So, white working class children are being failed by schools and society in general.

[mrsruffallo]

Held in contempt by the middle classes (much evidence of that on here)
Industry no longer provides these people with a job for a life, dismissed as chavs, it seems that these are the the people that it is okay to ignore.....

Alien agree great shame that that has been scrapped. But also it was introduced far too late in the last year of Labour's 13 years. Why? What was happening before that?

""My personal view is that poverty is the issue, tackle that and you start to get somewhere."

Exactly"

Whilst I'm no fan of poverty, how does giving a family money make them take more interest in their child?

This is the problem- recent schemes have had a very short shelf life, whereas any real change (involving tackling poverty IMO) would take one or two generations to embed and become effective; therefore yielding slower results. The way projects are financed requires short term success in order to be able to justify funding- these kinds of interventions are akin to putting a sticking plaster on a broken leg.

It's not as simple as 'giving them money', chill- as I say, real change would take one or two generations to embed and would need to involve the infrastructure.

DH came form a white FSM family.

His parent, lovely kinly poeple who loved their children put no store by education and expected DH to leave school at 16 and take a job (blue collar), his sister was expected to leave school and marry.

If DH had been born to my parents he would have gone on to university as that is what my parents expected for their children.

It is not only poverty, but poverty of expectation that needs to be addressed.

Nowadays DH's mum is very proud her grand daughter has a degree, although she still does not understand what DH does and says he can't have a proper job as he works in an office.

How one changes this I just don't know, other than DH really values education and wants DD to go to university.

I have a friend who says the only thing that separates working class from middle class is aspiration and the time they devote to getting there.

It also does not help that the ubiquitous "yoof" culture seems to emphasise being cool, hanging out and sending texts and obsessing with appearance, not school work and getting on with life as an adult.

Poverty alone isn't the issue.

My parents and grandparents generation grew up with the sort of poverty you just don't get these days.

However they valued education, heaven help any of the children that didn't make the most of their shot at being educated.

And as carolondon has said ethnic minorities from equally poor areas don't, as a crude rule, seem to have the same disconnected and/or obstructive attitude to education.

So it's not "just" poverty and galloping after that as some sort of solution is going to result in failure.

In fact the best solution to poverty is education itself.

Well... there was one-to-one tuition going on... mainly targeted at the absolutely lowest performing group (that no-one here as mentioned btw) - Looked After Children.
Several schemes around the country proved very successful in raising their attainment and self-esteem.

Considering our authority had funding for over 16,000 tuition places "a great shame" does not even begin to cover it!

Indeed badgers/miggsie- lack of aspiration is the biggest barrier.

Alien, I mentioned children in care further up- 82% of whom are white.

As an aside, I am due to start as a LAC advisory teacher in sept- how safe do you reckon my job is?

"In fact the best solution to poverty is education itself."
Agree, I don't think it is poverty. I think these inner cities need the best schools with the best most inspiring teachers attracted to work there. There should be emergency funding for these areas and salaries should be higher for these areas. Discipline needs to be enforced from the age of 5 so that it becomes a habit. The aspiration of the kids can be engendered by the teachers, irrespective of what the parents think.

Interesting that a thread about a project demonstrating that white working class kids are at the bottom of the heap, you get quite so many posts basically saying it's the parents that are to blame. As if it's individuals alone, nothing to do with society and how we choose to run our society and distribute resources at all.

Nothing to do with the last 30 years of governments deliberately choosing to turn us from a manufacturing economy with plentiful traditional working class jobs into a service economy with an entirely different workforce needed, nothing to do with governments that promoted labour market 'flexibility' (i.e. make it cheap and easy to sack British workers and outsource production overseas).

Many working class parents will themselves have had a pretty shit time at school. So it's hardly surprising that some might not be leaping into school on the first day asking 'how can we support you? Bagsy me for PTA treasurer.'.

It's all very well for middle class people who benefited from the education system to sneer at those who haven't, but actually it doesn't help build a happy or prosperous society, much less a fair one.

"I think these inner cities need the best schools with the best most inspiring teachers attracted to work there."

You'll still be battling parental lack of involvement. Inspiring teachers can only help so much when you're facing the sort of parents who will look you in the eye and lie when you ask them if you help them read at home. And that's from the parents who bother coming into the school at all, which leads me to the next point....

"Discipline needs to be enforced from the age of 5 so that it becomes a habit"

Disciplining the children is sometimes the only time that the parents become engaged with the school at all, and that's only to protest and challenge the treatment of their children.

"The aspiration of the kids can be engendered by the teachers, irrespective of what the parents think."

I'm really not so sure...

tethers- in our authority only 60% of LAC are white, but obviously we have a very different ethnic make-up from the UK as a whole.
When you say LAC advisory teacher do you mean a Designated Teacher for LAC in school (def safe) or an LEA advisor (probably about to be outsourced in our authority)?

You also mentioned "white middle and upper class children who have the highest achievement"- this is actually not the case- the highest performers at all Key Stages are children of Indian and Chinese heritage, followed by white girls not eligible for FSM.

badgeers- I agree it is difficult for teachers alone to turn around the life chances of chidren coming through their doors- children only spend 1/4 of their time in school, 40 weeks of the year.

Why aren't people beating down the doors of Excellence in Education to see how it can be done? They take children from disadvantaged areas of London and turn them into world beaters. It's not poverty that is the problem. These kids are not geniuses, as their father said. It can be done with lots of other kids too.

www.metro.co.uk/news/815293-ready-for-high-school-2-years-early

I think kids can be turned onto education, no matter what their parents think. They can see that learning, doing well and being clever is fun. It is the school that can teach them that. The school should stretch them, enter them into quiz competitons against other local schools so that what the parents think becomes irrelevant.

Alien- It's within a virtual school, so not school based. Am very worried.

WRT those of Indian and Chinese heritage, is this including those in the independent sector? Apologies if I have that wrong.

"It's all very well for middle class people who benefited from the education system to sneer at those who haven't, but actually it doesn't help build a happy or prosperous society, much less a fair one."

This isn't about class and 'sneering..... This is about debating why, when we have a high standard of free state education to the age of 16 which people in other countries would give their right arm for, some children find themselves left out of the loop and ending up with rotten futures.

The economy has moved away from manufacturing. Unskilled/semi-skilled labouring jobs can be filled by people from overseas. Which means it's even more important to be better educated than in the past.

Parents don't have to be on the PTA... just agree to help their children do their best. It's not a big ask

Can you say which LEA you work for, alien? Initials? (I assume you are in London)

"Interesting that a thread about a project demonstrating that white working class kids are at the bottom of the heap, you get quite so many posts basically saying it's the parents that are to blame. As if it's individuals alone, nothing to do with society and how we choose to run our society and distribute resources at all."

Well being blunt it is the parents that are to blame and the people that have been saying that are largely saying that in reaction to the suggestion that the schools could be doing something.

If you get parents from the same area and economic background who do have the right attitude then things can turn out so very differently.

Likewise if you can change the attitude of those parents then things will equally improve.

However, and this is important, that doesn't mean that I say we should wash our hands. There most definitely is something going on in society that's behind all of this. It can't be true that a large slice of society have all just decided for no reason to throw the towel in.

Don't forget though, that by targeting the current generation of pupils and changing how they value education, that these pupils will grow into the next generation of parents.

This is how we should tackle parental disaffection- in many ways for the parents of children currently at school it is just too late.

We need to look one or two or even three generations ahead.

"It can't be true that a large slice of society have all just decided for no reason to throw the towel in."

I agree, it's more likely that the state has thrown the towel in. It is the state's job to provide education and other countries manage it for children in poverty, so what are they doing wrong here?

Even the most feckless of parents prefer to see their children getting As rather than Es, they are not as bad as is sometimes made out.

claig, the most feckless of parents don't give a fuck what their children get

no, parenting by proxy through schools is counter productive.

the greatest social, cultural and educational influence in a childs life is the parent.

teaching them how to be good parents, whilst they are at school detracts from the curriculum and from treachers teaching - which in itslef is ironic considering that we are talking about education.

let teachers teach.

teach parents. invest in them

I don't think change will come about through schools alone- there needs to be a massive societal change. But to expect dramatic shift in attitudes to education overnight is unrealistic. We should be looking at the bigger picture rather than at short-term fixes.