White British pupils underperforming because of parents

[noblegiraffe]

White British pupils are underperforming at GCSE and it's because of the parents claims a report out today:
www.theguardian.com/education/2016/apr/04/white-children-falling-behind-other-groups-at-gcse

So what do families from other cultures do differently?

bigkidsdidit I'm talking about my experience of non-selective state education, so I'm not sure your points about the 11+ or paying for private education apply to my argument. I also believe there is no current prejudice against women entering university education.

I'm going to make a very broad statement here but when I have made home visits for nursery white working class households very very rarely turn off the tv and there were no books or educational toys to be seen. Of course all the books could be in other rooms.
Houses of other nationalities the tv went off and there were generally books, magazines or newspapers about the place.

No, of course

My point was that 'feminisation' may or may not have occurred. But it is not the reason girls are suddenly doing better - this has always been the case.

I was asked recently by a fellow professional (senior to me) to provide more things in my classroom that would be user-friendly to children from a more deprived background. For example, using lots of TV themed work and characters, super heroes, sports stars, celebrities etc. I did think hard about it, but in the end declined. I feel my time is better spent 'catching children up' in the stuff they've missed rather than reinforcing low quality stereotypes and junk TV. Would be interested to know what others think though. If it was demonstrably better for the children, I do it. I can't find any evidence that it is. (Plus all my MC families would complain...)

Another very broad generalisation here but a lot of poor white children are born to young parents with limited education themselves. The parents can't help their children because they haven't got their own lives on track yet.

I completely agree with Forgetmenot, having the time and money to go to toddler groups, dance classes, music groups makes a world of difference.

The correlation between London advantage and immigrant/ESL advantage is complicated and overlapping.

London schools are better funded. I think that they also have the huge advantage that London children know full well that there really are good jobs out there for the taking for people with the right qualifications, and they'll normally have somewhere to stay while they get the first foot on the ladder. An average child in, say, Great Yarmouth, won't have that sense that there are good jobs just a bus ride away - and housing costs in areas where good jobs are plentiful pose a huge barrier to entry. There's not the same simple credibility to the equation work+qualification => good job => money.

I think the answer is likely to be muti-determined.

My guess is that bright children from all sorts of background are doing fairly well.

The bottom in Britain is a very low and long bottom.

And why do certain groups end up there?

Culture: quiet and respectful is going to translate well in any kind of educational setting.

I wonder what the impact of private schools is - does this trend hold good for private schools? Iis it just for poorer children?

Is it because whie British just don't think they have to work so hard at education? Perhaps contacts mean they feel that exam results aren't so necessary for social advancement? I've certainly seen lots of friends' children, with less than stellar educational results, being helped into jobs and careers.

That use of networks outside of education probably holds true at all levels of society.

There must also be some sort of interaction between the behavioural characteristics one needs in order to learn in a mass education system and cultural characteristics.

I also suspect that willingness to tutor as a supplement to mass education plays a part. And if not tutoring, then children being told in a very clear way that they have to supplement what is learned in school with extra study.

I'd love to know the answer. I feel I am a parent fighting a very educationally-negative culture when it comes to my own children.

Anyway, interesting.

I agree with Forgetmenotblue that MC children have cultural experiences that have opened up to the world that give them a huge head start in understanding so that when they get to school it is much easier for them to grasp what is going on and what is expected of them.

IME thecatfromjapan is that bright children from all backgrounds aren't doing well though. Bright WC children (esp white girls, in my experience) tail off during primary school and certainly in the early years of secondary, and settle for familiar low paid jobs that they know about...hairdressing, beauty therapy, retail, catering etc. Nursing or midwifery is seen as very ambitious. Being a doctor/solicitor/accountant seems out of the question.

(Generalising, I know, but holds true for the vast majority of white WC girls I've taught)

havent read the whole thread yet but just wanted to add my thoughts. Im a child of parents who came over from asia. School was very important to my family. Having kids that were doing well at school (in academic subjects) was a status symbol. It is common on exam results day for parents to phone each other and brag about their children and how well they have done (which is awful if you dont do well).
Of course, back in my parent's country of origin, there was no benefit system as there is here. if you dont work, you dont eat. your job chances increase if you have qualifications or you happen to be well connected. For me, I am incredibly grateful that I live in a country where there is free education. I want my children to take advantage of it.

Some very good insights, DaphneWhitethigh.

It's clearly a complex problem. My feeling is, if we know a certain group is struggling we should target help at them, not blame the parents or culture.

I know for a fact that my son wouldn't be doing as well if we weren't pushing him. We look at his books when he gets home from school to see what he's been doing and what marks he's got, we are in the same room as him when he does his homework, so we know he's doing it and we're there if he has any questions. When it comes to tests, we help him plan his revision and make sure he does it.

We do that because we both had poor educations back in the 80's. Our parents didn't care about our schooling, never checked we did our homework, barely ever went to parent's evenings. We were both "coasters" - never got into trouble, never did any revision etc, always did the only homeworks where we'd get into trouble for not doing it. The teachers just ignored us - never wondered why we were going down in terms of marks/grades as each year passed. Considering we were at schools hundreds of miles apart, our experience of schools was frighteningly similar. Result was we both got crap O levels and had to fight and work hard to get qualifications in later life to get decent careers. So, basically, two reasons for crap education - lack of parental interest and poor teaching!

Trouble is, with our son, the teaching aspect hasn't improved in the last 30+ years. From what our son says and from what we see, it's just the same. Lacklustre teachers who often don't appear to care. Our son was incredibly demoralised in year 7 when he spent hour after hour doing a history project on the crusades - he created a masterpiece, but the teacher never even bothered collecting them in, let alone marking them - a very poor example. He's had the same teacher for biology for 3 years running, yet at the latest parent's evening, the teacher couldn't remember my son by name - he had to refer to a sheet of pictures before he could recognise him - evidence that the kids who don't cause trouble and don't make a fuss are basically ignored. It's that kind of thing that have made us take control and pick up the slack that the schools won't do.

So, both parents and teachers to blame - blaming each other but not accepting their own role in the declining standards. A good teacher can make up the shortfall in parenting, good parenting can make up the shortfall in teaching, but without one or the other, it's no surprise that kids fall through the gap.

If you look at country of origin I suspect that the equivalent ethnic groups have a wide variety of aspiration - those that come here are more likely to aspire. Perhaps China is an exception because one child families have made them think more about their one heir

My dmum often mentions the time she attended my db's parents' evening and his teacher didn't know who he was. She was livid.

The London issue is interesting and as I understand things, the pupils there are better funded than their counterparts in other places. I have been banging on about lack of achievement in certain areas of the UK for a while now but I don't think anybody cares,

Here's the map

I get that Chinese thang. I don't have a PhD so my brother thinks I'm lazy It's not just a one child policy thing there are six of us, it's a cultural thing. My family dynamics are very hard to explain.

I studied library studies and social sciences so deemed a thicko subject by him. I redeemed myself by marrying someone with a PhD in a hard science subject

Jumping in after reading only the first page.

I wonder if (amongst other things) the fact that they speak two (or more) languages also has something to do with it. In that speaking another language might open the brain up in some way?

Well fair enough, I AM confused. This is direct to the CF report?

Pg 11 is a graph with PISA data on it (for instance).
Presumably many graphs in the report aren't related to PISA, though.
Yet otherwise the report talks about "We also intend to benchmark reliably our performance in England against the rest of the UK and the world." and "CentreForum’s proposed world-class benchmark requires 75 per cent of secondary pupils to score 50 points or higher (the equivalent of a ‘good pass‘ in all eight subjects)2 across Attainment 8 by 2030." (so they DO want to compare the GCSE results to some world-reference standard).

Seems they artificially designated some threshold, seemingly because of world comparisons, and it's on the basis of those world comparisons that they are moaning (sometimes).

I realise this thread is trying to dive into data in other ways, and some of the charts have nothing to do with their proposed standard Does the CF report ever divide the GCSE results into quintiles, maybe, and consider possible inequalities that way? Without reference to their 'world benchmark'?

I have no opinions or expertise on why some kids underachieve, beyond the obvious & usual social inequities and luck of the draw factors.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

I wonder if (amongst other things) the fact that they speak two (or more) languages also has something to do with it. In that speaking another language might open the brain up in some way?

Definitely. It would be useful to see this broken down further by humanities/languages vs quants.

Interesting anecdote; when my son sat for Westminster, the applicant pool was dominated by not extremely well-off ethnic minorities. All white applicants were from obviously middle-(&upwards)class families.

This kind of chutzpa (attempting to penetrate a venerable upper-class English institution as an immigrant cab driver, for example) translates into academic success.

My impression is that Chinese families value education and make sure that their DC knuckle down and do their homework: the Chinese that I have known or known of have always been like that. Historically, in China education was a way out of grinding poverty; the Chinese diaspora in Asia has a long tradition of setting up its own schools; illiterate adult Chinese in the 1930s and 1940s were quite happy to go to night school to learn to read and write: if the chance was there, they took it.

The interesting thing is that modern teenagers have twigged who does well and why. As in, 'No, X can't come round, she has to revise, her dad is getting all Asian parent on her again.' X's results thus far have been stellar (and she's a nice kid).

Not necessarily fakename. I teach children who came to the UK from Poland 3 years ago and can still barely speak any English, and then others who did the same and whose English is just as good as their classmates who were born in this country.

I think it's really complex, and a mix of factors.

Firstly, first generation immigrants tend to be the people with 'get up and go' by definition, so they're likely to have high aspirations for their children.
Secondly, some cultures - most notably China and India - put a very high value on education.

But there is, I'm sure, a 'London effect' from the huge amount of funding and effort that has gone into the Capital's schools. If you look at GCSE results by ethnicity over time, there has been a very definite change. This report shows GCSE results by ethnic group from 2006/7, and then 2010/11.

In 2007, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Black Carribean and Black African origin children all got worse GCSE results than White British origin children. By 2011, all groups had improved, but the non-White British had improved by considerably more. Evidently that pattern has continued, and now they've pulled ahead. IMO it's very likely in part if not entirely because London schools have improved massively, and non-White pupils are concentrated in the capital.

Chinese thing is nothing to do with one child policy! That is a mainland China only thing, for a couple of generations or so.
It is a combination of factors. Mainly work ethic.

"illiterate adult Chinese in the 1930s and 1940s were quite happy to go to night school to learn to read and write: if the chance was there, they took it. "

The same was true in the UK though, think of the Working Men's Educational Association - night school was always the classic way to improve yourself and your prospects.

No matter the denials, we are still an incredibly class-ridden country. Its almost caste like - so those from abroad are immune to its effects.