To wonder why working class white boys do worse than any other ethnic group, and how we can change this?

[Carla786]

A lot of stuff I've read recently has argued the way school is set up disadvantages boys compared to girls. But this doesn't explain why white working class boys would perform worse than wc boys of other ethnicities.
Asian wc boys are more likely to have present fathers,,but black wc boys less likely than white boys (I think). So absent fathers I'm sure are part of the problem, but then maybe also black boys then have a protective factor that still boosts performance which white boys don't have? What could this be?

And how can white wc boys be helped? The question also remains why white wc girls are apparently less affected too : maybe I suppose tying in to school methods being more suited to the average girl?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/03/24/the-betrayal-of-white-working-class-boys/

That attitude would be anathema to us. DH is a white, working class son of Irish immigrants who has a degree and who encouraged DS2 (also white working class) to go to university after which he came out with a 2:1 in Business Management. You have a better chance in the job market if you’re educated to degree level.

¯\(ツ)/¯

I was the first person in my family to go to university. I have 11 cousins, 3 older the rest younger. 2 of the younger ones also went to university. The rest all left school at 16 and work in trades running their own businesses or minimum wage jobs. Some of them have young adult children, none of whom went either. My parents both went to grammar school. Their siblings didn't. My parents told me that university was the goal for me. They had books in the house and read themselves. Their siblings didn't so much. Class, aspiration and being surrounded by people who also have the same goals is huge. If none of your peers nor your parents care about education then you are swimming against the tide.

To be clear - my cousins are all doing fine, they work and most of them have good lives. I just chose a different path, but only because that path was shown to me. Schools can only do so much, family has a huge influence and for a lot of white working class families like mine education hasn't been a priority except in isolated pockets. Add in the need to start earning early because the family is struggling.

This is always what is said in these discussions, anything else wouldn’t be pc would it.

Not many people know these studies use free school meals eligibility as the definition of working class. That’s an income under £7,400. A small minority of families who will have reasons they earn so little that affect the child’s ability to study. Being a carer for a disabled parent for example.
It’s not the millions of sons of plumbers and builders we picture when we hear “working class”

Anyway I challenge anyone who believes white kids are lazy and naughty and all ethnic kids are studious hard workers with good parents to spend a week in a school in inner city London.

Because the country is stupidly race obsessed.

I recall years ago when the obsession was about Black-Caribbean boys underperforming and the focus on alleged “cultural” factors. It was pointed out it was a socio-economic issue not a race one but all attempts to remedy that focused on one sub-group and ignored other boys in similar circumstances (white working class boys) and now we are where we are. (Akala has pointed this out many times.)

I do find the difference in language interesting though. When other ethnic groups do badly conservative writers such as those writing for Spiked insist they need to look inwards at what they are doing wrong. It’s “their culture”, “their values”, “their family structure”.

When it’s specifically white working class boys doing badly then it’s society that is “failing” them.

Very interesting.

The idea that "valuing education " = degree level education is part of the problem here, no? It excludes half of young people straight away.

It's performance measurements throughout, though, all the Key Stages.

I think it’s simply socio-economic background.

A lot of Africans who arrived in the 50s etc arrived (and arrive) as middle class students. A lot of the Windrush arrivals were working class.

'Education' (and systems within it) could be viewed as foisting middle class values onto working class kids/communities. Explaining the distrust and lack of engagement.

It’s maybe coming across like that, yes but just making sure your kids go to school from primary to secondary is a start

Interesting question. I grew up on a large council estate and I believe its the culture. My own mother sneered at me for reading and wanting to go to uni. Apparently I thought I was better than them, would be wasting my time and uni wasnt for people like us.

Pretty much everyone with an education left my home town. There's nothing work wise for you there. So kids don't see how different life can be if you do well. It's not like Steven from down the road gets a degree and then a decent job, then everyone sees he has a nice car and foreign holidays each year. It's Steven thought he was better than us and fucked off to a different city.

Most of the popular kids growing up were too cool for school, taking drugs, out partying. Trying was seen as lame. School was hard, most lessons were disrupted, its hard to be the boring one who wants to focus.

I don't really know what a feasible solution is. The only thing that I could see working would be to completely change the education system. Possibly more like they do things in Germany. Once children get to 14 you could split them into academic and vocational education.

What sort of values would those be then?

What "middle class values" do you think get "foisted" on to working class people, and who is doing the "foisting"?

This is the attitude that is needed. I feel like since the introduction of vocational GCSE’s etc there seems to be a shift in attitude so that there isn’t as much emphasis on achieving the basics e.g C’s at maths and English as there are ‘plenty of other options and school isn’t for everyone’.

So you sort them out at 14? You'd need to build in a lot of flexibility to allow for those who caught up later on.

@Hallamule Essentially the components of cultural capital (Boudieu, 1986)along with social capital, symbolic capital.

Yep, this. My experience was very similar. I know that grammars were divisive and secondary moderns failed people, but for parents like mine (especially my dad, who grew up in south London in abject poverty) they were an absolute lifeline. Class is so ignored here and yet so influential. We need to find ways to work with, and change, the system we're in instead of pretending it doesn't exist.

Although working class white boys have poor educational outcomes, they often have better life outcomes than their peers. Asian girls might perform high in school but often still expected to marry and become home makers. Black boys might perform slightly above white peers in school but generally have worse life outcomes.

Quite. I would love to see a similar thread on the shocking lack of construction skills in middle class boys.

The first post nails it really.
I live near London, all our near-by grammars and independent schools are 70-90% filled by middle class Asian children who have been tutored since nappies which is very common e.g. in India. When my children in my 90% white small village school with 20% of children on free school meals tell their colleagues that they have aspirations to go to the university, they hear 'why do you bother, my dad never did A-levels and is doing fine' (working part-time cash-in-hand and claiming benefits...).

In the German system there's plenty of flexibility in a sense. But being in the Apprenticeship stream isn't lesser, it isn't something you can or need to escape from in order to do well, it just provides a different route for doing well. So, for example, my cousin was severely dyslexic and hated school. He started the apprenticeship route, working for one of the big supermarket chains on the shop floor but with (compulsory) day release to college to learn about retail and business. He was quite good at his job and the college model suited him better so he later started courses in management and worked his way up and today manages an IKEA store. He wasn't condemned to spend the rest off his life stacking shelves but, equally, shelf stacking is considered a respectable job that one can take pride in and that requires training. An uncle of mine worked his way up from junior draftsman to architect in the same way (that was a long time ago though).

Thanks. I know of the Swedish system, which has quite good built in flexibility.
I think because of the negatives of the binary grammar/secondary modern of old, it would take a massive change to institute that here.

Socioeconomic background is the biggest determination of outcomes in the UK. The UK has a huge inequality of achievement based on class but there is absolutely no appetite from any government to solve the class, and therefore opportunity, gap.

I don’t think that anyone is saying that all white working class kids are lazy and that all ethnic kids are studious and hardworking
Op asked why white working class boys generally do worse than other ethnic groups and posters are simply giving some of the reasons which includes some personal anecdotes
My dds attended a grammar school in Kent and a third of the pupils were from ethnic minorities many of them travelled from inner London

I wasn’t good at maths either it runs in our family so don’t worry about it.”

A common comment and not totally class related, a Colonel's wife said it to me, a Maths teacher, when her son was struggling. Strangely I never heard it said about reading, that seemed to be the Holy Grail of learning!
On the original subject, I retired, early, 20 years ago and the situation regarding white working class boys was starting to be discussed before then so it's not new. We had 'initiatives' to support girls in general, 'looked after' children ie in care or foster homes, the very least able through Special Needs as it was called then and the most able Gifted and Talented, none of which supported the working class boys of average or slightly below average ability
Before that job I taught in a very diverse school in the Bradford area and one thing we were told was not not say anything negative about the attainment of the black children as it had been known to create problems for them at home, the expectations were very high.