Stokingham Sixth Form College: institutional culture and dispositions to learning.

Learning is high on the political agenda for post-compulsory education and training in England. Official discourses about learning assume a predominantly individualist stance, despite the development of theoretical models that stress the contextual and situated nature of learning. In a study following 50 young people through further education over 4 years, it became apparent that the institutional culture of the colleges had a significant impact upon students’ dispositions towards their learning. In this paper, we explore the nature and significance of this impact in a case-study sixth form college: an under-researched sector of educational provision. This is followed by a brief discussion of the implications of our analysis for issues of access, widening participation and inequality in relation to current proposals to reform age 16–19 educational provision in England. We conclude by identifying some of the questions about the fine-grained nature of that college culture that our data does not permit us to address directly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]