being replaced with new consumer-based ones, but that secondary schools continue to act as sites for the reproduction of social stratification, as well as risk and harm relating to drug use. ©2009 Taylor & Francis.