In this section of the blog you’ll find an overview of the findings emerging from this project. Follow the links to other pages to explore each theme in more detail.
- Understandings from School:
o Education and restricted personal agency Many students described a desire to ‘escape’ from formal education upon completing secondary school. This was accompanied by discussions of the constraints and restrictions placed on students by the ‘audit culture’ of assessment underpinning secondary education. Students associated the lack of agency or freedom that this system represented to them with education in general, and so described wanting to ‘have a break’ in their learning trajectories before returning to what they imagined would be a similar system of stress and regulation at university. One interesting lack in relation to how students discussed their learning trajectories was any indication of the love of a particular subject and a consequent desire to continue to study it.
o Understanding the relationship between qualifications and aspirations There is evidence of a disconnection between students’ aspirations for the future and their understanding of the meaning and value of qualifications. For some, the horizon of their future learning trajectory was GCSE or A-Level, which were considered gateways into ‘good’ employment and future financial security. Higher Education as an option arose only when considering examination failure, arguing that they might continue on to university in order to bolster their CVs and enter the kind of employment that better examination results might otherwise allow them to access. Understanding this interpretation of the relationship between qualifications and imagined futures represents an area of significant further research. Some students also revealed a limited understanding of the wider career options offered by Higher Education, with some linking a degree level qualification with a limited number of standard professional occupations such as doctor, lawyer and teacher.
- Understandings from Family
o The importance of family Perhaps not surprisingly, family proved to be a very important influence in the decision-making process to attend university. What was surprising was the fact that students were influenced not only by positive encouragement from parents and other family members, but also by ‘cautionary examples’ of older siblings or other family members who were perceived to have made unfavourable life choices after school – or for whom ultimately university was an expensive and unproductive experience. It was also surprising to find that university was not a point of discussion within some families: some students were even unsure about whether or not their parents had attended university, let alone discussing the likelihood of their own university attendance.
o Cost, class, and the commodification of university education The principal concerns for most students thinking about going to university were: a) rising costs, b) the ability to meet these costs, c) the cost-benefit of attending university, and d) the implications that this has for the ‘kinds of people’ who they imagined attending university. While not all students were fully aware of the costs involved in going to university, they were able to articulate discourse concerning debt and the relative value of a university degree in terms of future employment and financial gain. This overshadowed discussions of the academic, intellectual or social value of attending university. By extraction, discussions of the high cost of Higher Education also revealed students’ perceptions of university as a place of privilege: rather than being culturally a place for ‘posh’ people only, for them university is now mainly a place that only ‘posh’ people can afford.
- Students’ own reflections
o Education, cultural capital and aspirations Contemporary political discourse identifies a ‘poverty of aspirations’ among disadvantaged students as a principal barrier to improved educational outcomes. Among the Year 9 students interviewed, there was little evidence of limited long-term aspirations or a lack of imagination when it came to thinking about future trajectories. Students were sometimes limited, however, in their ability to imagine the means, educational or otherwise, by which these aspirations could be achieved. Even students with very clear and ambitious aspirations demonstrated marked gaps in knowledge in terms of how they would progress from one stage in their learning trajectories to the next, and how they might play an active role in this process, in order to turn their imagined futures into reality. We explore this issue in relation to the idea of cultural and ‘creative’ capital – students’ ability not only to imagine particular future trajectories, but also their capacity to imagine the means by which these trajectories may be navigated effectively.
o Media representations of Higher Education Perceptions of university among the students interviewed were deeply influenced by representations and ideas derived from media consumption, particularly from US-based films and TV dramas. The impact of media consumption on perceptions of Higher Education far outweighed any other source of information, and was considered among the students to be much more important than teachers or school discourse in shaping their ideas about attending university.
Implications: Each of these themes is presented in the findings section below. A thread running through the findings is the extent to which students were mystified by the world of university, and the pathways towards it. The ability of students to place Higher Education within their vision of the imagined future was hampered both by a lack of knowledge and understanding about university, and also by the mystification of the world of university: not only did students not know about university, they lacked the ability to recognise the kinds of cultural capital and agency necessary to open the doors to Higher Education. Learning to recognise the cultural capital that will allow them to do this represents an enduring challenge for schools, families, and for students themselves. This finding is not new: one of the contributions of this study is to indicate where the greatest gaps in knowledge are and how they are impeding students’ navigation of subject choice, applications and financial support that make up the pathway to Higher Education. The research also reveals that students are navigating several sets of practices simultaneously – family, friendship, school – and unsurprisingly find that these practices are not always in alignment.
We found no evidence that the academic and other achievements that their schools valued for them dominated over what was prioritised by family and friends. Students tended to envisage university as an extension of school in terms of examination pressure and constraints on their time. There was also no evidence at all of students wishing to study a subject based on their enjoyment of it. Their view of Higher Education was instead instrumental and based on its economic value. There was no indication that these students lacked ambition, nor were their ambitions related to fantasies of celebrity. Their anticipations about their future trajectories were usually entirely rational, with evidence of intelligent cost-benefit analyses, albeit of an informal kind. Where there was a degree of fantasy was in the images of Higher Education gleaned from film and television. This was, for us, a new finding offering considerable food for thought.
The implication, therefore, is that there is a continued need to demystify university as a possible future option for secondary school students and for their families. The accounts given by students also suggest that, in most cases, their families paid little or no attention to university as a possibility for their children. In Chapter 4 below, we put forward a number of possible ways of addressing this gap and the misalignment of school and family priorities. The suggestions include developing better networks between home and school; encouraging the construction of ‘common knowledge’ about why university education matters between families and schools; increasing family awareness about the costs of university; developing understandings of the social and cultural aspects of the university experience; encouraging positive understandings of academic life at university; and creating ‘third spaces’ in schools to bridge the gap between the worlds of secondary schools and universities.
Raising Apiration in Oxford City Schools 