White working class children failed by the system?

[Vintlet]

Big news story this morning showing that white working class children have been failed by the education system in the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq51j10q601o
I cannot remember a time in the last fifty years when national data did not show this. White working class boys particularly are the bottom achieving group in educational terms. There have been very few initiatives aimed at supporting this group. Wes Streeting has done his best to highlight this issue but compared to other traditionally disadvantaged groups little has been done to support them.
I have had intense discussions on MN with people who refuse to believe that white children from poor backgrounds are not privileged. I am impressed that Baroness Morris recognises the need for recognition that the state is failing this group and that steps have to be taken to remedy this and to support children from this background of deprivation.

Indians and Chinese

Because when the pits (or equivalent in any single-employer town) close, so does the working men's club, the institute, the sports and recreation club - followed by the library, the leisure centre, the borough hall. Anyone who can do, leaves - resulting in a zombie town of people too old and infirm to get out, and those without the skills and capabilities to leave. They 'survive' propped up by benefits and preyed on by high street bookies, sellers of cheap booze, drug dealers, and, increasingly, online agitators.

I agree. But that's not the BBC's fault - they are reporting on the inquiry, it's not their job to paraphrase it (which they have got into trouble for in the past).

In any case, if you read the report (here: https://educationaloutcomes.org.uk/static/pdfs/wwci-report.pdf) you can see on page 10 that they admit that it was hard to come up with a definition of "white working class children" and they use free school meals as a reasonable proxy.

They could of course have come up with an alternative definition such as "white British children who's parents are in semi-skilled or unskilled occupations", but that would be very hard to actually run a study on, given that the DofE has no records of children's parents occupation.

But it's not " working class" kids I have had pointed out to me. It's kids on FSM. Big difference

The writers of the report thought it was a reasonable proxy for working class children. You and others disagree. Your dispute is with the writers of the report, not with the reporting on the enquiry's findings.

Out of interest what definition would you have used? Given that the Department of Education do not collect data on children's social class or the occupation of their parents.

I do not think its just the system they are often failed by their parents too. The attitudes of education isn't really for us (which to be fair my grandparents had but this was the case then they had to work at 14), the reliance of benefits, the feelings that the system is against them

and I do not think this is really about working class its about the group of people who are not working or working part times because they have been forced to but prefer this so they are topped up by benefits

When I was on maternity leave then went back into education I was astounded by how many people I met who had this attitudes. I can understand this in areas where they is so little investment the general feeling is of no hope but this is not everyone and we excuse laziness far too often

Indeed. Then Bangladeshi girls started outperforming everyone in school despite their apparently terrible culture.

Blame everyone but yourself

Yes,
My dd has just graduated from University and many of the students are from West African ( mainly Nigerian) , East Asian( mainly Chinese ) and South Asian ( mainly Indian) backgrounds
The truth is that whatever the socio economic backgrounds of these children their parents are interested in the children’s education and will invest time and money to assist . This is not the same for the majority of white ‘working class’ parents

Totally agree

Up to a point but I believe there are still schools and young people in the S Wales valleys or Cornwall or name where you will. But yes health is terrible. I’m from S Wales originally. The physical state of some people in that neck of the woods has to be seen to be believed, even the younger ones employed in a large public employer in the Swansea Valley.

I think one of the main problems is the lack of effective, respected, vocational pathways in schools. The number of name changes to vocational qualifications during the time that GCSEs have remained a benchmark is ridiculous. Universities are already suffering from a significant drop in applicants. Students want courses that are value for money and lead to jobs. What are universities doing to attract students? Where are the courses that help with jobs? TV production is a big industry in this country? There are lots of degrees in TV studies but few lead to jobs. There is demand but universities and schools need to tailor their courses to attract working class students and make sure that the courses make them employable.
Schools also need to stop the stress at KS4 and KS% on academic results. Lots of Specs (syllabuses) are out of date, old fashioned and designed for writing about stuff. Never actually learning to do stuff. There seems to be an attitude of why teach students practical skills if you can make them write and do exams instead.
The work place is changing massively. Our schools and universities need to change to cope with this.

One of my neighbours had five children. The parents are not academic, but hardworking, personable and bright. Their children were not academic but all went to college and trained in a trade. Three have their own company now; they are doing well because they are hardworking, organised and are pleasant people to work with.
mum and dad couldn’t help them with school work but encouraged them to work hard and have good manners.

schools can only do so much, parenting is key. Sure start was at least some support in encouraging good early years parenting.

I come originally from a very white working class mining town - a lot of people ridicule being bright or wanting to move away or higher education - not all, but it’s lot - consequently you have a ton of people of all ages with a ginormous chip on their shoulders, but not prepared to do anything g to better their lot - I had several people tell me last time I visited they would only be £200 a month better off working - yep but that’s £200 and an improving CV but they didn’t have that mindset - all the brighter working and middle class kids tend to move away for higher ed and never come back - understandable too and to a man seem to think Reform would have the answers when actually there are few non white residents , a few eastern Europeans who all work - but that’s about it - before Brexit there were quite a few manufacturing and logistics large scale businesses established locally - that’s now stopped.

I blame the UK university 'finishing' school culture. Go to a red brick uni, do a degree in History or Geography or psychology, graduate and expect a posh graduate traineeship to fall into your lap. If the current statistics are to be believed many of these degrees are no longer a passport to a job. Three years at a posh finishing school uni is an expensive waste of time however pleasant.
There needs to be realistic changes. There needs to be more opportunities/ schemes/programmes designed to encourage youngsters from poor backgrounds to prepare for and get jobs. there is nothing more dangerous than a disadvantaged underbelly who feel alienated from the rest of society.

As more and more young people reject the whole notion of 'finishing school' universities leading to huge debt, universities will either end up even more middle class and posh. Or they will be brave and change.

I’m from a white working class ex-mining town, our post school career options presented to us were to go to college to do travel and tourism or hair and beauty as that is what all the girls were doing apparently. Lots of women make a good living from hair and beauty, holiday repping not so much, but I could be wrong. But both paths make it hard/ impossible to access cushy middle class paper pushing jobs. These roles are probably going to reduce due to AI, but I currently have one and I can say the middle classes claw onto these jobs like their lives depend on it and any and all ladders for the working class are swiftly kicked away once the number of roles start to become limited. I’m sure everyone feels far more comfortable with the idea that these white working class boys should be down a sewer or up on a roof rather than in the c-suite. And I’m not saying there is anything wrong with doing that work, but it’s the assumption that a white poor British person should be doing manual work and tugging their forelock - all options should be available to all that want them. Personally I don’t have a problem with old Etonian plumbers or carpenters.

Anyway current state education has been designed to reward compliance to the status quo and it’s easier to do that if your parents are supporting you and also educating you around the edges. If you have a family income of less than 7k (and I’m not sure how anyone is surviving on that) then I doubt anyone in your household has the capacity to help you learn to read and to find things you like to read in the free library or support you with your times tables or take you to the free museum to see the mummies or the stuffed creatures. Yes some white British families have an awful culture regarding education and betterment but I see that as often they are getting the fuck you in first before they are rejected for not knowing what a crab spoon is or how to pronounce Belvoir. And it’s been like that for generations so god knows how you’d fix it.

I come from this kind of family. On the one hand there were plenty of people who didn’t share those values and went into the ‘chavvy’ stereotype who became the underclass. On the other, many of us who followed these routes, late Gen X and millennial generation, found ourselves facing the complete change of our world to a neoliberal, rentier economy.

All our work has come to little because of that change, the single biggest impact is the explosion of buy to let and the explosion of house prices around the turn of the milllennium. While wages did not move at all. Instead of working for ourselves we found ourselves working to pay mortgages and retirements in Spain for the boomers.

After years of trying to be heard, trying to make the impacts on our lives understood, we began to realise in 2008 or so that the impact was known very well and actually it was wanted by that group and the financial elites. So you know what? We realised that the ladders were broken beyond repair deliberately and slowly more and more of us stopped trying to be mugs.

There were loads of economic books that came out around 2010 or so protesting and providing information about the impacts. No one cared - it took a while to realise that the actual culture had changed and we were now back in an imperial society that actively wants two-tier societies and classes of no hope - but all that literature is still there to peruse if you genuinely want to know the answer to your question. There was loads of info from organisations like the OECD too. I could do you a whole reading list but let’s start with Selina Todd’s ‘Snakes and Ladders: the great British social mobility myth’. It’s readable. ‘The Spirit Level’ is a classic too .

We knew we had been betrayed, is the short answer.

I suppose by ‘Boomer’ you mean me and my cohort. I can do nothing about the fact of my DOB or the prevailing economic conditions of my lifetime. Yes I have a second property abroad but mainly funded by the early deaths of my parents (my father is the one in the PP who left school at 14). Personally I would have preferred to have had them around for a bit longer. I still do some consultancy work at 68 and paid mortgage rates of something like 15% early on. So we’re not all sunning ourselves on the Costas or have had the life of Riley. (Getting a job on graduating in the early eighties was difficult for many.)
We recently inherited more money from my OHs very upper middle-class family and as we have no children, we have passed thousands on to nieces and nephews, mindful of the fact that it is more difficult for them than it was for us. So I’m not quite as ignorant of the current situation as some people suggest ‘Boomers’ are.
I still don’t get the lack of ambition of what was a working class but now in some part is a complacent non-working class.

I agree. They are failed by their parents

But we’re saying their definition of ‘working class’ children is completely wrong when they are only talking about children who receive free school meals. There are plenty of white working class children whose parents work full time in working class jobs who haven’t been considered in this study. The only children considered in this study are those with high levels of deprivation to be eligible for free school meals.
Being working class doesn’t mean you’re highly deprived does it? There are plenty of working class people earning good incomes. Your reply shows how out of touch you are.

I absolutely agree that they have used the wrong definition here and that is going to cause division between people when discussing the issue. They should have said ‘white male disadvantaged’ children or similar.

I am also shocked that one recommendation from the report is to increase the availability of 30 ‘free’ childcare hours for parents who aren’t working. So they recognise that those children need extra support in the early years and instead of targeting that support at the parents (ie sure start, parenting classes etc), they simply remove the child to a formal childcare setting for most of the week!

Surely helping the parents to parent better would have much wider benefits to the whole family and society?

Why is this only about ‘white’ working class children? What about working class children from other ethnic backgrounds?

Tbh, I think it comes down to poor parenting. Parents of children from other ethnic backgrounds push their children to achieve, regardless of whether or not they have money.

I don’t think that white working class children are just being ‘failed by the system’. They are mainly being failed by their parents.

Why is this only about ‘white’ working class children?

Because the report shows that children in that group are underachieving. If it showed children from other ethnic backgrounds were then I’m sure that would be the focus.

I agree

It's probably been mentioned and if so I don't mind making the point again. I work in education, it's easily more down to the parents (or the lack of in some cases) than the "system". I'm in Yorkshire/N East schools. These areas went from lots of people not needing an education because there were manual jobs aplenty in their communities, to not needing an education because there are no jobs at all barring a warehouse on every motorway junction. They just don't value it.