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Based on the life and educational histories of sixteen high-achieving, working-class girls applying to high-tariff universities, this paper rekindles debates about the role of agency within the decision-making process of young people who might not otherwise be expected to apply to such institutions. It draws on Margaret Archer's theorising to tease out the interplay between structure and agency in the form of reflexivity and show how this shapes the girls' educational trajectories, rather than pre-determining them. The paper highlights how social class powerfully influences working-class applicants' university plans, in the form of constraints and enablements, but also argues that the girls in this paper are not simply passive young women to whom things happen. As active agents, they are instead becoming increasingly skilled in reflexively navigating their own pathways through education and advance their applications to high-tariff universities in strategic and deliberative ways.

Being a graduate is no longer sufficient to secure a fulfilling and rewarding graduate role. This paper drew on Tomlinson's Graduate Capital Model to analyse the job-seeking narratives of recent computing graduates searching for a graduate job. Participants (n = 38), drawn from a national placement programme, were interviewed up to 12 months after they had graduated. Narrative interviews were analysed using the five graduate capitals of the Model, providing empirical evidence of the acquisition and application of graduate capitals, in particular through experiences of student work placements. The study found strong claims of human and cultural capital, arising from placement experience, while social and identity capital acquisition was found, but to a lesser extent. Fragile psychological and identity capitals were eroded by multiple unsuccessful job applications. This work empirically tested the Graduate Capital Model, contributing to understanding of capitals and their interplay.

In this paper, we consider the intensifying pressures on critical research and academic integrity in a research policy context that has come to be increasingly dominated by an instrumentalist mind-set. Using sensitising resources drawn from Geoff Whitty's critique of the 'what works' agenda, we reflect on the current conditions of academic labour and some of the key issues and dilemmas they pose for critical researchers in the sociology of education and beyond. In particular, we underline the trend for 'what works' agendas to become constitutive of academic identities and practices, including at micro-levels, such that the option of 'standing outside' them is shifting from being merely personally taxing to being institutionally disallowed. In addition to highlighting the dilemmas this creates for critical researchers and the threat this poses to expansive and democratic approaches to education, the paper emphasises the centrality of relationship-forming in understanding and underpinning academic integrity.

This paper is based on findings from an email interview study with 20 academics (17 women, 3 men) in the UK on short-term, insecure or 'casualised' contracts. The paper focuses on their perceptions of the effect their contract status has on the lecturer/student relationship: particularly in regard to student perceptions of their legitimacy and status. Using a poststructuralist theoretical lens, we explore lecturers' concerns or anxieties as to whether they may be interpreted as less legitimate than permanent staff; and the emotional labour involved in the work done to 'cover' for the difficulties that a lecturer's contract status causes for the quality of their teaching content and organisation. We also explore the considerations of some participants to voluntarily 'disclose' their status to students and the possibilities of such acts as a form of resistance to dominant discourses of the legitimate academic.

Academic conferences have a central role in shaping career trajectories, reproducing or resisting exclusions and moulding relations in and to academia, thus shaping academic networks. In this paper, we consider how precarious academics subvert and navigate conference spaces, including emerging online forms. Particularly, we explore how academic conferences generate and nurture friendship as an enduring political practice that undermines neoliberal economic, political and social structures. This is contextualised in UK higher education amidst mass job losses, increased precarity and the subsequent breaking of academic bonds. In interviews with academics and our own auto/ethnographical experiences, we explore how friendship emerges in and resists the exclusions of the conference space for precarious researchers. Finally, we explore how the nurture of friendship by precarious scholars at academic conferences promotes collective action to resist neoliberalism within the academy.

This paper examines the history of the expansion of educational opportunities in the UK, to understand how different generations of ­working-class students managed to access HE. Based on 23 life-story interviews with working-class students, the study highlights how the changing dynamics of the structure of compulsory education and the labour market have shaped working-class students' views of HE. Exploring the changing structure of opportunity, and how this has shaped working-class students' sense of social position, is key to understanding the uneven pattern of working-class pathways to HE across generations. It is evident that different types of secondary school experience and opportunities in the labour market affected working-class pathways to university with the nature of the school environment and employment shaping various expectations. This article concludes that people's understanding of their social position within the educational and occupational opportunity structure leads to variations in ­working-class transitions to university across different generations.

Over the last 30 years higher education has seen a rise in new managerialism across all its activity, driven by neoliberal economic policy. Professional doctorates (PDs) have been part of this rise, increasing in number considerably and spawning a related interest in researching doctoral work. However, there have been few studies focused on how students develop an understanding of theory/theorisation and how supervision supports it. This paper reports on a research project involving interviews with supervisors from professional doctorate in education programmes in the UK, as a particular example of PDs in general, to explore the process of theorisation. Drawing on Bernstein, it shows how supervision, and wider programme design, are mediated by the increasingly managerial context of doctoral study. The study raises questions about the ways in which students and supervisors engage with both methodology and theory/theorisation in working together and subsequent implications for the quality of doctoral work.

Research on international students' post-study plans centres on factors influencing migration and career decisions. However, few studies have considered the impacts of individual institutions on students' aspirations and their subsequent transitions after graduation. In this paper, I employ the notion of institutional habitus in order to explore the extent to which higher education institutions expand or limit the range of options that international students could envisage or realise. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 55 non-EU international postgraduate students from three different UK universities, this study aims to uncover the complex diversity that underpins ostensibly similar UK higher education degrees. Notwithstanding the overlapping influences of individual, family, friends and institution, I argue that individual institutions play a significant role in shaping the ways in which participants imagine and experience the field of possibilities after graduation. This perspective also enables a more detailed examination of differences between and within the institutions.

In this paper we provide a framework for conceptualising transitions from Vocational Education and Training (VET) programmes to Higher Education (HE), by bringing together Bourdieu's and Bernstein's theoretical approaches with the view to attend to the often side-lined epistemic and pedagogical parameters. We utilise the Bourdieusian tools of field, habitus and capital to capture the relational, material and cultural aspects of HE transitions. In using a Bernsteinian lens we shed further light into how social agents acquire differentially structured and valorised knowledges and develop a sense of themselves as hierarchically positioned knowers. The metaphor of transitional frictions is utilised to capture the ongoing struggles that students with a VET background experience as they make the transition to HE. We argue for the need of widening epistemic access and putting in place enabling pedagogies that can ease these "transitional frictions," thereby potentially increasing the chances of successful HE participation and completion.

This article responds to criticisms, put forward by Harrison and Waller in this issue, of an earlier paper by Noble and Davies. In particular, we argue that our interpretation of earlier quantitative research is correct, that Harrison and Waller have misconstrued the purpose of our previous paper and the analysis it contains, and that they (mis-)attribute to us a series of propositions and standpoints that are not in our paper. In the light of increasing policy interest in the extent to which providing information can lead to "more well-informed choices" about participation in higher education, we remain of the view that researching the role of cultural capital in the students' "immanent choices" is a matter of considerable importance.

This paper is based on a qualitative case study of undergraduate curriculum design and pedagogic practice in the new University Business School (UBS). Data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 24 academics from across a range of business sub-disciplines together with an extensive documentary review of materials relating to two undergraduate degree programmes. The case study found that the UBS curriculum had become recontextualised as a "business project" in which programmes were constructed as "products" for the higher education market. The associated pedagogy was largely confined to behaviourist problem--solution routines based on narrow projections of the "real world" of business. This paper contends that UBS undergraduate programmes were designed in a generic mode in response to the material and discursive influences of marketisation. As a consequence, "epistemic chaos" had arisen in which knowledge and pedagogy had become fragmented and amorphous.

The provisions of the Higher Education Act (2004) have renewed interest in widening participation research. Therefore, this paper explores the development of this scholarly field, primarily in the United Kingdom, by examining major trends in the study of higher education. Political debates related to higher education, the prevailing structure of the sector and predominant sociological perspectives have largely shaped the empirical and theoretical concerns of widening participation research. These delimiting factors have resulted in incomplete accounts of the barriers to higher education, which do not fully explore the relationship between students' social characteristics, learning experiences and university careers. Furthermore, contemporary research runs the risk of reinventing the wheel and replicating the mistakes of the past, since there has been a collective act of forgetfulness with respect to earlier contributions. In contrast, this paper provides guidelines to facilitate a holistic agenda for future widening participation research.

Higher education (HE) is often viewed as a conduit for social mobility through which working-class students can secure improved life-chances. However, the link between HE and social mobility is largely viewed as unproblematic. Little research has explored the possible impact of academic failure (in HE) on the trajectories of working-class students or the ways in which working-class students may re-construct their career aspirations as a result of such academic failure. This paper seeks to fill this apparent gap by focusing on a group of non-traditional students enrolled on a BA undergraduate programme in a post-1992 university. Utilising Bourdieu's notion of habitus, the paper identifies how academic failure contributes to possible trajectory interruptions and whether these are temporary or possibly permanent. It specifically focuses on how working-class students interpret and respond to their academic failure and the possible impact this has on their social mobility.

This paper draws on the theory of Basil Bernstein and on more recent applications of it by Rob Moore, John Beck and Michael Young to respond to recent calls for the replacement of discipline-based university faculties and departments with "problem-based" curricula and programmes of study. It considers, particularly, the potential consequences of such a shift in higher education policy for the identities of university teachers, researchers and students, and suggests that these calls for reform are premised especially on the problematic assumption that, in Bernsteinian terms, "regionalised" curricular inputs can be expected to produce "generic" knowledge outcomes within the university. (Contains 10 notes.)

This paper examines whether women and men publish journal articles at a level comparable with their representation within the social sciences. The paper also explores sex differences in patterns of single authorship and co-authorship. To do so, demographic data of the UK social sciences is compared with a sample of UK-authored journal articles. The findings of the study show that, overall, female academics contribute to a lower proportion of journal articles than the proportion of academic staff that they constitute. However, within certain disciplines (social policy and psychology) women publish articles at a level comparable with the proportion of the discipline that they constitute. These findings, it is argued, can be helpfully understood as both cause and consequence of the gendered academy. (Contains 8 tables and 1 figure.)

This paper explores some of the unresolved tensions in higher education systems and the contradiction between widening participation and the consolidation of social position. It shows how concepts of capital derived from Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam provide a powerful basis for critique, but risk a deficit view of students from less privileged backgrounds. These students are more likely to attend lower-status institutions and engage with an externally focused curriculum. The paper argues for greater attention to agency, and community and familial capital, in conceptualising the resilience of those from less privileged backgrounds. While the recognition of "voice" is important, a curriculum that acknowledges the context independence of knowledge is essential if these students are not to be further disadvantaged.

This paper focuses on formative assessment in the field of higher education. It examines Bernstein's work on vertical discourses and knowledge structures with the view to deepening understanding of the concept of assessment "for" learning. The first part of the paper draws on Vygotsky's work on concept development and Bernstein's work on knowledge structures to explain why "generalisation" and "hierarchy" are central in knowledge acquisition. It then explores Bernstein's claim that, within the vertical discourse, different knowledge structures (hierarchical and horizontal) afford greater or lesser visibility of their epistemic structure, and thus of their evaluation criteria of what counts as a legitimate text. The second part of the paper investigates the ways epistemic expectations are signalled through the practice of evaluation to first-year university students in a professional education course and proposes that markers do not offer students stuffiest access to recognition rules necessary for producing legitimate texts in the future. Drawing on Maton's distinction between semantic gravity and semantic density, the paper offers an example of how markers could recast what is present in students' work to offer students access to key ordering principles in vertical discourses. (Contains 2 tables and 18 notes.)

At a time when "personal development planning" is being rolled out across the UK higher education sector, this paper explores young adults' inclinations to plan for the future in relation to work, relationships and other aspects of life. Although Giddens has emphasised the prevalence of strategic life planning (or the "colonisation of the future") in all strata of contemporary society, du Bois Reymond has argued that there are important differences by social class, with young people from more privileged backgrounds more likely than their peers to engage in such life-planning activities. This paper draws on interviews with 90 young adults (in their mid-20s) to question some of these assumptions about relationships between social location and propensity to plan for the future. It shows how, within this sample at least, there was a strong association between having had a privileged "learning career" (such as attending a high-status university and identifying as an "academic high flier") and a "disinclination" to form detailed plans for the future. In part, this appeared to be related to a strong sense of ontological security and the confidence to resist what Giddens terms "an increasingly dominant temporal outlook." (Contains 2 tables.)

Theorists of friendship in contemporary society have suggested that our relationships with peers are characterised by their emphasis on openness, disclosure and emotional communication. Moreover, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue that friendship, as a deliberately sought, trusting partnership between two people, can play an important role in countering some of the negative consequences of a market-driven society, "acting as a shared lifeline to take the weight of each other's confusions and weaknesses". However, drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with students from nine different higher education institutions, this paper will argue that such theorists overlook significant complexity in the ways in which young adults choose to "order" their friendships. Indeed, it will suggest that highly individualised and ruthlessly competitive approaches to academic study can be maintained alongside more socially cooperative relationships with friends and peers, played out in non-academic arenas. The paper will discuss the implications of this for both sociological theorising about friendship, and policy and practice within the higher education sector. (Contains 2 notes.) [The research on which this paper is based was funded by the Society for Research in Higher Education.]

This paper argues that the recent debate about plagiarism has taken on aspects of a moral panic, which reflects underlying anxieties about the state of higher education in the United Kingdom. In contrast to the moral absolutism of some commentators, we argue for the significance of posing the phenomenological question of "what is plagiarism in its appearing?" We present a detailed idiographic analysis of two cases taken from a wider study of staff perceptions of plagiarism looking at the multiple meanings of plagiarism in the life-world of individual staff. Our approach does not entail judgemental relativism; rather, it involves a proper recognition of the limitations of rule-bound approaches to complex ethical matters. We argue for a virtues-based approach to plagiarism, which recognises complexity, and for a more measured and collegial debate.

This paper draws upon a range of ideas and concepts developed by the British sociologist Basil Bernstein to examine recent challenges and changes encountered by members of professional occupations, including those who teach and research in higher education. The paper discusses and seeks to develop Bernstein's analysis of how particular structurings of knowledge may be related to the formation of occupational identities centred in what Bernstein refers to as "inwardness" and "inner dedication". It then examines a range of challenges to such identities--particularly those arising from the "regionalisation" of knowledge and from "genericim". The paper concludes by assessing the prospects for perpetuating such identities in an era of increasing marketization and managerialism.

This paper examines the role that social characteristics play in determining the academic success of students who begin university with roughly similar entry grades. The data used were drawn from the administrative records of over 38,000 UK-domiciled undergraduate students from one British university between 1998 and 2009. Results show that the characteristics of entrants have varied only slightly over this period and intake is still largely in favour of "traditional" entrants: namely those from professional occupational backgrounds, the privately educated and those of traditional age. The relationship between background characteristics and eventual academic success also reflects patterns seen at earlier education stages. However, when prior attainment was taken into account, the link between degree outcome and many social characteristics does diminish -- notably for students who were privately educated and who came from professional occupational groups. This suggests that once students have overcome barriers to admission, it is entry grades rather than social characteristics that may most strongly influence eventual academic success.

Since the neoliberal reforms to British education in the 1980s, education debates have been saturated with claims to the efficacy of the market as a mechanism for improving the content and delivery of state education. In recent decades with the expansion and "massification" of higher education, widening participation (WP) has acquired an increasingly important role in redressing the under-representation of certain social groups in universities. Taken together, these trends neatly capture the twin goals of New Labour's programme for education reform: economic competitiveness and social justice. But how do WP professionals negotiate competing demands of social equity and economic incentive? In this paper we explore how the hegemony of neoliberal discourse--of which the student as consumer is possibly the most pervasive--can be usefully disentangled from socially progressive, professional discourses exemplified through the speech and actions of WP practitioners and managers working in British higher education institutions.

Robust academic research on the topic of students involved in the sex industry is in its infancy, yet the relationship appears consistent and permanent. This paper draws on findings from the largest study into the stripping industry in the United Kingdom to explore the relationships between students, sex work and consumption. To make sense of the relationship between students and participation in the sex industry, a deeper understanding of other social and cultural processes is needed. In this discussion we argue that the following points are relevant and interlinked: changes to the nature of sexual commerce and sexual consumption as they become part of the marketplace; changes in social attitudes and the rise of "respectability" in sexual commerce; the "pleasure dynamic" amongst students; and changes in the higher education structure that place students as consumers as well as financially fragile. We set out a future research agenda given that this relationship is set to grow as the individual bares the cost of higher education.

This is an attempt to review what I am now. To give some coherence to an incoherent academic life, written against the background of profound changes is what it means to be an academic. The paper begins in a welfare state primary school and ends in a global neoliberal university.

Extant research on family migration for education has focused almost exclusively on the education of children. We thus know very little about family migration when it is driven by the educational projects of parents. To begin to redress this gap, this paper explores the experiences of families who have moved to the United Kingdom primarily to enable the mother or father to pursue a degree. It argues that, in common with what we know of UK student-parents, both choices about and experiences of higher education are strongly differentiated by gender.

Employing students to market higher education (HE) and widen access is established practice in the United Kingdom and other developed countries. In the United Kingdom, student ambassadors are held to be effective in aspiration and attainment-raising work and cited as "role-models" for pupils. The focus of this paper is student ambassador outreach work in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics including medicine) at two contrasting universities. The study deployed ethnography and approaches from across the social sciences to trace and analyse discourses surrounding ambassadors, and to explore their positioning within learning contexts, relationships with pupils and the learning that takes place. Findings indicate that where ambassadors work collaboratively with pupils in contexts with "informal attributes", pupils can identify closely with them. However, in contexts with more "formal attributes", differences, not similarities, are highlighted. Stakeholder interests are found to significantly impact on learning contexts and on ambassadors' efficacy as HE "role-models".

This paper explores the layered transitional experiences of a semi-professional athlete named Jack (a pseudonym) between the fields of professional sport and further and higher education. Our analysis is framed by the quadripartite framework of structuration and focuses on Jack's "in-situ" practices at his college and university in order to illustrate how these can operate to reproduce, transform, and challenge the habitual discourses and rituals that circulate within these institutions by generating forms of corporeal empowerment for young athletes who have valued conjunctural knowledge. The findings highlight the fragility of the transition process and raise questions regarding how the experiences of young people are shaped by the relationships between employment and post-16 education. Jack's experiences have implications for both policy and practice within further education and higher education.

This paper illustrates how critical use of Basil Bernstein's theory illuminates the mechanisms by which university knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy both reproduce and interrupt social inequalities. To this end, empirical examples are selected from the findings of the ESRC-funded project "Pedagogic Quality and Inequality in University First Degrees" (RES-062-23-1438, November 2008-January 2012). The project investigated sociology-related social science degrees in four social science departments in universities in different positions in influential UK higher education league tables. A Bernsteinian lens throws fresh light on how university education might contribute to a more egalitarian society. (Contains 1 table and 5 notes.)

In the last two decades, undergraduate medical education in the United Kingdom has undergone several important changes. Many of these have revolved around a paradigmatic shift from "paternalistic" to "patient-centred" approaches to healthcare. Adopting a Foucauldian understanding of power and borrowing from Freire's critical pedagogy, in this paper I draw upon ethnographic data from one UK medical school to illustrate the recurrence among medical students of narrow and uncritical understandings of patient-centred practices. These understandings highlight a tension between the ideals and frameworks of medical education policy and students' conceptualisations of professional learning and practice. I explore this tension by tracing some possible links between students' views of patient-centredness and the teaching practices at the medical school. I argue that more critical approaches to medical learning are sorely needed and suggest some directions for medical education that would help support the personal and professional development of more critically aware practitioners.

Higher education is commonly described as offering combinations of work and leisure, but the implied relationship is often limited. Different conceptions of leisure, especially leisure as pleasurable experience, raise new possibilities for seeing academic activity itself as leisure in several important senses. The importance of identifying pleasure as a necessary component of work and politics is discussed. Several more specific approaches to try to understand such pleasures are reviewed: Cultural Studies approaches, the work of Bourdieu on taste, and some recent work in the Sociology of Leisure.

This paper explores Indian women's views on arranged marriages in the United Kingdom. It is based on research carried out with 32 Indian women studying at a university in the South East of England, UK. The article draws on Wenger's social theory of learning to explore how Indian women's participation in communities of practice in higher education contributes to their participation in arranged marriages. The concept of "social capital" is used to discuss how women are able to negotiate their participation in arranged marriages, It is used to examine the knowledge and identity resources that women develop through their participation in higher education, which provides them with the means from which to develop the necessary "bridging ties" leading to their active participation in the wider South Asian community. (Contains 8 notes.)

This article considers some of the ways in which the transformative power of Web 2.0 digital technology is reconfiguring learning, knowledge and academic identities in the contemporary university. Through a focus on five specific examples, we consider the impact of virtualization processes on spatiality, materiality and embodiment, and pedagogic relations. We argue for the benefits of taking a microsociological approach in order to reflect on the potential of virtualization to bring about new geographies of knowledge production and as a means to identify the ways in which potential transformations are uneven, problematic and contested. (Contains 2 notes.)

This paper discusses findings from a small-scale empirical exploration of the views, experiences and educational practices of middle-class minority ethnic families in the United Kingdom. It draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with 36 parents, pupils and "young professionals". Analyses consider to what extent generic class resources, as identified by the US work of Lareau, are evident within the educational practices of British middle-class, minority ethnic families. It is argued that generic class resources and practices were evident to the extent that parents expressed a desire for personalised education, felt comfortable voicing their opinions and concerns to schools, and were willing to climb the ladder of authority to get their voices heard. However, it is also argued that "race" plays a significant and complicating role that calls for a qualification (but not a negation) of Lareau's theorisation. (Contains 4 notes.)

This paper offers a response to a recent article where the authors argue cultural capital is the only determinant of the propensity of young people to seek to enter higher education, dismissing other indicators such as social class. This response questions the support the original authors draw from other literature and offers criticism of the sample used in their study, the survey tool employed, the analysis undertaken and their conclusions relating to the agenda of "widening participation". In reality, the wider literature suggests that social class, as represented by parental occupation, continues to have a role in explaining educational trajectories, even once other factors are controlled for. (Contains 1 note.)

To date, scholarship on international students has generally focused on flows from non-western economies to the main English-speaking destination countries (such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia). In contrast, we draw on a qualitative study of 85 UK students who have either completed or are considering undertaking a degree programme overseas. We found that, in opposition to a common image of "international students", UK students are not overtly motivated by "strategic" concerns. Instead, they are seeking "excitement" and "adventure" from overseas study and often use the opportunity to delay the onset of a career and prolong a relatively carefree student lifestyle. Despite these ostensibly "disinterested" objectives, however, UK students remain a highly privileged group and their experiences serve only to facilitate the reproduction of their privilege. The paper calls for a more critical analysis of the spatially uneven and socially exclusive nature of international higher education. (Contains 3 notes.)

Embarking upon a pre-university gap year is an increasingly popular option among British students. Drawing on Brown et al.'s work on positional conflict theory and the increased importance of the "economy of experience", this paper seeks to explore this growing popularity and argues that the gap year's enhanced profile raises important questions concerning the processes by which certain groups of young people are able to gain advantage over others during a period of educational expansion. Indeed, it is arguably no coincidence that the gap year's popularity has taken off in parallel with this expansion, as the gap year emerges as an important means of "gaining the edge" over other students in the context of increased competition for entry to elite institutions.

There is a widely recognised national trend for girls to outperform boys at all levels of compulsory schooling. With few exceptions, however, most recent research has reported that, in relation to academic performance at university, men are proportionately over-represented at the First Class level. A number of general hypotheses have been put forward to explain this phenomenon, including those that assume gender-linked differences in cognitive and/or personality traits. A smaller proportion of research has given explanatory primacy to the broad subject area studied. More specifically, it has been alleged that the over-representation of men within the First bracket is largely a function of a "compositional effect" whereby men achieve proportionately more Firsts as there are more of them within the First-rich Sciences. Based upon analysis of 1,707,408 students graduating between 1995 and 2002, this paper seeks to provide the most comprehensive exploration, to date, of this effect. It confirms that a substantial proportion of the "gender gap" can be explained with reference to the male propensity to take degrees in First-rich disciplines.

Although Boudons distinction between primary and secondary effects, and its associated rational action models of inequality of educational opportunity, have been more influential in the field of social stratification and mobility than in the sociology of education, there is good reason to reconsider the theoretical and practical implications of this approach. The investigation brings conceptual analysis and empirical research to bear on Boudons arguments in a manner that may be somewhat unorthodox. The theoretical arguments are developed in the context of a detailed empirical investigation of three transitions--age 10 to O-level, O-level to A-level, and A-level to degree--using the extensive 1970 British Cohort Study. It is concluded that primary and secondary effects should be recognised as methodological rather than theoretical concepts, that the techniques used to identify them are independent of rational action theory and that, contrary to an influential position, the evidence suggests that primary effects are more important than secondary effects in the generation of social disparities in access to education. (Contains 3 tables.)