The concept of the hidden curriculum is very familiar in the context of school education. It came to prominence in educational discourse following Phillip Jackson's classic study in 1968 in which he showed that, for some pupils, the formal curriculum was less significant in their learning than the hidden curriculum - which included the messages that were conveyed through the structure and organization of the institution, the relationships between teachers and pupils, the disciplinary regime, the assessment system, the sub-cultures that formed. In a school context, the hidden curriculum is usually seen as something negative, which runs counter to the stated intentions of the institution. In extreme form what can happen is that disenchanted students can turn the approved values upside down and create a subversive counter culture. For teachers, pupils who conform to the values of the school - by being polite and obedient, paying attention, working hard, doing their homework, and contributing to the school community (through sport , music, drama etc) - acquire status. But for pupils who cannot or will not meet these criteria status within their peer group can come from being disruptive, not completing prescribed work, playing truant, and refusing to take part in the officially sanctioned social life of the school. When we move to post-compulsory education we would expect some of these features, if not to disappear, at least to be felt in a less acute form. After all, most students are there voluntarily and see some benefit, in personal and/or vocational terms, in taking advantage of the learning opportunities that further and higher education offer. However, although the indicators of the hidden curriculum may not be exactly the same, the concept has continuing validity. An American study by Eric Margolis entitled The Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education (Routledge, 2001) has suggested that colleges and universities, despite their stated intentions, help to maintain race, class and gender hierarchies and reproduce conservative ideology. He further suggests that we need to be much more alert to the political function of post-compulsory educational institutions in relation their role in serving the labour market. A particular aspect of this is the way in which FE and HE institutions uphold the ideal of professionalism, which is a highly ambivalent concept, combining both altruistic and self-interested impulses. These issues have widespread relevance in the UK and European contexts. This paper offers an examination of the way in which post- compulsory students interpret the unspoken messages of their experience in further and higher education. What do they learn apart from the formal curriculum? How do they negotiate the system, with its codes and conventions, its assumptions and values? What impact does the structure of colleges and universities have on their understanding of what education is about? What meanings do they attribute to forms of assessment, grades and qualifications? How do they relate the codified knowledge which they are expected to acquire to the commonsense knowledge they draw on in everyday contexts? The paper will be primarily analytic in character but the intention is also to identify areas for empirical investigation and to identify policy implications.