Prospective teachers’ practices under China’s ‘Examination-for-Entry’ system: a Bourdieusian perspective

Over the past decades, competitive examinations and assessments for public-school recruitment in China, referred to here as the ‘Examination-for-Entry’ (EFE) system, have become widely institutionalised, but little is known about how prospective teachers navigate this mature field. Drawing on interviews with 22 prospective teachers preparing for or recently passing the exam, this study examines their practices through a Bourdieusian lens. Findings show that candidates enact three patterns of practice, pragmatic, entrepreneurial, and developmental, each emerging from the interplay between field doxa, long-standing exam-oriented habitus, and uneven distributions of economic and examination-relevant cultural capital, together in some cases with access to bounded professional networks. While these institutionalised recruitment arrangements promote procedural fairness, their long-standing operation has also been accompanied by intensifying competition, an expanding exam-preparation market, and growing pressures on professional identity formation. Prospective teachers’ practices reveal tensions between bureaucratic standardisation and the cultivation of professional competence. The study advances sociological understandings of teacher selection policies and highlights implications for more fair and educationally meaningful recruitment systems.