MATT GOODWIN: White working-class children have never been fashionable enough to warrant the attention of today's Left

Daily Mail​

8 hours ago

Even a broken clock, as the proverb goes, is right twice a day. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson proved that nugget of old English wisdom this week, when she admitted that white, working-class British students are in danger of being 'written off' by the rest of society.
That is something most people in the country already know to be true.
She might have gone further still and pointed out the glaring truth that it is white, working-class boys in particular who are being written off, even before they sit their GCSEs. But recognising the gender gap might have been a reality too far for a Labour Cabinet minister, in a Government that has shown a worrying obsession with woke identity politics.
For the first time, the Government is expected to publish data on the number of white, working-class pupils excluded from school – a figure that has risen sharply since the pandemic.
Promised analysis of that data, using enhanced AI software, could reveal how much worse these children fare, compared with those from other classes and ethnic backgrounds. We can already guess the answer.
White boys from poorer and broken homes do badly in comparison with just about every other group. Fewer than 19 per cent of white children who qualify for free school meals, for example, achieve a Grade 5 (equivalent to C+ at O-level) in their maths and English GCSEs.
By contrast, the overall average for all state pupils is more than 45 per cent – a depressingly low statistic, to be sure, but more than double the pass rate for white, working-class pupils.
For me, as the son of a white, working-class single mother, who grew up in a household where money was always short, this feels personal. Phillipson tries to simplify the problem, by tying it to low attendance at school.
'Children with good attendance have twice the odds of achieving strong GCSE results compared to their peers who miss just ten more school days,' she said. But raising attendance rates will not be nearly enough.
The truth is that white, working-class children have never been fashionable enough to warrant the attention of today's Left. They are left behind by progressive establishments that show far more interest in helping minorities.
By conceding even a part of that statement is true, Phillipson will win no friends in the Labour Party because it contradicts the Left's great lie – that Britain is an 'institutionally racist' society in which sinister 'power structures' are holding back minorities while the white majority pushes ahead.
The figures disprove that. As pupils queue up to collect their A-level results this week, 62 per cent of black children are expected to progress to higher education – a leap from 44 per cent just two decades ago.
That's a laudable success story. Yet it is not matched among white, working-class children. According to statistics from the Department for Education, just 40 per cent of them will be going to university. That's lower than any other group: among mixed-race students, the figure is 48 per cent; for Asian students, it's more than 65 per cent; and among the Chinese community it's an exceptional 81 per cent.
The same patterns hold true for Oxbridge and the prestigious Russell Group universities. Poor, white teenagers lag behind every time.
Often, only children from traveller, Roma and gipsy families do worse. In many cases, children from the white, working-class have fallen behind those who are 'looked after' in council care and those who speak English as a second language.
Despite the Education Secretary's invervention this week, Labour has persisted with the fashionable narrative that it is children from immigrant backgrounds who are being suppressed. This is worse than lazy – it is deeply dishonest. As Peter Edwards, emeritus professor of chemistry at Oxford University, said in 2022: 'White, working-class young males are now the truly disadvantaged group in Britain. In this age of levelling up, how can this be allowed to happen?
'What we are seeing is a terrible waste of talent on an enormous scale. This appalling situation also sows the seeds of social unrest.'
In 2021, I worked with the House of Commons education committee to explore the deeper reasons behind this.
Our report pointed to myriad factors: persistent deprivation that has cascaded over multiple generations; a historic failure of governments on both the Left and Right to invest seriously in levelling up communities away from London, Oxford and Cambridge; a tendency among white, working-class parents not to see education as a pressing priority for their children; a lack of strong social networks in their declining towns; and a failure by politicians to address these disproportionately low rates of participation seriously.
Even before Covid lockdowns disrupted education for an entire generation, researchers at the think-tank Neon highlighted this.
In 2019, they analysed university records and found that more than half of English universities took 5 per cent or fewer of their admissions from poor, white backgrounds. At Oxford, the figure was just 3 per cent, and at Cambridge 2 per cent.
They also found a yawning gender divide, with young white women from working-class homes far more likely to apply to university than their brothers and boyfriends.
At the same time, universities were expending considerable efforts to increase their intake of students from other backgrounds, while falling over themselves to remove statues and 'decolonise' reading lists.
Any suggestion that the same energy and resources ought to be devoted to initiatives for students from the white working-class met seething opposition.
In 2018, the rapper Stormzy provided scholarships for black students to study at Cambridge. But the following year, when philanthropist Sir Bryan Thwaites offered scholarships to help under-privileged white children into private schools, he was turned down due to fears his generosity might be seen as racial discrimination.
I'm one of the fortunate few who beat the odds. My roots are solidly working-class. My grandfather worked in a steel factory in Salford for most of his life.
One memory that sums up my schooldays is waiting at the gates every afternoon for my mum to come dashing round the corner, after finishing her shift at the local NHS trust.
By the time I reached the sixth-form at my all-boys' secondary school, I was working two jobs to help pay the bills. One of these was at a fast-food restaurant, where the manager was keen to take me on full-time.
There was pressure on me to do a management training course – which would have meant abandoning my A-levels – so that I could start to earn proper money.
Turning that job offer down meant some serious soul-searching – and more financial sacrifices by my endlessly supportive mother.
I really do understand how hard it is for many children from white, working-class families to go on to university.
But Labour ministers don't understand, even when they get the right answer by accident, like Bridget Phillipson this week.
They continue to see boys from poor, white families as the problem – like the teenage killer in the Netflix drama Adolescence, filled with misogynistic anger and destructive hatred.
In the Britain of Two-Tier Keir, the white working-class makes up the lower layer. And disadvantaged boys are right at the bottom.