Middle-class struggle? Identity-work and leisure among sixth formers in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the ways in which sixth-form students in Milton Keynes negotiate their identities and the symbolic significance they attach to leisure activities in the process of doing this. The paper draws upon qualitative, young-person-centred interviews with sixth formers in state and private schools. We address the investments of sixth formers in constructing themselves as autonomous individuals and argue that they do so from a position of middle-class subjects-in-the-making. Through an inversion of Willis' ( 1977) ( focus, our concern is to make explicit the implicitly middle-class identities sixth formers were forging. We argue that the identity-work of sixth formers plays a part in the reproduction of school-based class inequalities by pathologising working-class students while constructing themselves as bourgeois liberal individuals.