Introduction

The previous chapter demonstrated that most participants vocalised ‘high aspirations’ for the future, though the extent to which they felt confident of fulfilling these varied. This chapter turns attention to the opportunity structures within each school which either enable or restrict young people's chances of succeeding in realising their aspirations. The pupils in each school already come from vastly different backgrounds with differing levels of resources (see Chapter 2). Thus, to what extent do the schools’ opportunity structures compound this privilege or disadvantage? It is important to shed light on these issues of inequality because within the system of education and the labour market, all young people are judged on the same terms. Their subjects studied and grades achieved are viewed as outcomes of their own personal ‘choice’ and ability.1 This chapter disrupts such a discourse by arguing that young people's choices must be understood as situated within different contexts. In Eagles Academy, General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) (and A level2) options are located within a ‘blocking system’, whereby pupils select subjects from specific timetable ‘blocks’. While the language of the blocking system may appear neutral at the outset, referring merely to the grouping of subjects, as I will discuss in this chapter, the system also functions to ‘block’ some routes for some young people. In contrast, the pupils at both Grand Hill and Einstein High benefit from a system of enhanced choice, with a vast array of GCSE (and A level) options and no restrictive criteria in place to ‘block’ any pathways. Drawing mainly upon theorising of Bourdieu and Passeron (1979; 1990 [1977]) and Bowles and Gintis (2011 [1976]) this chapter contributes to an understanding of how school systems and regimes continue to have strong implications for young people's educational pathways.

‘Option time in Year 8 is extremely important. The decisions you make now will be a significant step for your future life choices’

As is indicated by the title of this section (a quote from the vice principal of Eagles Academy taken from the Year 8 options booklet), the decision to take certain GCSEs over others will be directive of the pathway a young person is subsequently able to follow. That is, certain subjects will open doors while others will close them. This situation is compounded by the A level options presented and chosen (see Chapter 6).

University: aspirations and expectations

In this chapter, I turn to exploring participants’ aspirations and expectations for university alongside perceptions of the value and purpose of higher education (HE). This chapter also highlights inequalities in proximity and familiarity with the university field. Contrary to political rhetoric around the ‘poverty of aspiration’, most of the young people I interviewed in all schools wanted to go to university. Nevertheless, as will be explored in this chapter, there remained notable differences in respect to how university was understood and discussed. These differences presented themselves most prominently through the survey data. Those at Eagles Academy were less likely than the rest to express a positive expectation for university, something which might be explained by those pupils having less confidence in this as a probable outcome for them. In the initial questionnaire I asked pupils: ‘How likely do you think it is that you will go to university?’1 Unsurprisingly the Grand Hill Grammar and Einstein High pupils were the most confident that they would attend university, 90 per cent of Grand Hill pupils and 75 per cent of Einstein High pupils responded ‘likely’ or ‘definitely will’ compared to only 43 per cent of those at Eagles Academy (see Table 4.1).

It is notable that 43 per cent is still a relatively large proportion considering the proportion of pupils in Eagles Academy who gain the necessary GCSEs to continue to HE. Another point to note here is that the Grand Hill pupils’ figures are perhaps surprisingly low given the high academic achievement level within the school. Only 42 per cent said that they ‘definitely will’ attend university. During my fieldwork I showed these figures to Paul (the teacher overseeing my project) and he was surprised. He told me that far more than 42 per cent of their pupils will end up going to university. While a lot of these pupils still anticipated HE as part of their future, many expressed more modest expectations (for example, by ticking ‘likely’ on the questionnaire). This question is essentially tapping into expectations rather than aspirations. This is an important distinction (St Clair et al, 2013; Khattab, 2015; Harrison and Waller, 2018). While I do not wish to claim that one can be inferred from the other, I felt it more helpful to gauge pupils’ expectations at this stage.

Introduction

This chapter begins to present the findings of this research through engaging with the career aspirations of the young people in each school. As was discussed in Chapter 1, the concept of ‘aspiration’ in public and policy discourse tends to be reified as a one-dimensional, narrow and linear ‘thing’; thus we see the rhetoric around ‘raising aspirations’ which is always in relation to careers and assumes a hierarchy of aspirations as real and measurable. Interestingly, in line with other literature (Brown, 2011; Roberts and Evans, 2012; Allen, 2013) the aspirations of the young people in this research provide a challenge to this conception of aspirations, as what constituted a legitimate and vocalised ‘aspiration’ varied across the cohort. When interviewing I asked all young people how they imagined themselves at 25 years old. While this question left room for responses to span wider than in respect of jobs, most of the young people chose to respond in respect of their career aspirations. Arguably young people are highly influenced by the widely acknowledged focus on thinking about and constructing a future around jobs. As was noted by St Clair and Benjamin (2011), aspirations are often voiced by young people to serve a specific purpose. The young people may have been responding to my question in line with what they thought that I wanted to hear. It is important to highlight that not all of the young people responded to the question (of how they visualised their future selves) in relation to jobs, and this was particularly noted during the plasticine modelling, which left more space for alternative visions.

Flo did have a few concrete jobs that she was interested in doing but these had simply not featured in her initial thoughts about herself in the future. The aspiration which she prioritised was that of where she lived. Flo even followed this up with connecting being a general practitioner (GP) over a doctor to wanting to live in the country (she envisioned GPs existing in the remote countryside but doctors, she said, needed to be in a city with a hospital). Flo, much like the young people in Brown's (2011) research, appeared to centralise and prioritise a future focused around happiness, which for her meant living in the countryside with animals.

This chapter tells a more troubling story in which I return to the starting point of aspirations. Following an incessant policy mission to ‘raise aspirations’, with schools working hard to promote this discourse, young people now largely possess high aspirations for the future (see Chapters 3 and 4). In Chapter 8 I discuss the way in which the careers advisor in Eagles Academy, faced with young people with increasingly high aspirations but relatively little chance of fulfilling them, must work to realign aspirations with position in social space, cultivating within the pupils a particular disposition towards failure. In this chapter I present extracts from interviews with the careers advisor from Eagles Academy alongside notes from observations of one-to-one careers sessions where the careers advisor consciously works to lower aspirations. While all schools appeared to conduct some work to ‘dampen aspirations’, the form this took and the response from the young people differed. In this chapter I discuss how the Grand Hill Grammar and Einstein High pupils, secure in their dominant position in the field, confidently challenged the careers advisors. Meanwhile this was deeply problematic and painful for the Eagles Academy pupils as, unable to contest the school, they came to internalise the idea that they were lacking in the ability necessary to fulfil their ambitions.

Aim lower: doing the aspiration work

Despite political rhetoric of the need to ‘raise aspirations’ in disadvantaged communities, the careers advisor in Eagles Academy told me that students rarely aim too low. This corroborates the interviews I conducted with the pupils themselves where the majority held relatively high aspirations (see Chapters 3 and 4).

Grand Hill Grammar careers event question sheet

This chapter explores several fundamental features of ancient Greek and Roman ethics and considers some ways in which these features are still influential in contemporary education. Ancient ethics was generally undergirded by a substantive cosmology and related philosophical anthropology; ancient thinkers often affirmed the existence of some sort of objective logos that served as the ordering principle of the cosmos and in accordance with which human beings ought to order their lives. This two-fold commitment resulted in a focus on cultivating virtue. The chapter also discusses three educational arenas in which commitment to features of ancient ethics is manifested today: arguments for “flourishing” as an aim of education, “character education” initiatives, and the contemporary K-12 “classical education” movement.

What kind(s) of thinking and doing should inform how teachers might lead (working) lives that are “ethical,” and how should this translate to preservice teacher education? Two broad schools of thought are identified: teaching as an inherently “‘moral” endeavor, driven by “values” and requiring an educational approach to teacher formation; and teaching as a “profession” requiring formation following models of executive education found in other vocations, particularly medicine. After reviewing these two perspectives, consideration is given to programs that might best address these aims, assuming this is needed beyond learning on the job. The chapter concludes by identifying promising practices, established and emerging practices, across both moral and professional understandings, arguing that in each case these need to be adapted and developed to meet the needs of teachers more equally across a diverse range of cultural contexts.

Feminist ethics, the project of living with gender in all its varieties while also seeking to undo gender-related limitations, seems simultaneously retrograde, repetitive, and utterly necessary. This chapter seeks to make connections among several major feminist philosophers and transgender theorists, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Julia Cooper, Simone de Beauvoir, whose work unfolds these interconnections and differences in ways that also work through the contradictions of wanting to recognize how diverse women are but also not wanting to remain within the complex and constitutive but insufficient cultural definitions of gender.

This chapter provides definitions of academic freedom and its legal precedents, stemming from the First Amendment. The authors note the tension placed on the concept as it occupies a space between the purposes of democratic legitimation and the promotion of democratic competence. The strain on conceptualizations of academic freedom is exacerbated by a lack of legal clarity and the ambiguity of some of its key elements. Contemporary challenges, including the neoliberalization of the university and political attacks in the form of “divisive concepts” bills, will continue to test the discursive power of “academic freedom.”