To think the issue of poor white boys failing at school is overlooked?

[hibbledibble]

They have the worst outcome of any group.

I highly recommend watching H is for Harry, documentary film which is available currently on Netflix, and highlights this issue.

It's about a boy with SEN, including illiteracy, and his experience in a mainstream school over two years.

It brought tears to my eyes. It was great to see how much progress he made in small group teaching, but sad that his difficulties in class meant him eventually being excluded from the school, and there was not much information given as to what happened to him following this.

It's heartbreaking that this boy could have done really well with ongoing intense intervention, but that the barrier to this is funding. It seemed at the end that the school gave up on him, as he just spent time in the nursery.

I would be curious to hear others views.

@TomPinch

Its part of a social mobility study from 2016, ethnicity gender and social mobility. It just says that women and people from ethnic minorities are more likely to be unemployed than white British males. It also notes that white british men are over represented in appretiship uptake etc.

@Hagpie

I totally agree. People only ever bring up "working class white boys" when other inequalities are mentioned ( esepcially around black lives matter), they tend not to give a shit about it at other times and rant about benefits and scroungers who don't make enough effort.

Just like another set of posters on MN who are obsessed about one issue but ignore many other things.

www.gov.uk/government/news/asian-muslims-and-black-people-do-better-in-school-worse-in-work Asian Muslims and black people do better in school, worse in work

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/27/british-muslim-womens-school-gains-not-paying-off-in-work-study

There seem to be two types of white working class boys being conflated here. White working class boys who come from a family of tradesmen or hgv drivers etc arent as likely to be the white working class boys with the poor educational outcomes. The white working class boys with poor educational outcomes are the ones on FSM which means they are highly unlikely to have a parent earning £35k plus driving hgvs.

@Toomanyradishes

This is because the government lumps them all in together as part of their culture war.

As said pages back it isn't even just White boys on FSM, but white boys on FSM living in deindustrialised and coastal areas.

The government use the term white working class boys to get people's backs up and make them feel like their own kids aren't getting a fair go.

Geography, not race, explains the disparity in England's educational outcomes. For any one interested

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/04/geography-not-race-explains-the-disparity-in-englands-educational-outcomes

I actually think the lumping together of a large number of people into 'working class' is problematic and doesnt help get to the bottom of the nuances of these issues. Working class can include, two parents working one as a self employed builder, one as a receptionist, joint household income of 50k plus. But it can also include one parent household, parent working as a carer on a zero hours contract using food banks to get by. There is a massive disparity between the two. And thats without taking into account households with no parent working etc.

The reality is white working class boys arent an issue as a whole. Children living in poverty are an issue with white boys potentially having some of the worse outcomes. Calling it a working class issue means there are lots of conversations about boys planning on becoming builders etc which is frankly irrelevant. If dad is a builder they are unlikely to be in poverty. So its just a distraction from the real issue. Yes we need to turn out plumbers and hgv drivers who can read, write and do basic arithmetic, but the ones being discussed here are much less likely to go into the trades because they probably dont have family support in that direction.

The ones that are being discussed are the ones who are more likely to end up involved in gangs or drugs or end up in prison. Or they end up on benefits because they arent as motivated to get a job because they cant see any jobs that are suitable for them. Or they end up on minimum wage jobs in factories etc.

By calling it a working class problem we end up having conversations about a section of white boys who pribably arent going to have employment issues. Its a poverty issue, and the route to tackling it is tackling poverty, not trying to get teachers to do the impossible.

theconversation.com/what-the-governments-report-on-race-gets-wrong-about-the-education-system-159494 if people still want more links. There!

Just gonna repeat again.

Children with special educational needs, even those who are mild, are at risk of being cut off from learning.
Because sen is not in teacher training, Senco are often not fit for purpose.
They will become disengaged and bored from wherever they are from. Expect parents who understand a little will get help, even then that may not help! Because they are up agaisnt a loaded system.

Many people in jail are low on literacy scales.

Let's get proper sen modules on pgce.
Let's insist on Senco actually learning about sen the law and basic tips on how to tweak learning for sen.
Proper funding for ehcp and stop councils fighting ehcp applications.

Over all these small intervention will help society.

"Geography, not race, explains the disparity in England's educational outcomes. For any one interested"\

There are some that are.

Others not. Like black pupils being more likely to get excluded or sent to PRUs.

The reason SEN is such an issue today is that school funding has been so low for the last decade.

In the past getting assessments done was fine for schools, then the government decided that too many kids had them and made the process prohibitively expensive.

@Toomanyradishes I agree.

I trained 20 years ago and am pretty sure I remember having some SEN training. And regular training throughout my career. The mantra for a long time has been that the class teacher is the first person to adapt for SEN. We have lots of training on this. But if I have a class of 30 and even if only 15 have different SEN (adhd, add, processing difficulties, asd, autism, trauma etc), I can't cater properly for them all. Then they troop out and the next class on 30 troops in.

@Thickasmincepie

There is SEN training at trainee level, and in school. You are right about provision though.

@Hagpie

It’s not overlooked at all and it’s only brought up because people are talking about poor black people. The people that have defunded education/voted Tory for the last 10 years made this situation possible and their being white has nothing to do with it. Being white has NEVER been a barrier in this life; this poor young man’s barrier is his social class.

I think this is a real misunderstanding about barriers in general and race in particular.

Being seen as a poor working class white kid is simply not the same as being seen as a wealthy public school white kid. It's a package, you might as well be of a different race.

Similarly being male if you have certain other characteristics is not just no help, it's actually seen as part of a package that may be worse than someone with a similar background but female.

These different characteristics are not stable, so that you can combine a bunch of good or bad identities or groupings on a chart. The perception of individual characteristics is very much changed depending on what the others are.

@JohnHuffam1812

"Geography, not race, explains the disparity in England's educational outcomes. For any one interested"\

There are some that are.

Others not. Like black pupils being more likely to get excluded or sent to PRUs.

This kind of information isn't usually all that useful unless it's broken down much further. Why are they more likely to be excluded? What happens if you break the group down by something else like class or family type? Are those kids actually misbehaving more, or more seriously?

It may not be that being black that is the problem, it could well be being poor, or being a non-native English speaker, or something else. Focusing on the race correlation suggests solutions and causes that just aren't accurate.

The underachieving white boy narrative is achieved by aggregating all black groups together as if they are the same . It was deliberately and disingenuously done in the Sewell report to draw attention away from issues of institutional racism when it suited. In fact, when you don't do this, boys from black Caribbean and mixed backgrounds perform worse , as do Bangladeshi boys. And life outcomes, progression to FE and degrees attained are all worse for these groups and for eg Bangladeshi girls. Yes, some of this is due to poverty, but that in itself is an issue to consider.

It suited the current government's nothing to see here agenda to draw attention away from issues of race, to pursue their 'levelling up' agenda, targeted at certain communities and voters.

White boys underachieve because of issues such as poverty. White boys do not underachieve because they are white.

From the Marmott report. A child we lower socio-economic status does worse, regardless of "inate" abilty

And yes it happens before they go to school.

It’s been known for years that class is a major barrier. Nothing has ever changed. This is from 2004.
cdnedge.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3489490.stm

The emphasis on boys shows up how sexist Britain is too, when it is women that have taken the brunt of austerity, Brexit and Covid, and wages for ‘womens work’ is so low.

Education ignores these issues at their peril.

@SantaClawsServiette

If you look at the evidence a lot is to do with poverty ( 50% of children who have a black parent live in poverty btw), but being treated differently by teachers is another. There's evidence out there that black children get picked up more for minor infringments and then escalated quicker, or for example get sanctioned for things like their hair etc.

It also links to the treatment of black people by the police who are quicker to use force and more likely to use it against black people.

The issues are of course multifaceted. But it doesn't mean race isn't an issue in this case.

It would be interesting to know whether a white Brit with no qualifications would do better in say Japan or Pakistan than a native with no qualifications.

I feel like the situation might be similar in other countries. I.e. a working class Chinese man might find it easier to get a manual job in China than a working class British immigrant. But I doubt the data is there.