White Working-Class Pupils Behind in Nearly All of UK’s 3,400 Secondary Schools
White working-class children are falling behind their peers in all but 21 schools across England, highlighting a deep and persistent educational gap affecting thousands of pupils nationwide. The Mail has the story.
It means only a tiny fraction of more than 3,400 secondary schools across England see such pupils doing as well as their peers. …
The proportion of white working-class pupils getting grades 5 or above in English and maths GCSE was 18.6%, substantially below the 45.9% national average, according to the data. …
Tory schools spokesman Neil O’Brien said: “Everything Bridget Phillipson is doing is disastrous for white working-class kids.
“Her trade union-led Schools Bill is smashing up 30 years of cross-party reforms which have raised standards in England.
“Phillipson has axed support for able pupils in mathematics, physics, Latin and computing because she sees them as elitist.
“She has axed the behaviour hubs which were doing so much to improve discipline and standards in schools.
“School funding formulas still tend to heavily favour urban areas. While 40 years ago, London was an education disaster zone, today it is the highest-achieving part of the country and the lowest levels of achievement are found in shire and coastal areas.”
At secondary school, white British pupils on free school meals perform around a grade and a half worse in each GCSE subject compared with the national average. …
According to the research, white boys from disadvantaged backgrounds and workless homes have the lowest aspirations of all groups.
But white working-class girls also fell in school attainment at a faster pace than their peers over the past five years.
Worth reading in full.
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Systemic discrimination, surely.
Also another form of systemic discrimination is against men who in every society die 3 to 4 years on average sooner than women. What worse for of discrimination could there be than earlier death?
It’s not a demographic I’ve really had much contact with until recently. More recently my experience of white working class men has been that they are intelligent, hard working and naturally sceptical, and financially successful. However it’s a small sample size as these seem to be mainly self employed trades people. I don’t know how well any of them did at school but certainly from what I hear about schools these days I imagine most of them would have been bored witless and probably not got on very well. Maybe the issue is the school system trying to fit everyone into the same mould.
I went to a grammar school – mixed demographic class wise but mainly white. Certainly when I was there, there were a fair few working and lower middle class kids, who did just fine. Maybe that’s also a factor in all of this.
It wasn’t education or academics that brought about the modern world. Academic learning used to be for monks and those wishing to join a bureaucracy. The working class learned their trades from apprenticeships which would have been on-the-job training, which is still the best way to impart knowledge. This side of WW2 various government elites have moved the UK away from manufacturing and apprenticeships and towards academic learning.
“Two things are outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterise all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. …they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally could only teach the classical subjects for which they had been founded. The universities also (there were only two, at Oxford and Cambridge) took little interest in modern or scientific studies; and they were closed to those who did not conform to the Church of England.
The other outstanding feature is that the new inventions were for everyday use…”
Jacob Bronowski
“Academic learning used to be for monks and those wishing to join a bureaucracy.
What do you mean, ‘used to be’?
Outside STEM, it still is! (Medicine is a branch of Engineering, Chemical Engineering.)
Indeed. What I meant was it used to be only for the church and bureaucracy. What has happened is that every subject has become academic so that you need a degree to become a midwife and it is possible to do a mechanical engineering degree without any practical – for just two examples.
Off-T
Kathy Gyngell at TCW with a fine outburst lambasting the bent judge who found Mr Coskun guilty of blasphemy. The man who attacked him welding a knife and a random muzzie Deliveroo rider who also decided to engage in Turd World aggro are still on our streets.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/judges-blasphemy-law-ruling-on-koran-burning/
Always important to rewrite history so it can be brought up to date for today’s Clown World indoctrination objectives within the education system. What I’d really like to know is how many vikings were transgender. The sad thing is, I think if teachers stood in front of a class and taught kids that some vikings were in fact trans people, these poor kids with their malleable minds would probably believe such guff. Unlike us they probably don’t remember a time before the woke mind virus hit; ”Schoolchildren are to be taught that Vikings were “not all white” and some were Muslim, according to guidance from an educational charity urging tutors to abandon “Eurocentric” ideas. The Brilliant Club has instructed tutors placed in schools to ditch traditional narratives in favour of a “decolonised” approach that moves subjects away from a Western focus. A guide produced by the charity suggests abandoning the idea that Vikings were a “homogenous community of blonde Scandinavians”. Instead, tutors are told to consider teaching that Vikings were “a very diverse group of people” with “diverse religious beliefs”. The Brilliant Club runs a scholarship programme that places PhD students in more than 800 schools to tutor underprivileged pupils… Read more »
No teacher could possibly look herself in the mirror after teaching that self evident bollocks.
I mean, it’s just beyond belief.
Yes, it’s classic “Marxist Historical Revisionism”.
In other words, “Bold-faced Lies for Propaganda Purposes”.
Is it shocking?
We’ve always had class differences, but as society has become more meritocratic, higher IQ working class people have made the journey to the middle class – with the genetic stock of those left behind falling in quality. At the same time, reduced social cohesion (in part due to immigration but in fairness that is too recent a phenomenon to explain the change) makes the journey in the opposite direction much hard to complete, although we might yet see white collar workers made unemployed by AI try their hand at brick laying and carpentry (whether that then automatically makes them working class is another question).
That said, many children would probably be better off finishing school in their mid teens and starting working or training for a trade. They’d get at least a five year head start in work experience that way.
Indeed – and not just the “working class”. In my experience, university education is a waste of time and money for many, even those are academically reasonably competent.
It’s the case for most Arts and Humanities graduates. However, STEM subjects require an immense amount of Mathematical learning and practice of those skills, and an academic culture is a suitable environment in which to perfect them.
True, though in my experience even in the midrange of ability – people getting 2.1s in STEM subjects from “decent” Unis – the employment opportunities are limited unless you’ve studied applied science, and it seems like those degrees are just proof you are not dumb and can work, rather than containing much that you will use in your work.
It’s been true for ages but what is interesting is that it’s even being admitted. Last year at the educational institution in which I work, our in service training was about ‘anti-racism’, this year it’s about engaging working class white boys. In reality what this seems to mean is packing as many as possible of them off to university, although interestingly this year our management has also noticed that apprenticeships exist.