Recent socio-economic changes, developments in school policy, and increased migration have added new dimensions to debates about educational inequalities. They concern one of the major challenges facing Sweden today, which is to offer all its students an equal education. What we know so far is that growing up in a disadvantaged neighbourhood with high rates of poverty, joblessness, and single parenthood are often used to explain lower levels of schooling, but that their mechanisms and interactions are not well understood. This is the focus of the present article. In it we use meta-ethnography to explore expressions about the education experiences of youths from suburban areas with high levels of unemployment and migration and educational performances lower than the national average to try to cast further light on these problems. We suggest that the common arguments used to account for the problem of school performance are strongly correlated with proficiency in the language of instruction and socio-economic conditions, but that these factors cannot account for the full extent of the problem. What it means to live within specific multicultural urban contexts is important as is the segregation and media representation of these areas and those who live in them.