Introduction

This is a book for educational academics and policy makers. But it is also a book for all educationists, especially teachers and parents. For both audiences it offers a double narrative. On the one hand it speaks about education and educational studies, on the other it relates directly to people's experiences about how education affects lives and educational decisions. Both narratives are important and intertwined for both groups. I would even say that they can bring people together.

I hope to broaden the hegemonic concept of education most of us currently work with, impacting upon it for change. This is work for the two audiences mentioned above. The work is for education to be a more dialogic and flexible, responsive concept, held between the rights, responsibilities and expertise of parents, teachers, academics and policy makers.

Whilst this is a big ambition, it is served by the data of the study to which this book connects. This data is from a small-scale study with significant and surprising ramifications. What is important in what I say comes directly from what people have told me. The voices of the research participants are crucial and central to this book's presentation. So, I am telling an educational story from research. But through recourse to this story, some theoretical points are also made in sociological, political, philosophical terms and contexts about how education functions.

The book offers:

• • New empirical evidence showing that, for adults, contemporary mainstream schooling is their main educational concept. Schooling means education and education means schooling.

• • Discussion of how adults do not have to see education as schooling. Indeed, the data shows that they actively wish to know it as something else also, encompassing a broader universe of different worlds of practice and theory.

• • Consideration of positive information provision about educational options beyond school choice. Many adults, as taxpayers, want and seek to discover, from official state providers, information about educational difference beyond mainstream state schooling. They want this in clear conceptual terms that can be utilised as everyday knowledge, whether they are parents or not.