White working class pupils fail in school. White working class boys fail more than anyone else. They can have a severe disconnect with it. Relentless research has told us this for 60 years. They’re failing worse today than ever. Just 32 per cent get the five GCSEs. They’re falling behind students from all other ethnic backgrounds.
Why? Parental neglect is this week’s reason.
I think it’s more complicated. Class lines are not so sharp. Things are more fluid today. Many will do alright. Some will leave their class, some won’t. There’s nothing wrong with that. Lynsey Hanley’s eloquent Respectable shows that changing classes isn’t easy. Some don’t want to join the middle classes. It can be a cold, corporate world, which isn’t welcoming.
I think the White working classes are mostly doing fine. However there’s an ever-growing group of boys who aren’t. They don’t even get to do their GCSEs. They vanish and become an underclass. I’m not sure why.
Perhaps it’s because we’ve never cared for them? Or simply abandoned them? We put them in secondary moderns to perish or in sink schools to fail or in liberal comprehensives where they crave discipline or in academies where they’ve been cleansed? I don’t know. Or was it Mrs Thatcher’s war on the working classes? Or Mr Blair with his “we’re all middle class now”? Or Mr Gove with his gentrified curriculum?
Or is it brutal estates, savage poverty, mean austerity, zero-hour contracts, third generation unemployment? Or middle class flight? Or, yes, rubbish parenting? Or original sin? Are they in the long tradition of the English Hooligan, putting the frighteners on people in dark alleys and mixed ability classrooms, shredders of the liberal nerve? They used to have a story like Billy Casper in Kes.
They used to have culture but now no-one wants it. Now they’re Dave Manias and just deracinated. They’ve been betrayed, got nothing to lose and just a bloody menace. Grayson Perry made a most moving, chilling sculpture of the White working class boy – “The King of Nowhere”. It’s a terrifying, tribal world.
The problem for these children is that much of their culture has been destroyed. They’ve been sacrificed. They have to somehow define, once again, their own values, their own aspirations, their own story. Not easy.
We must take care of them in small classrooms with specialist teachers. Is the political will there? I fear not.
- Ian Whitwham is a former inner city London teacher.