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In this paper I try to reflect about the overlapping of the problematics of school-family relationships and the sociological look about it. I try it through a double historical perspective (necessarily synthetical): a) about the emergence of that problematics, and b) about the emergence of its adoption by sociology. I build, further on, a corpus of Portuguese and foreign works, under book format, that include a contribution about that relationship that I consider to be pertinent, most of them of sociological nature. My analysis, in the second half of the paper, focus on the books that assume home-school relations as the object of study and that include, at the same time, a sociological analysis about it, paying special attention to the Portuguese literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social access to school education has taken place, from its outset, in contexts that are far from being considered uniform. Most recent research, especially the one carried out in the English speaking countries, has been demonstrating for the last three decades the existence of school effects in the pupils' schooling. Studies of a similar nature are, however, scarce in Portugal, even though an increasing number of factors combine to make school contexts gradually more visible, in what concerns both education policies and the social actors' strategies. This paper seeks to reflect upon the segregation phenomenon as it is shown by the way pupils are organised in school, as well as upon its impact on the pupils' school experience. In order to accomplish these goals, we handle the issues within the theoretical framework of sociology of inequalities in education, and adopt an articulated vision of school and family dynamics and strategies, in line with the concept of social composition. The second part of this study presents the results of a research that we have been conducting in the Autonomous Region of the Azores, which suggest (i) a substantial differentiation of contexts on the basic11 education level; (ii) an increase in this phenomenon; (iii) a potential impact of school differentiation in the pupils' experience, since the context tends to determine school expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]