You can probably remember at least one education choice you regret. You don’t have to be lazy or naive to pick the wrong subject, just lacking in information about what you will actually have to study on the course.
In England, this problem is concentrated at age 16. Young people are expected to choose a small set of subjects – three or four A-levels, or just one T-level, for example – that will shape not just their next two years but potentially how they succeed in the future.
In theory, there is lots of support: open evenings, prospectuses, taster sessions, careers platforms, guidance interviews. Yet disengagement and drop-out remain familiar features of post-16 education. One reason is that the system often treats course choice as a question of career opportunity, while leaving something oddly under-discussed: the curriculum itself.
That matters because students aren’t just choosing “qualifications”. They are choosing to spend hundreds of hours studying – reading, writing, experimenting, analysing – and then to be assessed in particular ways.
In a recently published study, I analysed an unusual dataset: what students thought about the A-level courses they were taking before they began them, and then, later, how well they did in those courses.
The study followed 191 students in a school sixth form who completed 674 questionnaires across 24 A-level subjects. The questionnaires were based on the specific curriculum topics and assessment practices that students would need to engage with on the courses offered in that sixth form.
The questionnaires asked how interested the teenagers would be in studying DNA, including what it is and how it works for A-level biology, for instance, or how much they’d enjoy learning about the management and conservation of coastlines for A-level geography. The questionnaires also asked how they viewed courses in relation to their future career aspirations and progression to university.
Across the subjects with enough data, students who reported higher interest in the content of a course were significantly more likely to complete their courses. But whether a student thought an A-level was valued by future employers, or that would help their progression to university, appeared less likely to affect their chances of completing the course.
This doesn’t mean careers don’t matter to course choice, but it does suggest career aspirations may not be enough to keep students motivated through the weekly pressures of course study.
Schools and colleges go to great lengths to provide guidance. But more information is not the same as meaningful engagement with what a course involves. Previous research suggests students often don’t rely on the course information they’re given to make decisions.
Choice overload
Linked to this is what psychologists call choice overload. Although we value having options, more choice can increase anxiety, reduce satisfaction and encourage us to take shortcuts when making decisions. It’s one reason students simplify decisions by picking subjects they think they know from GCSE, or those their friends are taking.
And for young people from backgrounds affected by disadvantage, choices can narrow towards what seems most likely to lead to employment, even where other interests exist.
And there’s another layer too: the environment of choice is shaped by competition. Research has shown that sixth forms are using open evenings just as much to market themselves to students as to provide information on what their courses cover.
For instance, in the competitive post-16 marketplace, a school may feel it is risky to recruitment efforts to dwell on the reality that their A-level history focuses on religion in the Tudor period rather than the saucier intrigues of the royal court. “Selling” and “informing” don’t always align.
Education policy implicitly assumes young people are to treat post-16 choices as an optimisation problem: maximise exchange value, keep doors open, choose strategically. This can reduce study to a trade-off: endure now, benefit later. For some learners, that works.
For many, it doesn’t, especially when their attention is already being pulled in multiple directions and when anxiety about their future is high.
But interest in what they are actually studying should not get lost. Interest sustains attention and effort. If we don’t know students’ levels of interest in course content to begin with, it becomes difficult to tell whether later underperformance reflects a poor fit between student and course, or limitations in how teaching and assessment are supporting that engagement.
Curriculum-first guidance is needed, making curriculum and assessment visible early and central to sixth forms and colleges’ offers to students. This should be at the heart of how they support teenagers making choices about their post-16 education.
There’s an additional benefit. If curriculum-specific interests can be measured reliably, this could help schools and colleges evaluate mismatches between course provision, the learners’ interests, and outcomes, creating a new way of thinking about “quality” in post-16 education.
It’s not only about who drops out, or whether GCSE results predict how well students do, but whether sixth forms and colleges are building on students’ intrinsic interests in curriculum disciplines.
It may not be impossible to avoid all regrets about choices in education. But if we start by asking learners what knowledge they would enjoy engaging with and acquiring over the next two years, we may go a long way in reducing those course choice doubts and improving the odds that their motivation survives the first difficult term.