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

The plight of white, working class boys of average/lowere ability was being discussed 25 years ago, they didn't fit a box, black, female, high ability the G&Ts, there was no secial programme for them and while they might have been average/lower ability they weren't stupid, they recognised there was little extra being offered to them, to this is nothing new.

Do you think? People spend all their time slagging off ex polys, which still exist as teaching universities

@ClarkeandNewman

I would class myself as white working class.

From a long line of extreme poverty
Multiple kids by the age of 26
Worked as a Teaching Assistant
live in the bottom 10 percent area (socioeconomic area)
council house
Swear a lot (although I’m a chameleon and can fit in with the middle classes as and when I choose to do so, although it exhausts me because I can’t be myself).
Didnt pass any GCSEs as I didn’t go to school in year 10 and 11 (barriers)
husband is white WC, works in a factory
All friends are WC (close ones)

Yes I got a first class degree but this was via the OU. It didn’t suddenly catapult me into the higher echelons. Unfortunately lol!!

I do value education though because my mum did. She spent a lot of life in the care system but in her primary years, was fostered by a very educated family who made her read and work daily. So, she herself was white WC but did value it due to her home environment at the time. She was then back into the care system during adolescence. (she did train as a MH nurse many years later in adulthood and thanked her earlier foster carers for fostering her enjoyment of reading etc) …. I always had books as a kid.

Like I said I do value education. My son, a white working class lad is set to pass all his GCSEs with flying colours (As and Bs). He doesn’t want to do A levels or uni because in his words “just can’t be arsed with more academics and it’s not really me”. So, despite his high grades there’s an identity thing going on there. He’s down to the final 10 from 300 applications for a HR apprenticeship at 16. He just wants to start work now, but definitely doesn’t want to go into a trade as he’s not practical at all. Many of his mates will get 0 GCSEs. The school can only do so much to mitigate poor attitudes at home. My son regularly got the piss taken out of him for revising and being in top sets.

“GCSEs are a load of shit”
” fuck that pal, what you doing” whilst flexing in bottom sets. That attitude comes from the home. Education staff try their hardest.

There needs to be other qualifications at school
Not everyone can get maths or English GCSE
There should be something like functional skills
And a different pathway for those who struggle academically
Why do secondary schools have a one size fits all approach
Two of my friends children keep failing maths and English GCSE at college,they are not allowed to progress past any foundation level courses with out maths and English GCSE.
If they fail these recent exams they will both leave college at 19 with 3 different subject Foundation level courses..and no. qualifications in maths or English
How does that equip them for a job.
The first foundation of level course they wanted to do..the second and third they were not interested in that subject.,but ha to do another foundation course to be able to resist maths and English.. functional skills are not allowed until age 19
They both keep getting a1 or a 2 in maths
So they leave education at 19 qualified for nothing
That is where it goes wrong
Everyone leaving college at 18 or 19 should be qualified to do something,or be going to university to get qualified to do something

Inner city black boys have more success in moving socially upwards, than the entirety of the Scottish Borders male student cohort.

This is due to programmes which focus entirely on Inner City black boys. Bangladeshi is also focused on.

I apply for Grants for a living, to help school age students. So many I cannot apply for as I have no Black or Bangadeshi recipients. NO GRANT has ever just been applicable to white male students; that I have seen or discovered. ( or white girls) ..... or white at all.

There are proportionally more white men in high flying positions (executive committees, snr leadership, government etc) than there are men of colour and the men of colour that tend to be there do tend to be less mediocre, much like the women in these sorts of positions

(Proportionally more in relation to population size)

Why is there no grant white children can have ..what is the criteria

I think the key word is cultural. My parents came from solid working class backgrounds, I was of the first generation in my family on both sides to go to university. But my parents certainly didn't see themselves as working class. One of them had a middle class profession (in the days when teachers didn't need a degree), the other faced significant barriers and didn't realise their potential. They were of a generation where people very much aspired to be middle class, culturally - although at least one of them was very far from Thatcherite, I think the post war consensus and subsequent move into neoliberal ideology impacted hugely on where people viewed themselves within the class system. And to me, this means that class based studies in the 21st century raise more questions than they give answers. There hasn't been any universally defined understanding of class differentials for decades. In fact I think looking at societal issues in terms of class obscures underlying structural factors which ensures that those will never be resolved.

Congratulations to your boy on doing so well and I'm sure he'll be a success.

Your catholic school example sounds very much like my daughter's primary school. I remember we used to roll our eyes at the school's banner when they were bragging about SATS results. The SATS averages were high, because the parents(African and Caribbean) were paying for tutoring, so we could all get our kids into thw highly sought after grammar schools.

In our family, there is an expectation that the children surpass the parents, and until such time as we can hand them generational wealth, a solid education is the way. This is replicated throughout my family. We have no other way out.

I think that could be achieved within a fully comprehensive system although it would probably involve the abolition of private education (or should).

I think it's because in some cultures education is sacrosanct. You WILL do better than your parents, better than your younger siblings. Their is a focus on family pride and a huge societal push to do better. Even if the child hates academia, hates the career path that's been mapped out.

But in WWC households, that push is frequently absent. I may be because of the breakdown of the family unit, or the motivation of the parents. Who knows.

I think the reason girls out perform boys is down to how education is structured. It rewards study. Not activity. Boys learn more through doing. I think sedentary study suits girls better. So they test better. So they "do better". This can be brute forced, but it's not a natural way for boys to learn. You need motivation, either a parental, or societal or demographic push. We have a society that thinks someone who read English and History at Uni is somehow more intelligent than a mechanic or a plumber.

If we arranged school so it was mostly practical, hands on classes, where you didn't just read about it, you did it. I think WWC boys would suddenly become "intelligent" overnight.

Yes. I do think so. I was not referring to what ex polytechnics do now. I am aware of what the ex polytechnics do now and my whole point is that it’s not what you used to be able to access there. An ex polytechnic is not, by definition, a polytechnic. You cannot now obtain the education and training that you used to be able to get from them.

Of course education has changed, because of the very differences in educational emphases that led to the end of the education that polytechnics provided. So, yes. I do think that a return to the skills based, vocational training available to all ages that polytechnics provided, given by people who worked in those practical areas is very much needed.

Many people have jobs high up because of quotas.

I’ve never met one. Or worked for a company with quotas.

Quotas?

But what’s missing? You can do apprenticeships manual training at college and more academic vocational courses like social care, Midwifery, computer science at teaching universities

This is the first comment I came across that resonated with my thoughts on the issue. Especially when I saw another that said we're all working class now. Erm, no we're not.

I live in what people would call a working class area, it's a town that grew up around a specific industry, with housing stock that was built for those workers and where many people still work (though not as many as in its heyday). High levels of unemployment, low levels of education, high levels of poverty, we feature on WIMD lists. Our catchment high school is not popular and it's not an area that people want to move to, people are snooty about it in general.

I live in Wales so we have a different curriculum and our primary has done amazing things as a community focused school to build positive relationships with families. It's been a long process and it takes time to build trust with parents (and grandparents) who had negative experiences in their own education and are often not fond of people they see as being in power.

Huge impact is made in primary at getting children into nursery at 3 who are way below expected levels in all areas to getting the majority to at expected or above by the end of year 6. We have many with ALN but outside of that cohort, many children come to nursery and reception with lower than average speech and language development, they're not read to at home.

I had a pretty lower middle class upbringing, was the first of my cousins and siblings to go to university, my parents didn't go to uni. My husband had a working class upbringing in a council house with free school meals and many siblings. Sport made the difference to him, positive male role models and peers who had ambitions and instilled a competitiveness around academic achievement as well as on the sports field.

Our own kids straddle two worlds really but I see their friends, I'm a school governor, I run a local charity, volunteer at our community centre, talk with our neighbours etc. The ambition is missing at home. They leave primary buzzing with ideas and big dreams and then high school sucks it out of them.

But even if they choose uni (why? how? it's too expensive and it doesn't guarantee a job at the end, these are young people from backgrounds who don't want debt, for whom the amount of debt accrued seems unfathomable), there are more barriers. I visited open days with my son this year and we were asking about industry placements and years in industry as part of courses and the red bricks, the Russell Group unis, just kind of shrugged and went "yeah, you make your own connections". Oh right, so that girl in the video about how successful she's been and the industry placement she did as part of that is actually the daughter of some big head honcho at Coutts?! Got it. Money begets money. It's still very much a who-you-know world out there and that gets really bloody deflating.

I know plenty of lovely working class teenage boys who are bright, polite and have lovely families and they're drawn to vocational courses and careers because they work with their dads or their uncles on the weekend, the only way that they can get weekend work is through people they know and the people they know work with cars or scaffolding. They need to earn money because their parents don't have spare to give them. They want to get a trade as it's a route to success that's in their control. And they know they don't need decent A levels to get into those roles.

Alternative routes aren't being modelled to them.

I think teaching as a profession also needs to be looked at here.

Teachers are graduates, looking for graduate salaries. Their partners are likely to also be graduates looking for graduate salaries. Teachers are needed across the entire country. There are not equal numbers of other graduate jobs across the whole country.

I think big cities, particularly London (with a very low number of white working class) have an edge in recruiting the best teachers as there are other graduate jobs for partners and of course the London salary weighting (which has done dreadful things for the London periphery, where white working class are more likely to live).

I would increase all teacher salaries in England, but particularly in areas that lack other graduate jobs to attract people to commute (either in or out)

This will be unpopular but I have always thought that a lot of this is to do with parental involvement and expectation. My parents are from India and both went to university. There was never even a moment growing up that my sibling and I thought we wouldn’t go to university. My parents place a high value on education and academic achievement and supported that with time and money (including sacrificing many things for themselves to be able to spend that money on our education). It was the same in every Indian family I knew and still know. Parental support and input seems to be a key driver in success. So I strongly believe that a lot of this starts in the home. Maybe that is what needs to be tackled, over and above what schools do.

I think we do need more vocational training, apprenticeships etc instead of university always being the aim. We have far more graduates than we need and not enough tradespeople.

Also we need to ditch the special bursaries and schemes for people based on anything other than socio-economic grounds. Also ditch lessons on critical race theory and 'white privilege'. Crazy teaching this stuff in overstretched schools.

But this is because they’re immigrants.

the people living in slums in Mumbai don’t have the same expectations of their kids. It’s not being Indian, it’s being an immigrant (and likely a middle/ upper class aspirational Indian, which is similar to a middle upper class brit)

It's extremely difficult to compare working class people and people of colour in the UK, where we have a racially mixed population as a result of very recent immigration.

Immigrants who came here in the preceding decades tended not to be the very poorest of the poor in their home countries, and they had to be fairly ambitious to make the move. They may not have been able to immediately get professional middle class jobs, but they wanted to be sure their children could. They worked hard, sacrificed a lot, and prioritised education for their children.

You can see it in our politicians. Sadiq Khan's dad was a bus driver, and Sadiq then became a human rights lawyer and a mayor, to take just one example. You don't often see that kind of social mobility in white working class families now.

The challenges facing the "native" working class population are quite different and it's really tricky to compare using blunt statistics.

Maybe a day out a Chatsworth House would help raise their horizons?

I’ve worked as a primary teacher and school governor across many schools in a very diverse London borough and a much less multicultural (but still very socially mixed) area of Hertfordshire. A few observations based on my experiences in these settings:

White working class boys (and girls to an extent) were undoubtedly the ‘toughest nut to crack’, and also the group with the lowest levels of parental support and engagement; I regularly endured parents’ evenings with belligerent parents whose attitude was ‘I hated school back in the day, and he’s a chip off the old block’. The issue of white working class underachievement is generational and deep-seated - almost baked into our culture at this point. For many of these families, it was taken as a given that boys in particular would be joining the family business/trade and for a long time that strategy worked well, but it’s breaking down now as work in general becomes more and more precarious. We do seem to have lost the tradition of the working class autodidact - partly I think because education is no longer seen as valuable for its own sake or a route to enlightenment or self-improvement, but rather solely as an economic tool.

At the same time, particularly working in the London schools (in my area generally either white minority or about 50% white) it was clear to me, particularly over the past five years or so, that the less advantaged white children were being underserved. The overarching climate of ‘decolonising the curriculum’ in practice often meant deliberately stripping out white role models and replacing them with role models from other ethnic groups in areas such as history and science. Things like music choices also changed, with world music squeezing out anything culturally British in assemblies and concerts, and often performances and presentations were prefaced with comments about how particular ethnic groups were mistreated by white people. During events like Armistice Day the focus would be on the contribution of black soldiers and so on. British history in general was viewed at best as mildly embarrassing and at worst as downright insidious.

For me the cumulative effect of all these undoubtedly well-intentioned initiatives was to give white working class children in particular the impression that their culture was both intrinsically ‘bad’ and no longer of interest - the mantra of ‘If You Can’t See It, You Can’t Be It’ turned on its head. The middle class children would generally have been OK, as their parents had the resources and wherewithal to introduce them to Shakespeare and Darwin and Tim Peake and the like at home, but the less advantaged children definitely weren’t seeing themselves or their culture reflected in school. Similarly, there were no outreach schemes or initiatives specifically for disadvantaged white groups, but many for others - although not explicitly ‘for’ ethnic minorities only, in practice all of the children accessing schemes such as Success Club and The Brilliant Club came from ethnically diverse backgrounds, and all of the music/drama/private school access schemes were designed specifically for non-white groups.

Finally, I find the assumption that all white children, no matter how poor or lacking in cultural capital, automatically enjoy ‘privilege’ to be harmful, because we so seldom give social class equal consideration to race when we make such judgements. It is possible to counter-argue that some ethnic minority groups enjoy ‘privilege’ because they exist outside the deeply entrenched class system that has existed in the U.K. for centuries, so are not bound by it in the same way. Generation upon generation of ‘Know Your Place’ has a huge amount to answer for in my opinion.

Is critical race theory and "white privilege" explicitly taught in schools? That hasn't been my experience and I have several children, so quite broad experience.

I don't think you can extricate socio-economic grounds from other factors when it comes to bursaries, additional support and so on, at least not without an individual, case by case approach which would be impractical.