Introduction Out of the total of 113,198 immigrant students in the Community of Madrid (Spain), mainly from (in order) Ecuador, Romania, Morocco, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Dominican Republic, China, Argentina and Bulgaria at the time of my fieldwork, 1 I met forty-three children in a special programme to ease the transition of immi- grant students into the school system of the Commu- nity of Madrid. The programme was called ‘Aulas de Enlace’ (literally, ‘Linking Classrooms’), and I con- ducted a three-year ethnographic study (2005–2008) in one of the schools where this programme was run. Using the ethnographic life-story technique, I have put together fragments of the incomplete narratives I collected from immigrant students in the Linking Classroom throughout informal conversations during my fieldwork. I will use their stories here to introduce the topic of my paper. Introducing the Students The first student is a 16-year-old boy from Romania, who arrived in Madrid and was enrolled in the Link- ing Classroom where I was doing my fieldwork. He started with no knowledge of Spanish at all, but was able to communicate in Spanish in three months. When I first met him, he was always speaking about his future, dreaming about going to the university to enrol in an engineering school. He graduated from the Linking Classroom programme in three months (in- stead of the standard six) and entered the last course of Compulsory Secondary Education before the school year was over. He was able to pass the exams and at the end of the school year he could be seen reg- ularly with Spanish kids, speaking very good Spanish. He played the piano and the teachers at the school helped him enrol in a music school to learn to play, even though he learned music and knew how to play the piano in Romania. During the second school year he was doing the first year of Bachillerato, which is a precondition to enter the University. He looked happy and when I asked him how he was doing, he told me that he had changed his mind about his education. The school rec- ommended him not to do the Science Bachillerato, as was his first plan, but an Art one, due to the fact that he played music. He told me that afer this advice he had tried to enter a Bachillerato in music, but his grades Re-shaping Migrant Students’ Trajectories through Public Policy in Madrid, Spain Margarita del Olmo ABSTRACT: This paper focuses on analysing challenges that students coming from different coun- tries face when they come to Spain and continue their school trajectories started in their coun- tries of origin. I use the narrative of one of these students, constructed through ethnographic work carried out in a programme designed to help migrant students ease their transition into the school system of the Community of Madrid. This narrative allows me to introduce some of the challenges these students face and how they re-shape their trajectories and their self-per- ceptions according to the possibilities their new contexts present them with. With this, I con- textualize the case study to show a broader picture of migrant students coming from different countries to stay in Spain during the last decade, and how schools themselves address this sit- uation in Spain, in general, and in Madrid, in particular. KEYWORDS: education policies, immigrant students, linking classrooms, students’ narratives Anthropology in Action, 20, no. 3 (Winter 2013): 20–31 © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action ISSN 0967-201X (Print) ISSN 1752-2285 (Online) doi: 10.3167/aia.2013.200304