The narrative recounts the final year of secondary school of 15-year-old Claudine, her brazen confrontations with her headmistress, Mlle Sergent, and her fellow students.

Claudine feels betrayed and causes trouble for the two women with the help of her friends, cynical Anaïs and childlike Marie Belhomme.

At the end of the book, everyone is at the ball when Miss Sergent's mother suddenly throws a man's shoe downstairs into the parlor from the living quarters upstairs.

Everyone is silent downstairs as the elder Sergent yells at her daughter for disgracing the family by sleeping with the superintendent of the school district.

Claudine at School as well as being a coming of age story is an example of homoerotic fiction in the tradition of Gertrude Stein's Fernhurst (1904), Ivy Compton-Burnett's More Women than Men (1934), Christa Winsloe's The Child Manuela (1933), or Dorothy Bussy's Olivia (1949).