Educational disadvantage, long recognised as a factor in determining post-school options, manifests in forms of marginalisation from and resistance to education, and in under-representation in tertiary education. Moreover, while student voice is becoming a more normalised aspect of decision making in schools, marginalised students have limited opportunities to participate in education reform processes. The practice of &quotstudents as researchers" (SaR) extends student voice through engaging students in researching the educational issues that directly affect them and inviting participation in pedagogical and school reform issues. In this research, I examine the application of an SaR model with marginalised secondary school students, and the outcomes for the participants and their schools. The Student Action Research for University Access (SARUA) project provides the site of my empirical investigation. The research is informed by two complementary lines of theory: Habermasian critical theory, which provides the framework for participatory research, and Bourdieuian social reproduction theory, which scaffolds the aims of empowerment underlying SaR. These theories are extended by a theory of imagination to take account of difference and to establish a link to post-modern considerations. I employed a participatory action research methodology to investigate changes in the students' awareness of post-school options, their aspirations regarding tertiary study, and the development of related educational skills as a result of their participation in the project. The principal findings from the research are that the SARUA model provides an effective medium for the empowerment of marginalised students through engagement in meaningful, real-life research; that participant schools are positioned to benefit from the students' research and interventions when school and student habitus are in accord; and that the SARUA model complements current pedagogical reforms aimed at increasing student engagement, retention, and progression to higher education.

Students who identify as being from an ethnic minority are under-represented within school geography in England at Key Stage 4 (ages 14 – 16) and Key Stage 5 (ages 16 – 18). At these stages geography is an optional subject and how students view geographical knowledge may influence their GCSE and A level subject choices. This study uses an intersectional theoretical lens to explore representations of geographical knowledge by students of different ethnicities, the stories that relate to these representations and how the students accounted for the GCSE and A level subject choices that they made. The first part of the study reveals a lack of empirical and contemporary research into ethnic minority students’ views of geographical knowledge and subject choices. This is followed by a two-strand exploratory case study at one girls’ grammar school in England. The practitioner-researcher strand was two phase; in the first phase, 314 sixth form students (aged 16 – 18) completed a questionnaire to gauge initial views of geographical knowledge. During the second phase, eight of these students represented their views of geographical knowledge through collages, critical incident charts and semi-structured interviews that explored their stories in depth. In parallel, a group of Year 10 (aged 14 – 15) students as researchers used questionnaires to investigate the influence of parents and other factors contributing to students’ subject choices at GCSE level. In the study, geographical knowledge was represented in different ways given different methods. It was found to be diverse and individual, although it was possible for specific themes to be identified. The representations reflected the characteristics and concepts from students’ recent formal experiences of geography. Informal experiences also featured but these were not always explicit or straightforwardly definable. Unless students could see the intrinsic usefulness of their view of geographical knowledge then they were unlikely to choose the subject past GCSE level. This study expands theoretical conceptualisations of how students represent geographical knowledge and the factors affecting subject choice, engages students as researchers in a methodologically innovative way and provides a rich and detailed account of post-14 subject choice by ethnic minority students which otherwise does not exist in an English context.