A major strand of my work over 20 years so far has been the investigation of lifelong trajectories of education and employment past initial schooling. This has involved changes due to IT, and the ways in which this has or has not made learning, especially informal learning, more accessible (Gorard and Selwyn, 1999, 2005a,b; Gorard et al, 2000, 2003b; Selwyn and Gorard, 2002, 2003). While there is insufficient space here to cover this aspect in any detail, a rough summary of the results over 20 years would be that the online learning world is roughly the same as the offline world in terms of who has access to the latest technology. The stratification of learning is not, apparently, open to a technical fix.

This chapter brings place and time more strongly to the fore in explanatory models of learning, added to the more usual mix of sex, ethnicity and so on, and distinguishes between biographical and historical changes (Gorard and Rees, 2002; Selwyn et al, 2003). I have been doing this work since long before intersectionality theory became fashionable among those who had previously focused on only one stratifying variable at a time. I also try to distinguish between the determinants of, and barriers to, participation. Chapter 3 showed the patterns of educational outcomes lifelong. In a sense, this final empirical chapter pulls it all together.

Trajectories and determinants

The idea of typical learning ‘trajectories’ that encapsulate individual education and training biographies was introduced in Chapter 3. Some people leave formal education at the earliest opportunity. Some of these leavers return to formal learning at some time as adults, but a high proportion do not. Other people continue into extended initial education, but never return to formal learning once this is over. Others remain in contact with formal learning for a large proportion of their lives. Which of these patterns, from lifelong non-participation to lifelong learning, an individual follows can be accurately predicted on the basis of characteristics that are known by the time an individual reaches school-leaving age. This does not imply that people do not have choices, or do not face barriers, but rather, that these choices occur within a framework of opportunities and expectations determined by the resources that people derive from their background and upbringing.