This article examines how public upper secondary school students in Brazil, with a focus on Rio de Janeiro’s Serrana Fluminense Region, perceive and assess the New High School reform implemented in 2024, seeking to understand what these perceptions reveal about curriculum, educational inequality, and the legitimacy of the reform in territorially unequal contexts. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach and combines 300 valid questionnaires administered to third-year upper secondary students across 14 municipalities with 14 focus groups conducted using the Photovoice methodology. The analysis combined descriptive statistics, thematic coding, and integration of quantitative and qualitative data. The findings show that students’ assessments of the reform are not scattered or random, but rather organised around relatively consistent clusters: criticism of the emptying out or disorganisation of content, questioning of teaching methods, the perception that the school is insufficient to prepare them for entry into higher education and for the future, the search for supplementary learning outside school, limited understanding of how the New High School reform operates, and perceptions of unequal comparison with private schooling. The findings also show that culture, arts, and sport emerge in students’ accounts as relevant dimensions of a broader school education. The study argues that the New High School reform should be understood not merely as a formal curricular reorganisation, but as a policy whose intelligibility and legitimacy depend on how it is appropriated and judged by its intended subjects. By foregrounding student voice, the article contributes to debates on curriculum change, educational justice, and public upper secondary education in Brazil.
