Concerns about fairness play a crucial role in shaping the extent of public concern with inequality, with many individuals only supporting the redistribution of income that results from non-meritocratic processes such as family background. Despite the crucial role played by the education system in enabling or limiting economic mobility we know little about how citizens perceive the fairness of educational opportunities. In this paper we investigate the extent to which educational institutions and mobility outcomes feed back into public perceptions of the fairness of the education system. We use data from Western Europe in the 2018-19 European Social Survey, alongside newly collected data on institutional equality to investigate the relationship between educational mobility, educational institutions, and perceptions of fairness. Our results suggest that individuals perceive fairer educational opportunities when mobility is high, although they appear to be more responsive to educational outcomes than to institutional contexts. Importantly, the association between mobility outcomes and fairness perceptions appears to be conditional on individuals’ prior ideological beliefs, with a stronger association among conservative than leftist respondents. By contrast, we find only weak evidence for patterns of feedback consistent with the idea that social norms about fairness in education are endogenously shaped by educational institutions. Our results suggest that educational institutions play an important role in shaping perceptions of fairness, albeit conditional on individuals pre-existing ideological perspectives.