Improving educational outcomes for white working-class children is not ‘just the responsibility of schools but calls for action from across society’. So says Baroness Morris, the Blair-era educational secretary heading up an independent inquiry into the matter. The first phase of Morris’s review, which was published in June, found that ‘the education system is not set up to serve white working-class children and families’.
White working-class boys are visible when they’re victimisers (in racism, misogyny, homophobia) but invisible when they’re victims
The report looked at the differences in performance between white children in receipt of free school meals (FSM) and those who are not. By Key Stage 4, the attainment gap between white FSM pupils and all non-FSM pupils is 50 per cent. In the league table of FSM pupils achieving grade four or higher in English and mathematics, the category ‘white British’ comes third from bottom, with just 36 per cent reaching this level, compared to Chinese (85 per cent), Indian (68 per cent), Bangladeshi (68 per cent), Black African (62 per cent) and ‘other Asian’ (61 per cent).
So far Morris has recommended a standardised definition of ‘white working class’ and that priority be given to the needs of these pupils, as well as increasing low-income access to childcare, encouraging greater parental involvement, and more investment in mental health and combating screen addiction. There is nothing especially wrong with these proposals, but while they address the ‘working class’ half of the issue they glide over the ‘white’ half.
One of the reasons why white working-class pupils have been allowed to fall behind for so long is because they did not fit into the racial victimhood narratives embraced by the state, beginning in the 1990s with the concept of institutional racism and the emphasis placed on recognising and challenging it at the levels of policy-making, educational theory, and training. Confronting racism against black pupils, Asians and other visible minorities is no bad thing, although it is too often conflated with disparities in outcomes. The trouble is that whites, working-class or otherwise, have seldom been factored in on account of their race.
In the progressive identity ideology which has put down roots in Whitehall, under Labour and Tory governments alike, and which suffuses the curriculum of teaching degrees and post-graduate qualifications, the notion that whites can be victims of racial discrimination or disadvantage is overlooked where it is not derided.
Whiteness is the hallmark of the oppressor and the privileged. White children cannot be habitual victims of a system which progressives say is rigged to their advantage, otherwise the philosophical house of cards upon which progressivism rests would come tumbling down. As such white working-class children are one of the few groups whose ‘lived experience’ is routinely ignored.
Since there is no place for white working-class children in the identity hierarchy, there is no lobby for them. There are charities and think tanks and activist organisations and parliamentarians who advocate for black, Asian and other minority ethnic pupils, but the white working class are on their own. A useful illustration comes in the response to ethnic breakdowns of school exclusions figures. Statistics showing that black pupils of Caribbean heritage are excluded at twice the England-wide rate have occasioned parliamentary questions. A call from the Social Market Foundation to make schools ‘accountable for the educational outcomes of excluded pupils’. A report from the Institute of Race Relations calling the ‘segregation’ of black-Caribbean working-class pupils in pupil referral units ‘a damning indictment of a planned education malaise, which has been designed and deployed on a specific section of society with a history of resistance and rebellion’.
Yet, as the Morris report notes, white working-class boys have a suspension rate of 42 per cent, compared to 20.9 per cent for non-white working-class pupils and just 6.5 per cent for pupils who are neither white nor working class. (The figures for girls are lower but the pattern is repeated.) Despite this, white working-class exclusions have prompted fewer interventions from MPs, third-sector organisations and the liberal media. If these figures demonstrate racial injustice, as the disciplinary statistics on black Caribbean boys are said to do, it is an invisible injustice in the eyes of those otherwise alert to such disparities.
This is the progressive double standard on race. We are urged to be more awake to racial inequalities by an ideological movement not just asleep but comatose to potential inequalities affecting whites. When stirred to confront these inequalities, progressives are more likely to dismiss them or impute a malign motive to those pointing them out. In the progressive worldview that has made substantial gains in educational policy and practice, white working-class boys are visible when they’re victimisers (in racism, misogyny, homophobia) but invisible when they’re victims. It is a formulation grimly familiar from Rotherham, Rochdale, and other towns where white working-class girls were exploited by mostly Pakistani-heritage men. The girls were the prey of a demographic which local and national authorities would not allow to be seen as predators, and so both the girls and the men who raped them became invisible.
In an ideal world, we would have no racial hang-ups or double standards. Individuals would be treated as just that, and the academic abilities or disciplinary problems of particular pupils would not be hyped up in the aggregate as definitional qualities of strangers who happen to share their skin colour. We would not assume that black or white under-performance was indicative of systemic anti-black or anti-white racism, and would look instead to family, environment, socialisation, and culture. Unfortunately, those of us who favour the post-racial society which had been largely secured in Britain by the 1990s lost the argument, overwhelmed by political rabble-rousers, taxpayer-funded grievance-mongers, media agitators, and the moral panic that followed the killing of George Floyd.
Race is here to stay in Britain and will only grow in significance thanks to the demographic changes brought about by mass immigration. The future is one of competing racial and ethnic victimhoods, a societal conflict which cannot be solved and will therefore remain in resentful stalemate. None of this will improve outcomes for white working-class children, or anyone else, and nor will the Morris review unless it tackles the ideological infrastructure which pumps progressive identity politics into government, politics, and classrooms.
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