ONE reason I have never felt comfortable working in Britain’s universities is because unlike most of my academic colleagues and students, I come from the white working class.
For the last 20 years, as a university academic and then professor, I routinely found myself as one of only a few people on campus, if not the only person, from this background.
GettyConsistently kids from the white working class, especially boys are the worst performers in schools[/caption]
PALabour’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has even recognised the scandal[/caption]
I was raised by a single mum on the outskirts of London, went to a local state school and then became the first person in my family to go to university.
My life experience was completely different from the vast majority of my academic colleagues and students, who either came from financially secure middle-class families or, increasingly, from minority groups.
And the truth of the matter, if you look at the bombshell and utterly depressing statistics that are being discussed this week, as hundreds of thousands of children received their GCSE results yesterday, is that the deck was stacked firmly against people like me from the very start.
Contrary to what people on the Left like to tell us, that Britain is an “institutionally racist” country where whites are suppressing minorities and the system is working to exclude non-whites, at every level of our education system the opposite is true.
Consistently, it is children from the white working class, especially white working class boys, who are the worst performers and the most likely, by far, to be left behind by the system.
Black, Asian and Chinese children now routinely outperform their white working class counterparts at pretty much every level of the education system.
In the latest data, for example, just 40 per cent of white British 11-year-olds who rely on free school meals — an indicator of social class — met the expected standard of reading, writing and maths at Key Stage 2.
And barely one in three 16-year-olds achieved a grade 4+ in English and maths.
Routinely, the only group that performs worse than the white working class are children from gypsy/Roma and traveller backgrounds.
In fact, fewer than 19 per cent of white children on free school meals achieve a grade 5 in maths and English, compared to an average of more than 45 per cent for all state pupils.
I could go on.
White working class boys, especially those from broken homes, are also the least likely of all to progress to university, while universities themselves have been shown by think tanks to focus less effort on recruiting blue-collar kids than often more privileged children who happen to belong to non-white minority groups.
So bad have things become that this week even Labour’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson was forced to recognise the scandal.
She voiced her concern that children from white working class families are being “written off” by society and have been “failed” by the state, with four fifths of them falling behind the required skills in core subjects to get on in life.
This is all well and good.
But as a country we’ve known about their plight for about 20 years and yet nobody in politics has wanted to do anything about it.
Why exactly are these kids falling behind?
A few years ago, I sat on the House of Commons education committee, and we concluded that a toxic cocktail of factors has been at work for years.
A failure to invest in areas outside of London.
A tendency within white working class communities not to value the education system.
A lack of strong social networks in many of these deteriorating towns. And high rates of family breakdown.
‘WHITE PRIVILEGE’
But let’s be honest for a moment.
Something else, something even more sinister, has also been at work in our society, eroding the aspiration and belief that should be driving more of these kids forward.
As we saw with the horrific rape gang scandal in towns and cities outside London, this group has simply never been fashionable enough to attract serious attention from a ruling class that in recent years has become utterly besotted, if not obsessed, with uplifting minorities over everybody else.
Keir Starmer and his allies might have rushed to take the knee for Black Lives Matter while the BBC waxed lyrical about the dangers of “white privilege”, but they’ve said little about the fact black children in this country do better at school than white working class kids.
And while Starmer talks endlessly about “fairness” he has, to my knowledge, said nothing at all about the deeply troubling fact that universities routinely offer more scholarships and studentships to minorities than are made available to white kids.
Instead, what many on the Left prefer to do is fuel the ongoing demonisation of the white working class in this country by casually deriding them as “far right”, “Gammons”, and “racist”.
Meanwhile, simultaneously de-industrialising their communities through insane Net Zero policies, allowing their families and neighbours to remain out of work in an overly generous welfare regime, undercutting their life prospects and opportunities with endless amounts of mass uncontrolled immigration, and then wondering why people from these backgrounds might feel the deck is stacked firmly against them.
The answer to this problem is not to briefly enter the national debate with a few big words, as Phillipson has done, but urgently bring together a cross-party strategy of action to eradicate, once and for all, this stain on our national life.
After all, if we were talking about any other group in British society, wouldn’t Westminster be up in arms about it?
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