Summary.A modified Social Identity Inventory is shown to be a powerful tool for exploring the “internalisation” of social categories by school leavers. It revealed two basic forms of their representation of the category “school leaver”. The first is a relatively stable representation that is negative and significantly underpinned by the attribution of bad qualities. However, this is not generally seen as relevant to self. In contrast, there is a second representation which is both relatively labile and self‐relevant. It, like the first representation, includes worries about boredom and the future, but it involves the attribution of favourable qualities rather than unfavourable qualities. The reliability and sensitivity of different SII scores is also