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Everyone will agree that education ought to prepare young people to lead a meaningful life, but there are different ways in which this notion can be understood. A religious interpretation has to be distinguished from the secular one on which this paper focuses. Meaningfulness in this non-religious sense is a necessary condition of a life of well-being, having to do with the nesting of one’s reasons for action within increasingly pervasive structures of activity and attachment. Sometimes a life can seem meaningless when it is not so in fact. In more extreme cases it may in fact be to some extent meaningless. Equipping young people for a meaningful life is a worthwhile, but not all-important educational aim. Educators should help them not only to see their lives as meaningful but also to lead lives that are meaningful. This involves continuous engagement in the nesting of reasons mentioned above. Where autonomy is also an aim, temperamental attunement to possible options - rather than exposure to all possible options - and time to explore them are important considerations. Questions arise here both about social justice and about whether current school curriculum and timetabling arrangements help or hinder pupils in living a meaningful life.

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A much larger proportion of English 14-year-olds expect to apply to university than ultimately make an application by age 21, but the proportion expecting to apply falls from age 14 onwards. In order to assess the role of socioeconomic status in explaining changes in expectations, this paper applies duration modelling techniques to the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, analysing transitions in young people's expectations both from being 'likely to apply' to being 'unlikely to apply' and vice versa. Young people's socioeconomic background has a significant association with changes in expectations, even after controlling for prior academic attainment and other potentially confounding factors; in addition, young people's backgrounds affect their responsiveness to new evidence on academic attainment at age 16. This suggests more could usefully be done to maintain the educational expectations of academically able young people from less advantaged families, especially providing guidance on how to view new academic results.

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The many knowledge inputs that underpin teaching can be categorised in various ways depending on point of view and analytical purpose. Five different ways of describing the knowledge base are set out here. None is considered satisfactory in terms of addressing how teachers access their knowledge base or how classroom behaviour is affected by different knowledge inputs. A new model is presented, derived from Lonergan’s (1957) epistemological analysis of common sense. This is predicated on a concept of teaching as an intelligent, knowledge-based activity and takes proper account of teachers’ professionalism.

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Although the National Targets for Education and Training [NTET] in England and Wales include indicators for lifelong learning, and the progress towards the targets set for these indicators has been lauded by politicians and other observers, much of this apparent progress is actually accounted for by changes in these same indicators at Foundation level. However, once the ‘conveyor belt effect’, of passing increasingly qualified 16-18 year-olds into the working-age population instead of less qualified 60 and 65 year-olds, is taken into account, then progress in qualifying those of working-age is much less. In fact, there is then very limited evidence that lifelong learning targets have had any impact at all. Certainly work-based training has not increased, and may even have declined over the last decade, while some socio-economic inequalities in adult participation in education and training have worsened. The paper examines this apparent weakness for the current approach and its implications for the measurement of progress, in the light of a research review carried out for the National Assembly of Wales. It therefore asks increasingly important questions about targets, such as what they are for, and whether those who set and monitor them are aware of their deficiencies and artificialities.

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The article investigates unequal admissions patterns at the University of Oxford. Statistical work shows differences in admission rates by social class, ethnicity, gender, qualification status and secondary schooling. In-depth interviews with admissions tutors, college and university officials and observations of eight admissions meetings provide insights into the processes behind those admissions patterns. Results illustrate that adjustment of applicants' performance in the light of their schooling can account for the statistical observation of a lower chance of admission for private school applicants compared with their state school counterparts. The advantage in admissions chances enjoyed by post-qualification applicants appears to be related to the lower risk they pose with regards to their attainment. Little direct evidence is found, however, to explain inequalities in admission rates by social class, ethnicity and gender. A tentative suggestion is made that homophilic tendencies among selectors might account for these unequal admissions rates. It is recommended that future research should use different methods, such as experiments or detailed observations, to gain a better viewpoint on these proposed mechanisms. The article concludes by considering implications for policy and the social stratification literature.

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Research shows that a lower proportion of women than men are in graduate level jobs, six months after leaving seven top UK universities. This paper presents new empirical evidence from a unique dataset on the significantly different attitudes and behaviours between Oxford men and women undergraduates that might explain why women are less likely to have secured a graduate level job than men. Lower self-assurance, firmer beliefs in gender stereotypes, strong prestige and gender-characterisation of occupations, and favouring sectors with informal and low-status entry, all contribute to a lower proportion of women securing graduate level jobs. Despite many advances in recent years narrowing the gap between men and women, there remain policy implications for curriculum delivery and co-curricular courses to increase women's self-assurance and assertiveness, and thereby enable them to aspire to and then secure a wider range of higher prestige occupations.

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There is international concern about high levels of youth unemployment and an urgent cross-national debate about how to facilitate young people's transition from education to working life. In England young people are facing a crisis of opportunity in terms of employment that is currently affecting 18-25 year olds, but has the potential to undermine 14-19 year olds' participation, progression and transition into further/higher study or the workplace. This is at a time when the government intends to raise the age of participation to 18 by 2015. We identify a range of factors that affect both the decisions and actions of young people and those working with them and propose a multi-level ecological model to aid understanding and positive intervention. At the heart of this model lies the 'local learning ecology' (LLE), which we argue can take on a different form depending on the mediating actions of education professionals and other social actors at the local level. We describe the features of two ideal types of 14+ LLE - 'low opportunity progression equilibria' and 'high opportunity progression eco-systems' - with the latter more likely to benefit all young people in a locality. We conclude by suggesting that the ecological model has the potential to be adapted for other public, private or third sector areas of activity.

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This paper reflects upon the nature of a target-setting and mentoring scheme in an 11-16 school in England, through a series of retrospective interviews with students who continued into further education. It considers the extent to which the initiative impacted both upon students’ formal academic achievement at 16+ and upon the subsequent longer-term aspirations of these students. Interviews with students who achieved considerable ‘value-added’ in their [General Certificate of Secondary Education] GCSE examinations suggested that the impact of mentoring was strongest amongst those students who came from homes where there was less expectation of them participating in further and higher education, and that this effect was not differentiated according to gender. The paper suggests that longer-term transformation of students’ aspirations, and the challenging of gendered course and career stereotypes, will only be achieved if schools adopt a more holistic and proactive approach to careers education and to widening participation for their students, and that the absence of such proactivity will limit the longer-term gains initiated by successful mentoring activities.

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As the costs of higher education in the UK have moved increasingly from the state to students (and their parents), more university students have term-time jobs. Based on a survey of students in four universities, this paper identifies the pattern of term-time working, its effects on studying and its implications for equity and for the higher education system. The study found term-time employment affected the quality of education. Both cultural and financial factors affected who worked during term-time. Students whose father did not have a degree and female students (especially those from ethnic minorities) were more likely to work during term-time and, hence, benefit less educationally from university. The extent of term-time working varied across the four universities. The research suggested that the financial system might lead to an increasingly polarised university system: those that facilitate term-time working and those that do not, with the more prestigious universities tending to be in the latter category. This would distort the university choice of those who needed to work during term-time, inhibiting their access to prestigious universities, and lead to greater disadvantage amongst those who worked despite being at universities which made fewer concessions for term-time working.

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Previous research has indicated significant variation between schools in the proportion of their students who go on to higher education. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the specific school characteristics influencing application and entry to tertiary education. This paper sets out to analyse the individual and school factors which influence the transition to higher education in the Irish context. The paper draws on a large-scale study of 4,400 students within 108 secondary schools in the Republic of Ireland. Almost three-quarters of the students in the sample applied for a higher education course. However, schools varied in the application rates of their students. These differences are found to be related to the background characteristics of students (in terms of gender, social class and prior ability) along with the institutional habitus of the school. It is found that school factors associated with increased college application rates do not necessarily appear to yield higher rates of college entry but rather that successful entry to tertiary education is related to general academic effectiveness in the school.

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