This article engages with the notion that schools embody social class in their structures and practices. We draw on Bourdieu's critical concept of ‘field’ to describe the larger landscape of Croatian secondary schooling: a stratified system whose routes serve, and have served, to reinforce the maintenance of class (under)privilege. We also draw on the concept of ‘institutional habitus’, an analytical extension of Bourdieu's concept of ‘habitus’ to school settings, in order to capture how schools produce and reproduce class distinctions through their status, expressive order, curriculum and organisational characteristics. We ‘load’ these concepts with empirical meaning based on interview and focus group data we collected from students, teachers and parents in three, three‐year vocational schools in Croatia, finding that these schools embody a working‐class ‘habitus’. Students in these schools tend to come from less privileged family backgrounds than students in four‐year schools, practical subjects are prioritised over the academic, on‐the‐job training over school work and the schools are fairly under‐resourced.