These extracts illustrate how dominant educational discourses of the ideal female pupil may be experienced as narrow and constraining by young working class women, who find it difficult to reconcile a positive view of themselves as pupils with their own notions of an assertive, strong femininity. The girls’ assertions of ‘loud’, active and visible femininities can be understood as challenging the forms of submissive, passive and quiet femininity that are usually rewarded within schools. For boys, such ‘challenging’ behaviours may tend to be read as part of ‘normal’ masculinity, whereas the same behaviours may bring young women into conflict with schools because they are interpreted as deviant and undesirable aspects of femininity (e.g., as problematic or aggressive rather than ‘assertive’).