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Since the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, the new further education (FE) marketplace created in England and Wales has demanded that schools 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. This paper reports some of the key findings of the 'Post-16 Markets Project', a national survey of the decision-making of pupils as they approach 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 'trajectories' young people choose in an increasingly diverse FE sector, and on the timing of decisions and the factors that influence them. The balance between course and institution in decisions is explored, establishing the market-value placed upon particular educational pathways by pupils according to, for example, academic intentions and cultural capital. It is demonstrated that the decision-making processes engaged in by school leavers are more complex than hitherto identified, and that they have bought into the idea of their role in the education market as consumers. Analysis enables a conceptualisation of the FE market forms and processes to be identified, within which diverse perspectives on choice processes and the interplay of supply and demand on the realisation of student choice emerge.