“Aspirational capital” and transformations in first-generation Alevi-Kurdish parents’ involvement with their children’s education in the UK

With a focus on the London Alevi-Kurdish community from Turkey, the aim of this article is to analyse changes in parenting and home-school relations of two cohorts of first-generation parents arriving in the nineties (Nineties parents) and the noughties (Millennial parents). Against a backdrop of national data showing that “Turkish” children persistently underachieve in schools across Europe, this exploration of differences within the first generation challenges deficit models of home-school relations. Through adding “differences within a generation” to intersectional analyses of home-school relations, it facilitates the exploration of parents’ migration context, ethnicity, religion and community. Additionally, the article addresses migrant parents' access to different forms of capital in navigating the education system. This includes the contributions of children, the community associations and local schools which have made a difference to Nineties and Millennial parents’ relationships with schools. Finally, the analysis demonstrates how community activism can have much more powerful effects than parents acting alone