Education and Career Choice

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. Educational and Career Decision Making: An Introduction to the Issues

   • Patrick White

   Pages 1-34

3. Methods, Context and Sample

   • Patrick White

   Pages 35-46

4. Contextualising Post-16 Transitions: National, Regional and Historical Trends

   • Patrick White

   Pages 47-82

5. Conceptualising Choice: Types, Stages and Models

   • Patrick White

   Pages 83-105

6. Choice Motivations in Year 9

   • Patrick White

   Pages 106-121

7. Choice Factors and Rationales in Year 11

   • Patrick White

   Pages 122-152

8. Destinations, Aspirations and Trajectories

   • Patrick White

   Pages 153-166

9. Concluding Remarks

   • Patrick White

   Pages 167-171

10. Back Matter

    Pages 172-188

    PDF

This research project offers a new perspective on post-sixteen transitions. Combing secondary data with narrative accounts it describes how young people in the UK make choices at the end of their compulsory schooling and provides a dynamic model of decision-making and a thorough critique of current research in the area, beyond fashionable concepts.

• decision-making
• education
• Irish Republican Army (IRA)
• methods
• motivation
• Nation
• research
• schooling
• childhood studies

Education and Career Choice represents a refreshingly different take on the issue of student choice at the age of 16, mixing existing figures on participation and in-depth interviews with students at the time of making choices. Understanding more about this process of choice will be important for policy-makers and academics, in the UK and elsewhere, faced with widening participation and a 14-19 curriculum attempting to offer choice of both vocational and academic routes without creating a two-track system. - Stephen Gorard, Anniversary Chair of Educational Studies, University of York, UK

'...a well-written piece of research. It certainly comes to life and engages the reader when the author lets the students speak for themselves as they narrate their stories of decision making and taking...The end result is an erudite piece of research with a human face.' - Dione Mifsud, British Educational Research Journal

• University of Leicester, UK

  Patrick White

PATRICK WHITE is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Leicester, UK. He has conducted research on educational and career choice, educational markets and segregation, research capacity building, and the teaching labour market. He is particularly interested in social research methods.

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