This article reports on an anthropology thesis that aims to understand the school experience of 24 adolescents and young adults enrolled in a Ulis scheme of a vocational school. From their point of view, the ethnographic approach provides access to the meaning that they give to their normal experiences of students ‘included’ in and through the system to which they are attached. An analysis of the relationship between these young people and the school, how they adapt or oppose it, their choices, their plans, their relationship with themselves and others shows that they question the narratives and practices they are facing and wonder about their existence as secondary school students in general.