In this four-article series, Matt Bromley considers how we can support working class students, whose outcomes are often much worse than their peers. In part one, he looks at the scale of the problem and begins to explore solutions for teachers and schools
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Society is unfair and, as microcosms of society, so too are schools. Success is all too often determined not by merit, but by birth. The richer you are, the more successful you will be in school and in later life.

Working class students (particularly boys) are among the lowest performers in our schools and the link between household income and attainment is multi-racial.

If you are a high ability student from a low social class, you are not going to do as well in school and in later life as a low ability student from a high social class. In other words, it is social class and wealth – not ability – that define a student’s educational outcomes and future life chances.


Working class students

Article 1: In pursuit of equity in education: This article
Article 2: Four domains of secret knowledge: Published May 10, 2023
Article 3: Curriculum equality: Published May 16, 2023.
Article 4: Curriculum equity: Published May 23, 2023.


An overview of inequality

The Deaton Review of Inequalities published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (Farquharson et al, 2022) concludes that disadvantaged students start school behind their better-off peers and the education system fails to close these gaps.

The research argues that inequalities, such as the disadvantage gap at GCSE, have barely changed over the last 20 years and are likely to increase following the pandemic, which looks to have hit the attainment of poorer school children twice as hard as their peers. Specifically, the report finds:

  • Inequalities emerge well before school starts. Just 57% of English pupils eligible for free school meals reached a good level of development at the end of reception in 2019, compared with 74% of their peers.
  • These inequalities persist throughout primary school. Fewer than half of disadvantaged children reach expected levels of attainment at the end of primary school, versus nearly 70% of their peers.
  • Children from disadvantaged backgrounds make slower progress through secondary school. Of those who do achieve at the expected level at age 11, just 40% of disadvantaged pupils go on to earn good GCSEs in English and maths versus 60% of better-off students.
  • The relationship between family background and attainment is not limited to the poorest pupils – at every step up the family income distribution, educational performance improves.
  • Ten years after GCSEs, more than 70% of those who went to private school have graduated from university compared with just under half of those from the richest fifth of families at state schools and fewer than 20% of those from the poorest fifth of families.
  • These educational inequalities translate into large future earnings differences. By the age of 40, the average UK employee with a degree earns twice as much as someone qualified to GCSE level or below.

According to a report entitled Elitist Britain, published by the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission (2019), despite private schools representing just 7% of the student population, their alumni are over-represented in many professions. For example, private school alumni dominate senior judges (65%), civil service permanent secretaries (59%), the House of Lords (57%) and the House of Commons (29%), newspaper columnists (44%), and the 100 most influential news editors and broadcasters (43%).

According to the Office for National Statistics (2019), only 10% of those from working class backgrounds reach Britain’s higher managerial, professional, or cultural occupations.


Schools don’t work

As Imran Tahir, a research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and co-author of the Deaton Review, said: “Education should be an engine for social mobility, but instead the UK’s education system bakes in many of the inequalities that exist between children before they have begun school. Young people from better-off families do better at all levels of the education system: they start out ahead and they make faster progress.”

For far too many working class students the secondary school classroom simply is not working.

Back in 1958, in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy, Michael Young, argued that students from poorer areas had to work harder than upper class youngsters to get to university and, more than 60 years later, this is still the case. Improvements in access to higher education for working class children have not been sustained. Slowly and steadily, we have seen the removal of free education, maintenance grants, and free travel passes.

Much of what schools do is classist, including the way the curriculum is designed, the way the assessment system works, and the impact the hidden curriculum has on students – let’s look at each of these.


Curriculum design

The stated aim of the national curriculum is to ensure that all students encounter the same content and material. The curriculum should provide students with “an introduction to the core knowledge that they need to be educated citizens”.

There are two problems with this.

First, curriculum coverage – one size does not fit all and providing all students with the same curriculum further disadvantages those who are already disadvantaged.

Of course, we cannot reduce the curriculum for disadvantaged students. To do so is to deepen their existing disadvantage. We must offer the same ambitious curriculum to every student, irrespective of their background, additional needs, and starting points. But then we must broaden the curriculum for working class students to ensure equity.

According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, equality is “ensuring that every individual has an equal opportunity to make the most of their lives and talents” whereas equity is about “giving more to those who need it”.

Equity is not the same for all: it is giving more to those who need it proportionate to their own circumstances to ensure that everyone has the same opportunities.

Thus, we need to provide the same ambitious curriculum to all and then complement it with additional opportunities for those whose starting points are lower or for whom opportunities are limited.

The aim of equity in education is to celebrate and embrace students’ working class roots while simultaneously ensuring those roots do not take a stranglehold of their life chances. We want to widen horizons and remove barriers to success. As such, the aim of equity in education is social justice.

So the way to counter classism in the core curriculum is to provide equality then equity – offering the same ambitious curriculum to all then doing more for those who start with less.

Second, curriculum content – definitions of “core knowledge” are classist. In other words, definitions are based on the notion that wealth and social status confer taste and discernment, and the selection of knowledge is made by those of a higher social standing rather than by a representative group of people from across the social strata.

Since 2019, Ofsted has inspected the way schools develop students’ cultural capital. It describes cultural capital as “the best that has been thought and said” – but who decides what constitutes the best? Sadly, these choices are often made by politicians.

Every school’s curriculum should celebrate working class culture alongside culture from the dominant classes. We need to think more carefully – nationally and locally – about who decides what knowledge is taught, when, and why. And we should think more carefully about how representative that knowledge is of our school communities, how effectively it talks to students’ lived experiences and to their family traditions and cultures.

And once we have selected knowledge that does reflect our school community, we need to select knowledge that celebrates diversity beyond our community so that we can broaden our students’ horizons.


Curriculum assessment

Our current assessment system could also be regarded as classist. First, there is home advantage – increasingly students are expected to complete work at home, whether homework, coursework, or revision. Those who do not have a home life conducive to independent study are therefore placed at a disadvantage, compounded for those who do not have parents or carers with the capacity to support them (in terms of time, ability, or the money to buy resources or indeed private tutoring).

Furthermore, spending cuts have led to a steep decline in the number of libraries and to cuts to the opening hours of those that remain.

The last decade or so has seen spending on libraries fall by a quarter and 773 libraries close – that’s one fifth of libraries in the UK. Their demise has hit working class people hard (see Walton, 2021).

Second, there’s the content of exams – there tends to be a middle class bias in exam questions. Lots of examples can be cited:

  • A GCSE English language question that privileged those with first-hand knowledge of foreign travel.
  • A GCSE maths paper which asked candidates about a theatre, requiring knowledge of where the circle and stalls are located.
  • A GCSE exam which saw some students struggling to state the advantages and/or disadvantages of a skiing holiday.

Third, there’s the outcome of exams – the assessment system is designed to fail a third of students every year and it is the working classes who suffer most.

An independent commission of inquiry led by the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL, 2018) explored how to improve the prospects of what they called “the forgotten third” – the students who do not achieve at least a Grade 4 “standard pass” in GCSE English and maths at the end of 12 years of schooling.

The report emphasises that this is not an accident but the product of the system of comparable outcomes whereby the spread of GCSE grades is pegged to what cohorts of similar ability achieved in the past. Young people who fall below this bar pay a high price in terms of reduced prospects.


The hidden curriculum

All schools have a hidden curriculum. It exists in a school’s rules and routines, its behaviour policies, and rewards and sanctions systems, in its physical, social, and learning environments, and in the way adults in that school interact with each other and with students.

Students in private schools have an extra hidden curriculum – albeit hidden in plain sight. Private school students are taught they are the elite and their place in society is to rule over others. And it works.

Working class students in state schools might be told that we live in a meritocracy – that with hard work and the right mindset, anyone can achieve anything. But they soon realise that merit is all smoke and mirrors.

It is harder to have a growth mindset if you live in an overcrowded, cold, damp, rented flat. It is harder to attend an after-school drama club if you are expected to collect a younger sibling from primary school. And it is harder to do well in exams if you have got nowhere to study and no access to the internet or a computer.

The very idea of “meritocracy” – that, no matter your social background you compete on the same level playing field – is flawed.

In his ground-breaking book, The Tyranny of Merit (2020), Michael Sandel argues that: “The meritocratic conviction that people deserve whatever riches the market bestows on their talents makes solidarity an almost impossible project. For why do the successful owe anything to the less-advantaged members of society? The answer to this question depends on recognising that, for all our striving, we are not self-made and self-sufficient; finding ourselves in a society that prizes our talents is good fortune, not our due.”

It is much harder for working class people to get in and get on in various professions. Alongside the costs of entry to those professions and the advantages that accrue from having connections and work experience in that field, a person’s intelligence and ability are often conflated with their cultural tastes, mannerisms, and confidence.

These are all signals of social class, but not necessarily aptitude. Describing someone as the “right fit” for a job is a statement laden with class assumptions and prejudices.


What is the solution?

The only way to truly fix inequality is, of course, by reducing inequality. While I accept that because inequality is systemic then to truly tackle it society at large must change, in these articles I will focus on actions which school leaders and teachers can take to help working class students compete more equitably at school.

What can we do to make our schools fairer places and to provide working class students with a greater chance of succeeding now, at university, and in employment?

It is a question I have been contemplating an awful lot recently because I’ve been writing a book on the subject. In The Working Classroom, my co-author Andy Griffith and I focus on three strands of support that schools can offer to help counter this classism – we call them the 3Es:


1, Equality through the core curriculum

As discussed, the core curriculum is the first strand of support we can use to counter classism in education because if we design an ambitious, broad, and balanced, planned, and sequenced curriculum to which all students have access, and then deliver it through quality first teaching, there will be less need of additional interventions and support later.

As they are wont to say: a rising tide lifts all ships. Therefore, this strand is about achieving equality in the way we design the core curriculum and in the way we give all students access to the same ambitious curriculum, irrespective of their backgrounds, starting points and different needs.


2, Equity through curriculum adaptations and interventions

Curriculum adaptations and interventions are inclusive teaching approaches and additional support strategies, including though not limited to one-to-one and small group tuition, which are designed to help disadvantaged students access the same ambitious curriculum as their peers by converting the causes of disadvantage into tangible classroom consequences so that these barriers may be overcome.

Adaptations may be visual, verbal or written, and are short-term. The most effective interventions, meanwhile, are short-term, intensive, tailored, and focused.

Curriculum adaptations and interventions are the second strand of support because, while a rising tide may indeed lift all ships, some students’ survival at sea is rigged because they sail in boats full of holes.

As such, this strand is about achieving equity through adaptive teaching approaches and additional support strategies designed to help disadvantaged students access the same ambitious curriculum as their peers.


3, Extension through curriculum extras and enhancements

Curriculum extras and enhancements are carefully designed enrichment activities targeted specifically at working class students which provide long-term opportunities for students to acquire the secret knowledge and skills otherwise denied them because of their position in society, as well as to develop behaviours, attitudes, and values that allow them to compete with their more advantaged peers. It is about extending the curriculum experience for working class students through extra-curricular activities and carefully designed enrichment activities.


Next time

In the remaining three articles of this series, we will delve further into the secret knowledge that working class students need to be taught and what the first two Es – equality and equity – look like in the classroom and across the secondary school.

  • Matt Bromley is an education writer and advisor with more than 20 years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher, principal, FE college vice-principal, and MAT director. Currently, he is a public speaker, trainer, school improvement advisor, and primary school governor. Matt is author of numerous books on education and co-hosts the award-winning SecEd Podcast. His new book, The Working Classroom, co-authored with Andy Griffith, is due out soon. Visit www.theworkingclassroom.co.uk. Read his previous articles for SecEd via https://bit.ly/seced-bromley. Visit www.bromleyeducation.co.uk


Further information & resources

Related articles

Working class students: Four domains of secret knowledge

Working class students: How to achieve curriculum equality

Working class students: How to achieve curriculum equity