White working class children

[NotAnotherScarf]

The bbc has a report about a review of the academic system failing white working class children. The bulk of the population.

It's brilliant that this has been looked at but the recommendations are appalling.

Basically its saying that wcc's are only fit for manual jobs. That schools should push towards offering for vocational courses.

That's where my education went 40 years ago. One child from my year group of 242 went to university at 18. We had at most 6 kids from non white backgrounds. Many went subsequently. I have always maintained the school saw us as shop assistants, factory hands and dockers.

The other recommendations will help children of all races...free travel under 22. Promoting reading etc.

One of the reasons why kids from other backgrounds are doing better has been the push to get them into university...ie black boys being actively recruited and bursarys being given solely to them. Places sponsored etc etc.

Whilst I welcome the move to vocational training. And for many people thats a brilliant move, ts disappointing that the report thinks that that's the main option for wcc's. Basically its says "we don't think your good enough for anything else " .

BBC News - White working-class children 'failed by schools system' - BBC News
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq51j10q601o

So not only do the right not really care about women and girls, they don't care about education. They are weaponising WWC. Absolute bonkers. No wonder there remains a divide with such a negative attitude.

I'm sorry, I've no idea what you mean by any of your four sentences here. You appear to have compiled a selection of phrases that have no relevance to anything I've said and don't serve to argue against it or to offer another perspective. Genuinely, you've lost me.

Some of the Right's concerns on the British Majority culture getting overly diluted in history textbooks and other school events is valid

I often wonder my son's private school insists so much on LGBTQI priorities to the point that Gen Z seem to forget heterosexuals are a valid majority. And religion too. My son is Christian by choice in a Hindu household and I encourage it, but the school pushes atheism/ agnosticism / anything but Christianity.
Strange

I don't understand why you think the right are hijacking education for a political purpose. Times change, and maybe people have had enough of the white working class being kept down.

Mate, I've spent my whole life being tired of seeing the WC kept down. Didn't you get that from the first of my posts you responded to?
I've lived through decades from Thatchers decimation of my community, to the last 14 years, bearing the brunt of austerity.
Of course I'm tired of it. Tired of the way wealth and the advantages it brings passes down the generations, uplifting the mediocre, while people with huge potential and ability have to work twice as hard against the odds for a chance to contribute.
I'd love to see some attention paid to class based inequality. And if you would too, I'm right beside you on it.
Who do you think is keeping the WC down? And who and how do you think we can be uplifted?

This debate has nothing to do with the right, that's my point. That is just being show horned in, as usual. Socio-economic variables only take us so far. It is what pragmatic things are being done to improve the prospects of working class white children that matters.

OK but your one post was suspicious of this suddenly getting attention. That's the kind of victimhood mentality that holds people back. While this topic is again back out in the open, it should be grasped.

I am suspicious of it suddenly getting attention. The subjugation of the WC is as old as time, and the right have never acknowledged it. Why the change of heart?
The right have consistently blamed us for our own misfortune, and told us if we worked harder we could all improve ourselves, as did you in your post about Adams grandfather, and your comment about victimhood above. Which contradicts your view that we are 'kept down'.
So, for clarity, do you think the WC should 'get off our arses' and stop playing victims, or do you think we are justifiably tired of being 'kept down'?

Is that not what widening access programmes are for ? Kids from families living in deprived postcodes, those who qualify for FSM?

Recently private school fees have significantly been increased in Scotland and ask me how I know - the affluent middle class are taxed very heavily in all possible ways already. Not the very rich maybe who continue to hold ancestral wealth and the opportunity/networks that come with it.

We could simply cut down foreign students coming in (non British cirizenship holders/ coming in on student visas) regardless of white or not, so British white kids have more seats simply put to apply for but then governments would have to find an easier way than foreign student fees to fund unis? Is there a viable solution?

Would you be okay if govt benefits were decreased to increase university seats available without reliance on foreign students. It makes it easier for white 'natives' to get into med and stem and law at uni, and takes benefits away targeting people using benefits to not work, drink, do drugs. More can be done to for e.g. avoid benefit fraud but it won't be easy, to replace revenues from foreign student fees

What word do they use to temporarily stop a game? Eg if playing tag and someone falls and hurts their knee of it someone else's mum is calling them and they need to pause the game for everyone?
Actually, is it tig, tag or chase?

Curious about what the generation raised on tiktok etc calls these things...

Or maybe that would be what would they have called it. Since gen z are all teens/in their twenties now...

Brit white sarcasm is usually lost on me.....

If you say white children are being left behind your racist.

*you're racist

Plenty of people on this thread have engaged in good faith with your post without saying you are racist. So this is patently false.

I do think if you're of sound body and mind you can make your one future and success (barring responsibilities for caring for disabled family)

It's not sarcasm

Truce words are highly localised in the UK and tend not to change much over the years, even if the demographic (eg parents born overseas) changes radically. It's been of interest to linguists for a while precisely because of this phenomenon. It's thought to be because it's a word generations of children teach to each other rather than speech that's taught by parents or other adults. It's also a localism thats quite unique to Britain. Eg everyone in America remembers using "Time-out" as a truce word regardless of where in the US they are from.

I just wondered if, given the fact the young people you mentioned seemed to be more influenced by online trends than local/parental speech patterns that also translated to truce words/children's speech. In my experience it's still highly localised but it's interesting.

If you say white children are being left behind, I wouldn't call you racist. I would call you wrong. White children as a demographic are not left behind. WC children as a demographic are.
Some ethnicities buck the trend. And I think a discussion on what cultural differences lead to this is helpful, so at an individual level WC people can perhaps look at what they may wish to emulate.
However, the pertinent point is the class and wealth based disadvantage, together with flaws in the education system, means that WC are left behind.
I don't think the emphasis on 'white' is helpful, because white skin colour is not a source of disadvantage in our society. If it were, white people from privileged classes would also be left behind. Yet they continue to succeed.
A good look at how our education system and society in general disadvantages WC people is long overdue. But the focus should be on class and wealth as the causes, not having white skin.

No no no I'm not implying anything like that. What I am saying, and the stats prove, is that white kids are falling behind. If it were kids of Asian heritage you'd be right to question why. I am unhappy that the solution seems to be a blanket...push them towards vocational courses...not looking at educating parents to see (like you say Indian parents do) the value of education, not pushing universities to target working class areas etc.

One thing I do need to point out is that you actually come across as very racist...that every white person is in the pub... completely untrue.

But if you take my parents for example who would be in their mid 80s if they were alive, mum left school at 14 because of the poverty the family lived in and dad was never sent to school because he lived in the country and was a sick child. They didn't understand the value of a university education. Only one of my cousins and I have 56 first cousins, went to university....

Remember Indian migration came from the more wealthy and educated sector of the Indian population...it's they who could afford to come. The poor uneducated people in the main couldn't afford it

Absolutely agree with this. It must be so plainly obvious to those in education. I see it all around me (I don't work in education but have children in our local state). White working class families are being left behind because of their parents/cultural aspirations and expectations. It is not a system failure. The strongest predictor of success is your family unit and values, not the school. I see it so clearly in our local state school. White middle class kids or children of a different ethnicity (typically low wealth) are flying. The white working class kids struggle with getting off the phonics programme at the end of year 2. The parents of these particular children have NEVER practiced phonics at home and are so quick to blame the school for their lack of progress (which they have obviously made but it's solely down to the school) - always blame, never accountability. My husband's grandparents were wwc but they were desperate for a better life for their daughter. She trained to be a teacher and her son, my husband, was the first to go to university- oxbridge no less. There might be other factors at play, but the biggest factor - is your family/parental support and values.

So you think it's the government's responsibility to sell white parents on the importance of education?

Still staggering at the 45K small boats number primarily from Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia ....should EU be doing their share more, if the number is a bare minimum on compassionate grounds annually...... they cross through EU to come here hence wondering, why.....

The problem with generalising the problem as "white kids are falling behind" is that that risks presenting the solution as being solutions targeted towards "white" children. If (hypothetically) this meant targeting more educational resources etc towards "white" children said resources would almost certainly be nabbed by the white middle class, the white upper class. Who are not suffering from being left behind. So it wouldn't actually fix the issue.
Likewise, as others have said, it risks implying the core problem is one of racial bias but if it was then middle class white children would be falling behind middle class non-white children. But this isn't happening.

I suspect it's more the case that, unlike the US, class trumps racial differences still. So white working class children are far more disadvantaged by their class than they are privileged by their race. At most you could argue that a focus on racial disparities (driven by American focused discourse) has drowned out/shoved aside analysis focusing on class disparities. And maybe we need to think about class disadvantage more than we do.

@Persephonia1966 , checked with my 17 yo gen z'er , said he and his mates say 'pause' at school to stop a basketball game halfway - I do remember saying time-out instead back in India not pause (not that I played much sport you see).

He also said his cousins did not get ' that is mint' for something being cool.

My point really was more the entitled mindsets, stuck to their smartphones and what not was the same :-), also ditto with his American born cousins. None of these kids are going to be forced into anything, that ended with Gen X and millenials, immigrants better start getting a life that does not revolve around their kids all the time.

We left the EU. So the EU has no obligation to help the UK share any load. In particular, with increasing hostility towards migration on the continent, then there is every reason for them to want some asylum seekers to keep moving West. The EU does have a larger number of asylum seekers already based there than the UK has taken.
I am also not sure that changing the subject to what is a (comparatively to the general population and to general immigration) small number of people seeking asylum will help or is relevant really. I don't want open borders. I also don't want to become like some countries, locking up victims of sex trafficking and rapes for years in detention centres with no legal recourse because "immigrants bad".

For clarity, I'm a Thatcherite and you're not, so we are never going to meet half way.

I'm not expecting us to. I understand that you and I are from opposing ends of the political spectrum.
You did however clearly state the WC are being kept down, then appeared to contradict it by saying that its all victimhood and not getting off our arses, so I was just trying to clarify which was your actual stance on this? Our own fault, or someone keeping us down?
And if the latter, who is keeping us down, and how do you think we should be elevated?