The 11th February 2005 law on the organisation of handicapped children’s access to school planned for Équipes de suivi de scolarisation (ESS) to organise, as a team, a given child’s school career. These teams are coordinated by a Referent teacher who is in charge of inviting all the people collaborating in the child’s school career. The sociology of networks is a good way of describing the ESS in respect of the concept of “circle” (Simmel, 1981) : from a legal point of view, an ESS has a name, a specific mission and “mediation resources” (Gossetti, 2006). We ana-lyse the concrete functioning of these teams by means of an ethnographic study completed with semi-directive interviews and a national questionnaire sent out to all Referent teachers. By focusing on conflictual ESSs, we discuss the characteristics of these “circles”. This allows us to understand them as miniature replicas of the relationship between the universes of care and those of education, socio-historically constructed as in competition with each other (Mazereau, 2002).