RESOURCES: Review - Educational reform must create true equality

At the heart of this lies the question of the extent to which more disadvantaged young people will be able to afford the opportunities presented by this expansion.

In a pioneering study, Forsyth and Furlong set out to examine this question.

Building on an earlier study on access to higher education by young people from disadvantaged areas, they followed the progress of 395 young people who completed their secondary education in the summer of 1999. They consider the barriers these young people faced, and the ways those barriers were addressed.

Of the baseline sample, around two-thirds were still in some form of education more than two years after leaving school. But they appeared to differ from the wider student population in a variety of ways. They often still lived at home, had enrolled on courses at local institutions, and tended to have opted for lower level, more vocational courses.