Written as part of a project to understand young people’s university decision-making, this paper draws on data gathered from fieldwork carried out within the sixth form of an independent school. The broader study follows 12 young people on their journeys from starting A-level courses to receiving University offers. It argues for a more nuanced understanding than that offered by discourses of middle-class privilege and working-class disadvantage. It argues too for the need to look more closely at the independent school. The focus of this paper is the stories of three of those students, and their experiences of joining the independent sixth form after leaving state schools at 16. Carrying out research into the independent sector, I aim to deconstruct both popular and academic representations which mark it as a site of privilege. I challenge the idea that independently-educated students are somehow on a conveyor-belt to elite universities. I argue that the independent sector is either overlooked or used as a demonised ‘other’, and the students’ stories shed light and challenge clichéd representations. The paper argues for a broad interpretation of social class as a marker of identity. Socio-economic classifications offer a very narrow and sterile understanding of social class, but the inadequacies of such class labels should not discourage research into its enduring effects. The students’ narratives can be read as classed and gendered stories of the challenges faced in joining a new environment. In particular, their stories urge us to question commonly-held assumptions about what it means to belong to the middle classes, and in doing so, cast light on that grey and unstable terrain. Through not being working-class, they are a group that risks slipping between the cracks and crevices of privilege and disadvantage that so effectively dominates the educational research agenda. Moreover, in working with Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of habitus, capital and field, I explore how social class can be understood beyond the occupational labels affixed to people. I argue that Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field offer a more fruitful way of contributing to the debate about educational decision-making and social class. I acknowledge that habitus presents a challenge for empirical research, and as much as it is fashionable and widely-used within the sociology of education, evidence of its practical use is scant. My own interpretation of habitus adopts a formulation which I could work with, rather than refer to. To those who ask for greater clarity and a set of rules to follow, I argue that its very fluidity is to be embraced as a means to carry out a more subtle analysis of how class is lived and experienced.

Narrative interviews Observation Semi-structured interviews

That habitus, capital and field provide helpful tools in which to explore class in its broadest sense. That the independent sector is a part of the education system that should not be overlooked. That the middle-class is better described as middle-classes