CONSTRUCTING CHOICE IN CONTIGUOUS AND PARALLEL MARKETS - INSTITUTIONAL AND SCHOOL LEAVERS RESPONSES TO THE NEW POST-16 MARKETPLACE

Since the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, the new further educa tion (FE) marketplace created in England and Wales has demanded that s chools and colleges compete in a bid to secure larger shares of funded post-16 provision. Little attention has been devoted to establishing how 15 and 16 year-olds interpret this new competitive culture, or how individual institutions perceive and respond to their marketplaces. T his paper reports some of the key findings of the 'Post-16 Markets Pro ject', a national survey of the decision-making of pupils as they appr oach the end of compulsory schooling at 16, and of the influence of FE institutions' marketing practice on that decision-making. Particular attention is focused on the different educational pathways or 'traject ories' young people choose in an increasingly diverse FE sector, and o n the timing of decisions and the factors that influence them. The bal ance between course and institution in decisions is explored, establis hing the market-value placed upon particular educational pathways by p upils according to, for example, academic intentions and cultural capi tal. It is demonstrated that the decision-making processes engaged in by school leavers are more complex than hitherto identified and that t hey have bought into the idea of their role in the education market as consumers. Analysis enables a conceptualisation of FE market forms an d processes to be identified within which diverse perspectives on choi ce processes and the interplay of supply and demand on the realisation of student choice emerge.