Who gets permission to enjoy their education?

Widening participation has become a central policy ambition in English higher education, but participation is not the same as permission.

Who decides what type of education we pursue – and to what level – not as training or insurance, but as something worthwhile and enjoyable in itself?

This is a question I return to often in my work, because it sits beneath many of the conversations we have with young people about subject choices, qualifications, careers, and “realism.”

It is rarely asked explicitly, yet it shapes who studies what, where, and with what sense of entitlement or anxiety.

In England, what children are encouraged to study – and how they are encouraged to think about their learning – is deeply shaped by social class.

This is not only a question of access but a question of permission – who is allowed to enjoy learning without having to justify its economic value in advance?

Means or end?

In many state schools and colleges, particularly those serving disadvantaged communities, subject choice at GCSE and sixth form is presented early and explicitly in terms of outcomes, with pupils encouraged to think carefully – and often anxiously – about employability, earnings, and return on investment.

Subjects come to be described, both subtly and explicitly, as safe, useful, or risky. Law, economics, business studies, and the sciences are often positioned as sensible, rigorous options with clear career pathways, while arts and humanities subjects – English literature, history, philosophy, classics, art – are more likely to be accompanied by caveats.

In many contexts, some social sciences – sociology, politics, anthropology, for example – carry similar warnings: interesting, perhaps, but what will it lead to? Is it worth the risk?

This positioning does not emerge from nowhere, reflecting genuine concern about financial insecurity and social mobility, but it also reproduces a classed logic in which some students must choose defensively while others are allowed curiosity.

Students from more affluent backgrounds are often permitted a very different relationship to learning – no one routinely asks a pupil studying classics in a private school what career the subject leads to, because the assumption is that education is doing something broader: shaping how they think, giving them confidence with ideas, and opening doors later. The difference is not ability or aspiration but permission.

Enjoyment as liability

There is a well-known insight from motivation research that captures this dynamic neatly: how do you stop a child enjoying something they love? Pay them. When an activity is repeatedly tied to external reward, status, or future payoff, intrinsic motivation is eroded, and learning becomes instrumental rather than exploratory.

The same mechanism operates in education, where students encouraged to see learning primarily as a route to future earnings find that subjects involving ambiguity, interpretation, creativity, or pleasure are recoded as indulgent – enjoyment itself becomes suspect.

For many working-class students, the message is that education must justify itself early, that curiosity must be translated into utility and interest defended. Middle-class students, by contrast, are more often permitted to study arts and humanities without explanation, on the assumption that the value of education will reveal itself in time.

Subjects and access

These early choices matter because selective universities value subjects, not just grades. Traditional academic subjects – English literature, history, mathematics, the sciences – are widely recognised as strong preparation for a range of degrees, developing transferable skills in argument, synthesis, abstraction, extended writing, and critical reading that universities reward.

By contrast, subjects positioned narrowly around application or industry alignment may not carry the same currency, even when taken seriously by students and teachers, with the result that some young people unknowingly narrow their options long before they apply to university – often at the point of subject choice, not admissions.

This is particularly stark when arts and humanities subjects are treated as optional extras rather than central academic disciplines, meaning students who might thrive in these subjects – and who could be competitive applicants to selective universities – are steered elsewhere in the name of realism.

From subjects to qualifications

The same logic that shapes subject choice also shapes qualification pathways. Media studies BTECs, for example, have long been marketed as practical, job-ready alternatives to academic study – routes into the media and creative industries that promise relevance, skills, and employability. Now, with the phasing out of many BTECs and the introduction of T Levels, this logic is becoming even more explicit.

T Levels are often described as a quality reform – clearer, more rigorous, more closely aligned with employer needs – and in some respects they are, but they also represent a hardening of the distinction between education for work and education for thought. Where BTECs at least occupied an ambiguous space,

T Levels are explicitly occupational, requiring students at sixteen to commit to a narrow sector and identity, while A levels remain broad, flexible, and reversible, continuing to be the preferred currency of selective universities. As Alison Wolf observed in her review of vocational education, lower-attaining students are often steered into qualifications that restrict progression. Reversibility – the right to change your mind – turns out to be a privilege.

The training paradox

Young people are trained for industries that do not recruit primarily through training but instead rely on practices that advantage those with existing social and financial capital. Research consistently shows that access to creative industries, for example, depends less on technical skill than on networks, unpaid labour, and cultural confidence, meaning vocational routes into sectors such as media – whether BTECs or T Levels – promise access to industries that continue to exclude those without those forms of capital.

At the same time, these qualifications often narrow academic futures, with early occupational specialisation reducing exposure to theory, extended reading, abstraction, and historical depth – precisely the intellectual habits valued by selective universities. In practice, these routes often manage risk rather than expand opportunity.

A different ecology

Private schools operate within a very different ecology of subject and qualification choice, with arts and humanities subjects sitting at the centre of the curriculum rather than at its margins, surrounded by rich cultures of enrichment: debating societies, drama productions, orchestras, reading groups, museum trips. Intellectual engagement is presented as normal, pleasurable, and worthwhile.

Radley College offers a particularly clear example – alongside traditional academic subjects, students encounter critical thinking fellowships, scholars’ thinking suppers, cultural and artistic initiatives, and a wide range of leadership and service opportunities, none of which are presented as employability training but simply as education.

Sociologically, however, they cultivate something very specific – confidence with abstraction, intellectual risk-taking, leadership, and a sense of entitlement to ideas. This is education unhooked from immediate utility, where there is no need to justify enjoyment in advance, and these opportunities supplement traditional academic qualifications rather than replacing them, widening options rather than narrowing them.

Even Radley’s partnership work with local schools, while genuinely beneficial, reflects this asymmetry – Radley students mentor, teach, and lead while state-school pupils receive support, pairing privilege with service in a way that makes inequality appear benevolent while leaving its structure intact.

Where I stand

I am a state-educated woman who spent formative years eligible for free school meals and later taught in state schools. I now head the Access department at Trinity College, Oxford, where my work focuses on encouraging state-educated young people, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds like my own, to apply to Russell Group universities and to study the subjects they love, including the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

In my work, I am frequently asked entirely reasonable questions about careers, student loans and debt, and these concerns are real and should be addressed honestly. But I am struck by who is required to ask them, and how early. Students from affluent backgrounds are rarely required to justify their curiosity so narrowly – they are trusted to enjoy learning and to assume that things will work out – while state-educated students are often asked to translate interest into employability before they are allowed to pursue it.

The returns

Part of my role now is to say something that can feel counter-cultural: that studying arts, humanities, and social science subjects at a Russell Group university – including Oxford – is not only intellectually enriching, but highly rewarded in the long term, including financially.

Graduates from selective universities enjoy higher lifetime earnings, greater employment security, and access to a wide range of professions across disciplines, meaning an Oxford degree in history or English is not a romantic indulgence but a powerful and flexible qualification that opens doors in law, journalism, policy, finance, the civil service and beyond.

Yet working-class students are repeatedly encouraged to see these degrees as risky or impractical, even when taken at the most selective institutions in the country, producing a cruel paradox in which those who would benefit most from the social and economic capital conferred by a world-class education are often the most strongly discouraged from pursuing it, particularly in subjects dismissed as “non-practical.”

This hierarchy of value is not confined to schools. Recent political rhetoric about “low-value”, “rip-off” or “dead-end” degrees — often illustrated by reference to creative arts courses — reinforces the idea that some forms of knowledge are economically suspect. When funding signals, regulatory pressure and ministerial language converge around employment metrics and industrial strategy, it is unsurprising that schools internalise those signals. Subject hierarchies are not invented in staff rooms; they are embedded in policy architecture.

Maintenance support tied to “priority courses” and proposals to withdraw funding from degrees deemed insufficiently lucrative, do more than shape university provision. They send a cultural message about which kinds of thinking are worth public investment — and for whom.

As Diane Reay argues in Miseducation, working-class students are urged to be “realistic” while middle-class students are encouraged to take risks. Widening participation cannot only be about who applies to university – it must also be about what students feel permitted to choose, and how early they are required to justify that choice.

It means telling students honestly that enjoying learning is not a middle-class affectation, and that intellectual pleasure does not have to be earned through future suffering. It means resisting the idea that working-class students must approach education defensively, selecting subjects primarily as hedges against failure. This does not mean ignoring material realities – student loans matter, careers matter – but so does the evidence that a degree from a highly selective university remains one of the most reliable forms of long-term opportunity available.

To deny working-class students access to that knowledge, or to treat their curiosity as inherently more dangerous than that of their privately educated peers, is not realism but aspiration management.

Some students are trained to be cautious while others are cultivated to be curious, some asked to justify enjoyment in advance while others are allowed to discover value later – and in this context, the move from BTECs to T Levels, alongside the growing pressure to choose GCSE and A level subjects for their perceived career value rather than enjoyment, does not disrupt this divide but sharpens it.

Enjoying education for its own sake has long been a classed privilege. It doesn’t have to be – but only if we are willing to challenge the assumptions about who learning is for, what subjects are “allowed,” and how early curiosity is required to justify its existence and start paying its way.