ABSTRACT

This chapter sets out a conceptual framework to make sense of the struggles and affordances experienced by mature AHE students undertaking further formal education in FE colleges in order to gain entry to university. This framework is applied critically to a study that was carried out in 2012–2013 in a region of England. The chapter considers the aspirations that mature AHE students in the study held and how their initial choices of career were affected by social discourses of gender, age and social class and by the institutional cultures they encountered in schools. It then considers how students struggled with their social and policy contexts, the economic conditions they experienced, the systems of the colleges and their courses in which they were embedded and the agents of the state with whom they had to negotiate. The chapter then investigates the importance of interpersonal relationships to AHE students trying to develop their self-confidence and skills as learners.