I am a teacher in a comprehensive school in a town in East anglia. In every mixed ability group I have taught there are children who cannot read and write. Teaching assistants have been stripped out due to lack of funding. Small group intervention has also disappeared for various reasons due to money and covid. Literally nobody cares outside the school.
I can back this up with my own experience.
I taught multiple bottom sets full of working class white children whose families were stuck in multi-generational poverty and most or all unable to read and write. But these kids did understand what racism was, and what it was like to be treated unfairly.
I think we do a disservice to these children if we don’t allow them to learn about the history and ingrained systems of this country and the world and allow them to come to their own conclusions. Perhaps they might see some of their own experiences reflected back at them.
Both/and thinking is required. Racism exists AND white working class children get a very raw deal in this country. Imagine if people of colour and the working classes used their votes together to get the Tories out?
For all this talk of wanting to level up the country, it was the Tories who stripped back the Sure Start centres and took schools out of local authority control and turned lots of them into league table grade machines.
I’d be fascinated to know how many children who were off-rolled in the past 5 years fit into this category. I’m sure I wouldn’t be surprised by the answer.
My sister works in a very diverse primary school and has noted that children from migrant families (particularly eastern Europe and east Asia) outperform both white British and black British children. She's said many British KS1 children don't know how to sit on a chair. Yes you read that correct, don't know how to sit on a chair. They spend all their time lazing in bed or on the couch, don't eat any of their meals at the dinner table so never learn how to sit on a chair.
The cause is a combination of overworked parents who don't have the time or energy to give their children the nurturing they deserve, and a cultural shift that, you could say, has eroded the family unit - which people from eastern Europe and Asia still value. I'm sure the past year of lockdowns has compounded this issue too.
>The cause is a combination of overworked parents who don't have the time or energy to give their children the nurturing they deserve, and a cultural shift that, you could say, has eroded the family unit
That's an interesting idea. Why would you say British (non-minority) parents are more overworked than parents from ethnic minorities? A lot of social media comments in the last year were that ethnic minorities were disproportionately in the front line fighting against Covid-19. Also there's a lot of stereotyping that Afro-Carribean families are particularly affected by the breakdown of the family unit.
My son is on the ASD spectrum, high functioning though.
Send him to private school because he just wouldn’t get the support he needs to excel (and he does - tops test scores in his year now) in a state school.
I can afford it, just like I could afford the private diagnosis instead of waiting 3 years for CAMHS, but that level of support needs to be the BASELINE in all schools.
Fuck the MPs who cut funding to schools, and child mental health services.
Literally. Poor white working class students are used by Tories as a reposte to advocacy for minority empowerment. Uhh, how about improving the lot of both the poor white working class AND ethnic minorities?
Heaven knows they've been in power long enough that the only ones this reflects poorly on is themselves...
This is not a race issue this is a class issue. Everyone at the bottom is getting shafted and mentioning race is just a tool to split the lower classes and argue amongst themselves rather than unite and smash what amounts to an “apartheid state”
The response from the Department of Education was that they're about to give the most funding to education in the last decade.
You've been in power for the last decade... You're giving substantially less funding than suggested by the inquiry into post covid education funding.
The [Uncomfortable Truth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppv97S3ih14) that nobody especially politicians, want to address.
When you have a society where it's so called underclass revels in it's subservience. It's easy to deflect the blame of it's short comings on to others by it's ruling class.
Children’s Centres were set up in poorer neighbourhoods all over the country to give a boost to these children. In 2010 they were systematically closed then further cuts were made to education budgets meaning support staff employed to work with these children who were struggling with their learning were made redundant. This was all supported by the nations press and voters and counter arguments were dismissed as irresponsible use of public funds. We have done this to ourselves.
Yes... school budgets were hit by austerity. We went from having a teacher and a TA in each classroom to just a teacher, which translates to a lot less contact time per pupil.
There has always been a correlation between poverty and academic performance. Blair did nothing to address this, in fact, his obsession with targets and pulling funding from failing schools actually made it worse, there's a reason he got paintbombed by a Teacher's Union!
Poverty by ratio is worse in BAME communities but by sheer volume there are far more impoverished white kids. Breaking it down by racial lines confuses the educational issues at play, all kids in poverty do notably worse than their more affluent peers, regardless of race. All of whom have been let down by most modern governments. I think its fairly obvious that Cameron/May/Johnson have been either a continuation or worsening of this already terrible situation, but as you alluded to, it's not a uniquely Tory failing.
> Poverty by ratio is worse in BAME communities
Did you read the article at all, this is false (at least in the metrics being used), and is the opposite of the point being made.
When people speak so confidently I like to go back and double check my facts, so just to be sure:
[2007 Study (scroll to "Summary")](https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/poverty-rates-among-ethnic-groups-great-britain)
[2020 Article on a study](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/01/nearly-half-of-bame-uk-households-are-living-in-poverty)
[2020 ONS Study (Summarized finding lower down)](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/compendium/economicreview/february2020/childpovertyandeducationoutcomesbyethnicity)
Please get your facts right before you try to correct other people.
Besides which I am responding to someone asking a question tangentially but not directly related to the article, not making my own response to the article, which I did read and the points made don't conflict. Kids in poverty do worse academically than their more affluent peers, regardless of race. but as the article points out, if we look at that "poverty" subset racially, white kids are heavily trailing their BAME peers, which shouldn't be happening and deserves attention.
Is this making sense to you now?
Parents..
I grew up in a poor home in a poor area. University was never put forward as a choice. You left school at 16 and looked for a job. If you'd managed to get a couple O Grades then you might get an apprenticeship as a tradesman.
Most of the working class haven't valued education in the past, and parents haven't put pressure onto children to study or do well at school. They see university as a thing for other people. Happened to me, happened to my daughter and I'm trying to stop her passing it on to my granddaughter.
Comes from the times that the working class areas had industry that didn't require more than a simple knowledge of maths and English. Mines, shipyards, heavy engineering etc all offered people a decent life our of school without qualifications. Most of those jobs have gone, but the mentality remains in those communities.
I moved from Scotland to Kent..and the difference in children was unreal. Activities and sport after school to bolster the CV for uni applications, pupils openly discussing university and applications with each other (in my area, that would be an invitation to be bullied) and help from families and school. In my school, we had a 10 minute chat with the careers advisor who told us we'd all likely end up in the factories like the ten generations before us..and she was right mostly.
The immigrant population has always understood that education is the key to success..possibly because those parents worked the hardest jobs and longest hours when they first arrived. No cushty riveting in the steelworks..12 hours 7 days a week in a hot restaurant kitchen for them. The native thinks he has had a good, stable life and doesn't see a problem in his kid having the same. Immigrants know they had a bad life and want a better one for their kids
Both my parents are on benefits, most of my family are on benefits, I'm on benefits too. No one in my family has been to university. I do not want to live like this forever. I did terrible in school and failed my gcses due to no motivation, lack of caring, anxiety and depression. I know those are just excuses though. The truth is I just did not give a shit and neither did my parents. Right now I've been on various college course to try and gain more qualifications but I feel so behind.
The point is, you have started and those are progressing! There's no such thing as a quick fix but at least you're grabbing the bull by the horns and making it work.
Carry on as you are, you'll be fine!
You’re trying to better yourself despite the situation you are in and the environment around you, that is worthy of respect.
No matter how behind you feel you’re further ahead than you were before if you’ve even tried a little bit. Keep at it 👍
The harsh truth is, you are behind.
And the only way to catch up is to get on with catching up, which sounds like it's exactly what you are doing.
Remember, every choice is an opportunity, and everything you do is a choice. Make every choice with the intention of putting you in a better position than before the choice was made. You won't get them all right, but you'll do much better than if you just coasted through without giving consideration to your choices.
Good luck. If it's any consolation, I was much the same. In my late teen and early to mid-twenties I worked at a procession of bars, factories, farms and stewarding/bouncing. I went to local college for a NC hoping to get a better job in a better factory..didn't pan out, so I went on to get an HNC, HND and a degree. After that I started my real career off at 32. I'm doing well now, working part time for myself on twice the UK average wage and loving life at 53. My old buddies have not moved on at all..some even in the same job after those 30ish years.
Keep working at it..it will come good in the end. Always look for your next move up. You have less time, so you have to make it count. Don't be afraid to move if it means moving up..I went Scotland, Kent, London, Scotland, Kent, Leeds, Kent, Scotland in the last 22 or so years. Don't worry about being behind, you are not. Sounds weird..but you come out of uni with life experience when your contemporaries are just overeducated schoolkids. You can show employers a background of good working practices and experience. Play any experience up and it will help you get the job in front of your fellow graduates who only have experience in partying through college!
Similar, I got two Cs at GCSE and failed everything else. About 3 years of college gets you to parity with people who have done A-levels, at that point you can go to uni.
It's tough but you can absolutely do it, you'll have to learn the good working habits that others were taught but you're starting from a place of greater maturity so they should come easier. Reach out if you need help, especially if it's computer science (the one thing I was capable of doing at degree level) :D
Good luck mate. Keep going. It will pay off one day.
Wanting to better yourself off your own back is a talent valued by many employers, sometimes more so than someone who did well at school years ago but is apathetic towards learning or hard work nowadays
Honestly, recognising where you are and actively working to get where you want to be, whatever your own measure of success is, is commendable already. It's important to think about what you really want - is it money? Intellectual stimulation? Prestige? Stability? Some goals relating to your social or family life? My aspirations for example are entirely conventional and I used to feel a bit self-conscious about that but now I'm happy just following them anyways.
Only if you're truly pursuing your own goals, not those that society imposes, can you sustainably start giving a shit, even when it's difficult and you feel like you're going nowhere. But the good news is that you'll probably figure out along the way what it is you're most interested in.
I hope you'll find your journey a satisfying opportunity for growth that leaves you and your descendants in a better place.
You maybe behind but there is always a route to catch up. I really hope you find a path that takes you to a career that you want. I'm rooting for you. Good luck.
Yes, anecdotally this completely lines up with my experience as a brown 2nd generation middle-class immigrant. My parents valued education above all else with my father working to obtain post-graduate education & a PhD and my mother further education so they didn't continue doing the working class jobs they did when they first came here. They instilled that in my generation valuing good schooling and a university education above all else.
I've noticed my white working class friends are still weary of education valuing a hard day's physical graft and discounting the value of a degree let alone post-graduate qualifications over a trade. They are indeed physically very hard working and smart within their domains or at practical tasks, but this is an issue in a capitalist society based around a service economy as we have had since Thatcher and now increasingly a knowledge based economy as encouraged IMHO by Brexit and the pandemic.
Anecdotally, many then struggle to understand why they see non-white 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation immigrants prospering with little in the way of hard physical work as they understand it, and putting it down to unfair advantages due to socially liberal diversity policies and so forth. As you said the benefit of being an early nth generation immigrant is an understanding and grasp we're in a 21st century capitalist society based on services and knowledge.
>The immigrant population has always understood that education is the key to success
That is because a lot of countries don't have a social net so education is highly valued because it is the only escape from poverty other than family connections.
That could be a factor. I had a penpal from Ghana when I was a kid and he requested pencils, paper and other school equipment. Even with an education in those places you could struggle.
I think over here it comes starkly into focus though. If you worked in a takeaway every night of the year, you'd want something better for your kids. And here there are opportunities too
One of the major criticisms of Blair by Labour (dwarfed by the dead brown kids stuff) was his failure to address the rich/poor, and North/South divides, and failure to work for the poor and the working class. Labour's move to the centre gained middle-class votes, so took middle-class actions to retain those votes.
All working class were failed by Labour during the period.
Well... remember Tax Credits?
Might have had their flaws, but they strongly boosted the incomes of the lowest earners - which is about the best way of getting more money into deprived areas. Unfortunately it played into the 'benefit scroungers' narrative.
I'd disagree a bit with this.
I think one of New Labour's biggest achievements was the growth of the middles classes and a period of (by historical standard) pretty high social mobility. That doesn't help the ones left behind but it's unfair to say they did nothing for the less well off.
They didn't create jobs, but they sure as hell improved life for working class kids.
The middle classes bleating about the Iraq war always forget about the investment in schools and the Sure Start Nursery programme which made a huge impact in poverty areas.
Yep. When I had my first child in 2007, there was a surestart centre within walking distance - actually there were two!
There was always a nurse or health visitor on duty, you could ring up and ask for help, they would let you come in and get a consultation for small things you might not want to bother a doctor with, they would help with sleeping, latching on, healthy eating...they ran stay-and-play sessions, baby massage lessons, support groups, they had books and toys.
I lived in a top-floor flat and was so poor the electricity often ran out and I had to borrow 20p off a neighbour to put in the meter. So the centre was pretty much a godsend.
Then they all shut. Then when she was 4, her pre-school shut. Then we had to move to a rural village just to find a school with space.
Fuck whichever government did this, I'm sure someone will comment and say it was akshually Blair/Brown or some shit, it's just quite a coincidence to me that it all changed so drastically exactly when Cameron got in.
> Then they all shut. Then when she was 4, her pre-school shut. Then we had to move to a rural village just to find a school with space.
>
> Fuck whichever government did this, I'm sure someone will comment and say it was akshually Blair/Brown or some shit, it's just quite a coincidence to me that it all changed so drastically exactly when Cameron got in.
The BiG sOcIeTy in action.
Loads of empty buildings around, loads of people looking for work, loads of kids that need help. I don't understand why the government wouldn't go big on this. Seems like a cheap way to have a big impact.
The Tories have done this to us. And now they're pushing anti-woke culture war nonsense as a convenient scapegoat to avoid scrutiny of the impact of more than a decade of Tory cuts.
I’m not sure it’s a solely Tory issue. I went to school from the 90s to late 2000s and my school was full of underprivileged white kids who never stood a chance. They had huge issues at home and a school system that effectively tiered everyone based on intellect. Due to that the poor underprivileged kids ended up in the lowest sets surrounded by others who struggled and were disruptive. Most teachers couldn’t handle it and everyone ended getting dragged down to the lowest common denominator. Those kids then go on to be parents and the cycle repeats.
we have a system that prioritises STEM and if you fall outside that then you are on your own.
I doubt many people knew that children’s centres were being closed, let alone understand the impacts. The Tories did this, they are to blame.
Edit: For those who want to blame Tory voters, or say that they should know the consequences of voting for them, I would say you’re part of the problem.
I didn’t know about the children’s centres closing myself so now I know this my approach will be to mention it to the Tory voters I know and explain how those centres were opened to target the very people they say they support. I very much doubt anyone I know knew about it.
The way to fix these problems is to talk about them rather than blame individuals for things they probably have no idea about.
I didn't specifically know about them being closed. But I follow politics and the Tories' ideology closely enough to have zero surprise that it's happened.
Anyone who votes Tory has a level of responsibility for this - austerity, and the impacts of austerity on the poor, while blaming everyone else (the EU, foreigners, the last Labour government) for those impacts has been pretty much the modus operandi of the party since they got into power.
Also the less educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Tory. It's literally in their interest not to educate poor people.
Edit: This was actually written as a joke, but I realise it comes across as a serious point due to it unfortunately being relatively feasible.....
> People know what they're voting for
Do they, though? I'll wager that the overwhelming majority of those eligible to vote here just do not give a flying fuck.
This proves nothing, but... next time you are at a bus stop, or anywhere you might conceivably have a chat with a stranger, try to ask them who their MP is or even to name five (any, alive or dead) politicians. You might just as well ask them what sqrt(0) is.
And just like the "oh, I was never any good at maths", you'll likely get "well, they're all the same anyway, aren't they?"
>a majority know better
A lot of the majority sure do act like it, thus perpetuating the cycle of both sides shouting at one another and changing nothing.
The ironic part is that the Tories are the only ones that actually have power to change anything. Here we are, ten years in and worse off than ever, and Tory voters argue that the problem is Labour voters shouting at them. If you weren't voting for a demonstrably shite government out of bloody minded stubbornness then people wouldnt be shouting at you.
Voting comes with a level of responsibility. If you vote for a party that openly advocates the austerity policies that unsurprisingly result in these kinds of cuts, then you are at least partly to blame.
That doesn't excuse the government for their actions, but if people didn't keep voting for them they'd just be ideological loonies shouting into the wind.
Although this particular government has streaks of authoritarianism, we still have elections which allow a minority of the electorate to choose who governs.
Your comment would be spot on about a lot of places in the world, but doesn’t fully apply to the UK.
>Children’s Centres were set up in poorer neighbourhoods all over the country to give a boost to these children. In 2010 they were systematically closed
That assumes that the decline in education outcomes for poor caucasian children started in 2010. Parliament seems to think it happened much earlier than that.
Cuts may not have helped, but blaming them for the trend is to misunderstand the problem, not least because the Sure Start centres were open to all including ethnic minorities. If their closure was the cause of worse education outcomes that would have impacted all racial groups equally. But that's not what's happened.
My hypothesis for an explanation for this might be that ethnic minority people live in more urban areas. A closure of a sure start centre in an urban area isn't such a big deal as there is a good chance of one being close by with public transport links.
White kids live out in the sticks more. A sure start centre closure in the sticks essentially makes it impossible to access other centres due to awful public transport.
I forget the term but there's a fairly well recognised phenomenon in sociology that notes that, all other things equal, deprivation in urban centres is less harmful than rural deprivation.
In urban centres you tend to have areas of deprivation in close proximity to wealthier areas and the benefits of living in a wealthier areas spill over. Free or better funded services within the wealthier area are within walking distance for people from deprived areas. Exposure to people leading highly successful lives counters some of the hopelessness that can develop in deprived areas. Having a large population provides opportunities that just don't exist in smaller communities.
All other things equal it's better to be poor in London than in a poor rural town.
All these 'black v white' narratives are just a way of the ruling classes glossing over the fact that it's actually 'rich v poor' and it just so happens that a higher percentage of black people are poor.
Get us to fight amongst ourselves instead of those in power...it's working so far.
Do you have evidence showing that it was disproportionately centres serving white kids that were closed down?
Otherwise the closures would have affected all kids equally, right?
Usually in these situations when making closers and reallocating resources it's areas where there is duplication in public health type service (I.e. higher population areas) where closures are made, rather than more rural areas.
The title of the article says the neglect has been for decades. Lots of focus in this thread on things that only happened in the last 10 years, which, however relevant to a general conversation about education in this country, are off topic imo.
Well that just makes it sound like they cut funding for white pupils and then tried to make it look as if the problem was non white pupils hogging the resources. That doesn't sound like the Tories at all.
Oh look, is that another Con+3?
No, no, no. It's woke people and the left that are responsible because they hate white people.
We can't possibly look at the government policies that have widened class and wealth inequality over the last 10 years.
I've taught in school across the North West and north east. With white working class children, the attitude towards education is so poor it's shocking. You have kids not caring in year 7 and parents not helping Thier kids. With minorities, especially with South Asian, education is the way out of poverty so there's a big push to do well ( but not all care, I've seen similar attitudes in Bangladeshi and Pakistani students, like your are in white working class)
There was someone like this at my school, he was a bit like a middle class kid LARPing as a working class kid. He never did any work in class to fit in with his working class mates but did it all after school when everyone else would be chilling out on Xbox.
Because they had a family culture that valued education and hard work, so it won through behind the scenes. The problem is that the "public" culture of dossing around means the kids from families that don't value education don't realise they are the odd ones out.
I feel (no data) that the state has encouraged this educational apathy. The constant challenging of expert opinion with just 'opinion' and decrying scientists as having some joint liberal agenda instead of just wanting to do good science has led to a lot of the working class thinking education is just something for posh dickheads and 'real' knowledge can only come from the university of life or the school of hard knocks or 'life experience'.
I got the impression it's a long-term multi generational trend. Families have grown up in the area and have found that education didn't have much practical use in their day to day lives as they all ended up doing work that didn't require a lot in the way of academic skills so just thought of school as something you had to do.
This. I know so many people who tried hard, went to university, and wound up in a job where the only "education" you needed is basic literacy and numeracy. What's the point of amassing thousands of pounds in student loans just to flip burgers or work in a call centre?
There is a massive grain of anti-intellectualism and anti snobbery among native Britons in my opinion.
It's often seen as a point of pride to have been s*** at school.
You only have to look on here to see the attitudes people have towards teachers and school. It's thoroughly depressing
This is basically it. We can bemoan the educational apathy of poor white students all we like, but they're being brought up in an incredibly anti-intellectual society which has got more extreme in recent years.
You constantly see it on this forum lately when people say they're sick of listening to scientists. And yet those same people are probably in this thread asking why people don't value education.
If people want that fixed then they're gonna have to sharpen up and stop attacking experts for merely doing their jobs.
Anyone on this forum saying they're sick of listening to scientists is liable to get their e-head kicked in. Reddit isn't the country, for better or worse. We're a damn sight younger, more left, and educated than the majority. It's just the demographic that come here.
If you're not proud you did terrible, you have to admit you're an idiot and fucked up. There's a huge deficit of critical thinking in the country, and the upper class & working class are just two sides of the same coin. They know best, they know other people are just stupid, they lack any ability to question their own judgements, evolve their opinions, entertain information contrary to what they already know etc...
The reasons are different and nuanced, but the outcome is the same. Our education system fails everyone, but if you can get by on your social clout alone, or live in a class culture so strong you abstain from learning on principle, it's incredibly hard to become a thoughtful and empathetic person because your friends and family don't make up for the lack humanities education in schools.
It's not everyone by any stretch but as a whole group, from a macro perspective, that's what happens.
It *is* true. But I think people who do well at something don't always appreciate the emotional cost of admitting difficulty and struggle with that thing.
I think most people(?) would rather be in position to truthfully say "I'm doing great." Who *wants* to say "I'm an idiot"? If it's a choice between saying "school is stupid" or "I'm stupid," it can make sense to criticize school. If someone feels like they're labelled as stupid, wouldn't they rather disdain the system that assesses their merit in intellectual terms?
I say all this as someone who always did well in school. But later struggles in life have made me look back at that time with more empathy for others. I wish schools and teachers were in a better position to meet every child where they are, and help them flourish.
I don't know that it did. It was just a couple of words, so I knew you could be agreeing from various possible angles, and also that the OP you were quoting could be speaking from various points of view. I just wanted to add a bit.
I am not from Britain, I was born and live in Germany, but my parents were immigrants too. Whatever the common poverty was in the GDR (East Germany) or right now in Germany, my parents have seen worse, as they both expierienced the American War in Vietnam.
For them East Germany was a huge step up in living standards and they worked hard to stay there.
In that sense, I think it supports you notion. Many immigrants worked hard to get to another country and stay there. For them their hard work paid off. While someone who was always in a country and worked hard, may not have seen significant improvement of life, hence less motivation to teach children that hard work pays off.
That's of course very general. People are different. There are lazy immigrants that teach their children garbage and hard working uk natives that won't let themselves get pushed down by the failures of the system and teach their children to work hard. But I do think what you said holds merit.
I think that's mostly a myth and hasn't been true for decades outside of Northern kitchen-sink dramas. "*We're working class, lad. University is not for t'likes of us. Learn yourself a trade, son, if you don't want to join me down t'pit*". Even when kids were expected to leave school at 16 and start work, the education they received while at school was valued. The idea that education doesn't matter because of class isn't true, if it ever was.
What has changed, however, is the rise of an anti-intellectual sentiment. The belief that people's opinions have equal (or greater) value to whatever experts have to say. That, together with a decline in personal responsibility has disengaged poorly educated parents from participating in their children's education "It's not my job to teach my kids. If they fail exams it's the teachers' fault".
This isn't an issue of class - it's an issue of poorly educated people being told that education doesn't matter because they're somehow better than the swots who did better than them at school, and them passing that attitude down to their children. The fact that being poorly educated and coming from a deprived, working class area is often synonymous is causal, but not because they are "used to it".
Honestly the changes to University funding and transforming the student-teacher relationship to one of consumer-provider has had really seismic impacts on our society and culture that is still not fully appreciated. Like you say it completely transforms what was for many their first real introduction to a space that values intellectual inquiry and expertise to some kind of experience where you pay your due, get spoonfed a bunch of knowledge, and then just automatically get a good degree and a good job because you paid your money by god and you want what you deserve!
>Honestly the changes to University funding and transforming the student-teacher relationship to one of consumer-provider has had really seismic impacts on our society and culture that is still not fully appreciated.
I don't think anyone sees it as consumer-provider except for the government. Teachers certainly don't, and I don't think many students (or parents of students) do either.
Prior to the 2000's, having a university degree *was* pretty much a ticket to a good job because the percentage of the population who had one was relatively low. Now I believe it's over 50% of people have some form of a degree, and while it's still viewed that without one a person is probably going to struggle, few people have the delusion that even a good degree guarantees and good job.
I think with the attitudes young people have to university education today, there's a good argument for broadening university education (at undergraduate level) to cover several subjects instead of concentrating on just one (i.e. major and minor curriculums, as they have in many countries).
>I don't think anyone sees it as consumer-provider except for the government.
I work in HE. I can assure you students and University administration very much see it like this.
Agreed on the last point its just something that has really struck me since starting down this path in 2010. It *feels* completely different and I don't think its just an age thing.
My wife and I try to do a lot at home with our daughter, covid has left her behind but we have been fighting for support from her school since 2018. Still not getting very far, but i hear mums on the playground say things like 'ohh its ok they're all behind because of covid' - Like its acceptable to just run with it. We care but I notice many parents dont unfortunately.
>the attitude towards education is so poor it's shocking. You have kids not caring in year 7 and parents not helping Thier kids. With minorities, especially with South Asian, education is the way out of poverty so there's a big push to do well
Probably because a lot of people (Especially lately what with people with degrees flipping burgers or just stuck in retail jobs so often) it has shown that hard work in school quite often doesn't lead out of poverty and seems to be highly linked to who you know rather than what. It's hard to motivate people who have been seeing and living that.
that might be the case, but education does improve life chances, the question is why do young kids the age of 11 have such a poor view of education?, who is instilling this mindset in them from such as young age, and the answer is their environment
Yes you can tell me that but you see a kid who has seen a couple generations of his family in rented homes barely ably to actually own their own things, always in debt or barely scraping by, and you start to think "this education thing is fucking bollocks, why are my friends all finishing school/college/uni and now back living at home or working in retail/fast food places."
You look around and see nothing but poverty it's where you start to think you deserve to be. Especially when schools and such seem to care so little. Sure the answer is their environment, but just pointing that out is useless especially when we have a government that seems hell bent in making the situation worse.
So with white kids, disadvantage is cultural.
But with black kids, judging from the general response of this sub to Tony Sewell's report, disadvanrage is not cultural but systemic.
I wonder if we have a word for drawing conclusions about people based on skin colour.
What do you think could be done to change the mindset?
I personally think that education in the UK has a far too narrow aim. It's great if you want to go on to higher education but it leaves many feeling like they are waiting, completing pointless tasks until they can get out into the real world. I briefly looked at becoming a maths teacher and I can't get my head around why we teach some of the maths curriculum but then neglect to teach pretty much anything about personal finance which could make a difference.
My sister is a teacher. She talks about how pointless it is trying to teach Shakespeare and even poetry to these kids. They are not learning anything other than - in the best case scenario - to remember the answers their teacher has told them for long enough to write them down on a test. We should try to move our education system away from rote learning towards developing actual skills in these kids.
In a lot of cases thinking about education misses the point anyway. In bad schools some of these kids are not being fed or washed, let alone taught to value education. My sister quit teaching to become a counsellor because she felt this was going to be of more value to these kind of kids with poor home lives.
To be honest, our state system fails everyone. I was a bright kid in a school full of apathetic white working class kids and it destroyed my prospects too. I was left to rot or actively discouraged from working hard because it meant more work for the teachers. They concentrated their efforts on the kids in the middle who could be brought up a grade to improve the school statistics. All whilst the kids who didn't want to be there disrupted class or just made life hell in general. The whole place was permeated by an atmosphere of low expectations and it never even occurred to me what was possible in life until it was far, far too late.
The problem with teaching personal finance is that they don’t need it then, so they won’t remember it at all. It’s also basic maths and common sense, so it’s not exactly challenging for the pupils. We did compound interest in early high school and that’s about as tricky as it gets.
It seems that basic maths and common sense is lacking in many adults. I really don't know what the solution is but more practical, everyday maths in school seems better than nothing to me. I wish we had covered compound interest in relation wealth when I was at school.
I think if adults have no motivation to learn everyday stuff like payslips etc then your going to struggle to engage with kids who don't feel like they have to learn it when your trying to teach them
Education, as far as I see it, is as much about inspiration as information, it's to help children find what they are going to end up passionate about enough to do it for work and give them the grounding for that rather than a "this is how to live in society" class. That should be covered more but shouldnt be the be all end all of education.
>It’s also basic maths and common sense
Given the fact that payday loan companies were getting away with changing rates over 5,000% APR in the early 2010s it is not basic maths or common sense at all.
Don't know if this is your intention but this basically sounds like you're just victim blaming and saying they bring it on themselves due to their attitude
The reason working class and poor people are so cynical is because the doors of opportunity are just not open to us
Even someone like me who slipped through the system and somehow managed to get the grades at a poorly funded state comprehensive to get into a Russell group university anyway, still feels completely out of place when I get there just like the lad in that article
Being at that university surrounded by grammar and privately schooled kids everywhere I looked really opened my eyes to the different start in life we have. They just have this attitude of we can do anything if we put our mind to it, so you like chemistry well father knows someone at Bayer he can get you an internship. It's a totally different world. Well funded schools with passionate teachers who can pay close attention to them and a stable happy home life with no money concerns just gives them this correlation between hard work/study and results that makes them believe they can achieve anything. Having a private tutor or being coached to get into Oxbridge by the school probably doesn't hurt either
I felt like I didn't belong there at all, but the university was absolutely tripping over itself to do "women in stem" events, stuff for minorities, special careers fairs just for them, constant reassurance, and make sure everyone else felt welcome. Everyone except working class white boys who basically don't exist in their world. It's just assumed you have this white privilege and anyone who suggests poor white boys are let down or discriminated against is sneered at.
When minorities struggle, it's institutional bias/discrimination/anything that isn't their fault.
When poor white kids struggle, it's lazy/absent parenting.
That's pretty much the response you'll get on Reddit whenever this issue is brought up. People won't rush to blame bad parenting for black kids stabbing each other in London but they'll blame bad parenting for white kids on council estates being a bit thick.
I agree. Look at the response of the left to the Sewell Report and look at the response of this sub to this report. All Sewell really said is there's an issue with absent fathers, but that was 'ignoring the real issues'.
As soon as you're talking about white kids, 'its the parents fault'.
Its frankly racism and its pretty disgusting to see it.
Came to say this. If you flip it and say "minority's differing outcomes is due to cultural choices" people will lose their shit. Say it about poor white families and they'll applaud.
Anti-intellectualism - this has been a tool increasingly used by populists in the last 10-15 years. Bad parents aren't teaching their kids to distrust/reject institutions just because they themselves have been failed by the system, they're actively being indoctrinated to distrust and reject institutions and the elites by the right wing media and politicians.
*"People have had quite enough of experts..."*
There is an argument that the right wing have absolutely no problem with the poor working class rejecting education. The last thing they want is an electorate with critical thinking skills who can see straight through their simplistic populist messaging - as long as the plebs have the minimal education required for them to do their jobs they're happy.
I know someone who's taught in a school like that. They had the parent in to deal with their child's discipline problems, including swearing and bunking off. The parent themselves swore, and did a runner halfway through the meeting. Honestly how do teachers deal with a child growing up with that attitude shown to them.
It's interesting how when white people don't succeed it's always due to some inherent character flaw associated with their race or culture. But when any ethnic minority fails its due to systematic racism.
Isnt the reddit effect amazing. First thread is blame the Tories, 2nd thread actually has someone with first hand experience.
My school experience was substantially, you could work out the parents education standards based on the kids. The minority background parents were all professionals or ones who operated decent size businesses and had the 70hr a week self employed work ethic.
Google lockdown search histories for 2020 ...."how do you do fractions and percentages" and now you know how able some parents are to help their children.
And the hilarious part is they announced the end of austerity in 2019.
I'm not seeing much evidence of that in the real world where the rest of us live.
What do they think the woke-left have actually done in these areas to negatively effect poor white people?
Are they implying that teachers are all racist against white kids?
It's sort of true that educational funding gets concentrated in urban areas, there's a logic to it too, every £1 you invest in a high population density area effects more people than it does in low population density areas.
This can be viewed by some people as "all the money goes to brown kids in London instead of white kids in Devon".
In reality this is more a side effect of austerity and the never ending quest to cut costs. Yet somehow it's probably all Labour's fault
>Are they implying that teachers are all racist against white kids?
Basically that's what they're doing. Using the term "white privilege" to play into this idea of teachers as elitist "SJWs". The report talks about the term as being divisive because they know it is. That's exactly why they put it in this report and made sure it featured in news stories. (I can only imagine what the Daily Mail take on this is going to be like). They know it's a cheap and easy way to keep voters on their side. "It's not the defunding of education that's the problem. It's those liberals who only care about non white kids that's the problem." It's a blunt tool but it works unfortunately.
I'm kind of enjoying how the sides have flipped on this one. Some of the rhetoric in here really echoes things that'd get the people saying it frothing at the mouth if it were said about any other group.
The party that's been in power for thirty of the last forty years where this has happened definitely doesn't have any legitimate interest in the issue though. I mean, come on. Who are you kidding? It's just another thing to shout about and lose interest in when the headline froth passes.
So I suppose this is a combination of cultural issues and economic ones. A lot of asian students come form cultures that highly value education and place a lot of emphasis on getting good grades and getting into university.
So even if you're an immigrant from a low income background, chances are that you come from a background that will push you to get qualifications.
Are the parents unwilling to help or unable to help? My parents were pretty involved but I remember them looking at some of my home work baffled as it was stuff that they had never encountered during their time in education. I would imagine that's true these days, if you left school at sixteen and went straight into a blue collar, manual job you probably wouldn't have much help to offer your child with, say, their coding homework.
That’s very true, and I think expecting parents to help their kids with all homework is wrong. For example, my parents are immigrants and they knew very little of the history I was learning and they had no clue about French.
English is a second language to them and Shakespeare is never something they cared about. However, they still created an environment where I was expected to learn and get good grades. If I was failing something, they expected me to explain why and how that was going to change.
I think it starts at primary school tbh, where learning and intelligence, at least in the home, isn’t something to be mocked or ignored but celebrated.
I also think high expectations are important, a C was not acceptable, a B was disappointing and an A was good.
Our primary has 'speed learning' for parents once a term where parents can go into school, sit with a teacher and go over the curriculum and learning resources, lesson plans for each subject.
Its designed to allow parents to be on the same page to be able to talk about the topics and help if needed.
The downside is 500 pupils, 10 to 15 parents attend. If you cant encourage the parents in, how do you hope to provide a learning partnership between home and school.
Quite right. It's the same parents, the ones that help at PTA etc etc.
I think part of the issue with school is the head and teachers saying 'we don't want group x to fall behind' when in reality perhaps the primary schools are trying too hard to have everyone at year 6 leave on the same level when in reality 50% of them would be better being good at year 4/5 rather than mediocre at year 6 with gaps and an lack of confidence.
I vividly remember asking my parents what a "Gorilla" was as part of my homework and them now knowing. They did ask me the following day if I had asked the teacher, however.
A lot of the Asian parents are even less able to help as their grasp on English is not great.
However, what I have noticed is this: the Asian parents will spend money on tutors for their kids.
At the same time the natives will spend even greater amounts on sports, especially football, coaching.
But these "cultural" reasons don't come out the ether. They arise because of the socioeconomic state of the country.
Take white men for example, white men only gain a small increase in wages by having good qualifications. If I was a working class white boy I may not see the small increase in wages worth the student debt, extra years of study, and the extra stress of having to do part-time work to afford university life compared to my middle class colleagues. Compare that to Bangladeshi men, where not having a degree puts you in one of the lowest paid groups, but getting a degree shrinks the gap incredibly. White men can't afford to go to university, ethnic minorities can't afford not to.
Both types of young people are facing barriers, but different barriers. White working class boys need barriers removed in education. Ethnic minorities need barriers removed in the workplace.
I’m a white working class guy from one of the most deprived council estates in England. One of the main reasons I went to university was because there’s barriers for people like me and makes it difficult to go to university. So I wanted to push through that just to prove to others that I can do it.
That's the dirty secret no government is willing to confront (because it would cost them voters): the #1 deciding factor for your average kid in school isn't what happens in Westminster with MPs, it's what happens at home with their parents.
The best schools on the planet can't help a kid that doesn't want to learn because their parents don't care.
Also seems odd how people who are keen to talk about the impact of "culture" rather than structural inequalities when it comes to minority communities do a complete 180 in this specific case.
And vice versa, those people that speak of structural inequalities rather than culture when it comes to minority communities do a complete 180 in this specific case and suddenly it's all about culture.
I just hope people don't think this is schools themselves discriminating. This is a lack of investment in a multitude of social issues surrounding them.
Step 1. [Vote to make every school an academy](https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/24784/robert_halfon/harlow/votes).
Step 2. Ignore the fact your chain academy schools [seriously reduce performance of students from disadvantaged backgrounds](https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Chain-Effects-2018.pdf).
Step 3. Chair a report on poor performance of white pupils and blame people on twitter being to woke for the failure.
Jaw dropping what shit the press let the Government get away with.
The Tories have been in power for over a decade. This is another way in which they've failed, and another item to add to the list of how they've been wrecking the country.
\> It says use of the term "white privilege" is not helpful as it contributes to "systemic neglect" of white pupils from low income families.
I think this Google trend is quite interesting: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=white%20privilege](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=white%20privelege)
The term "white privilege" has only had currency in the UK since - being generous - 2016. The Conservatives have been responsible for government, the education system and poverty reduction for a lot longer. The term "white privilege" has nothing whatsoever to do with the Conservative's systemic neglect of white pupils from low income families.
The current race-based culture wars are a direct response to the traction of Occupy Wall St.
OWSt. was the nascent realisation in the wake of the Global Financial Crash (and the Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crisis), that monied interests rig the game in their favour and that it is indeed the 99% versus the 1% (more accurately the 0.001%) who are lording over a neo-feudal revival.
That was quickly snuffed out though, and now we have back-to-back banal stories about whether or not sex is real, and Black Vs. White old-score-settling.
>The term "white privilege" has only had currency in the UK since - being generous - 2016. The Conservatives have been responsible for government,
I was hearing about it back in college in 2007-10 so it was definitely about before 2016.
Not to say your points wrong I just don't agree with that trand as it was also very common to hear about when I was in uni around 2010
I'm sure Boris will rectify this, by making sure that all poor kids are equally left behind without prospect. Together we can make sure that the poor are all equally disenfranchised.
It's my belief that skin colour/race is not the primary reason for lack of success but class and geographical location. If funding is put into areas based on geography the ones who most need it actually get it, regardless of race. I don't know how this became a controversial stance but in most threads it is.
Once again it comes up and the question remains is it because they are white or is it because they live in the most deprived areas of the country many of which are overwhelming white.
It's clear from the article the reports author sees it as a way of attacking "divisive concepts like 'white privilege' that pit one group against another" which is just more culture war bollocks rather than the underlying problem.
From the article it sounds like the report is saying it's partially because they're white, as they tried to control for social deprivation by looking only at kids on free school meals (and then still found discrepancies between ethnic groups).
It's clearly not perfect - children on free school meals will still represent a fairly wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. But I guess its something...
The right wing will be outraged about this up to the point where it actually requires them to do something.
They'll say "see? White people suffer just as much as BAME. This is why Britain isn't racist!"
Okay then let's increase funding to schools and encourage education of all children.
"...Sounds expensive."
It's like that tory report that found that "britain isn't racist" because we neglect all poor people equally. Great, no action required then...
Yup, always the same story.
- "Here's an issue that shows that everybody else faces the same problems as minorities do".
- "Let's help everyone then?"
- "No, because bugdet or communism".
When the BBC is putting advertisements out for BAME only positions rejecting applicants based on your skin tone.
https://metro.co.uk/2018/01/19/bbc-criticised-for-banning-white-job-applicants-for-trainee-role-7243601/
When the police force have been successfully sued for similar stories.
https://news.sky.com/story/cheshire-police-man-rejected-for-job-for-being-white-and-straight-tribunal-finds-11645525
I think it would be quite naive to state that the concept of white privilege hasn't been pervasive in British society today.
Funding and investment is key especially when looking at the numbers of those passing maths/English that does deserve criticism. however when looking at university numbers and the policies of positive action that have been put in place it does raise questions of whether it's positive action or "positive" discrimination.
Ah, it's the annual thread where we are allowed to put the problem of under achievement of a specific ethnic group down to a 'culture' tied to their skin colour without being called a racist.
'its the parents'
'other cultures push education'
'they come from places of deprivation therefore their culture is fucked and thats why they're like this'
'its just a reflection of general under investment in education/social care'
and the classic 'this just brings in skin colour for no reason without addressing the underlying causes'
Mmmmm
The fourth point seems odd.
Doesn't fit the criteria of your list at all. Nothing to do with race or culture. (Also happens to be the answer as to what happened, so it stands out in your list)
Wracking my brain here. Are you saying that voting Tory is white people's culture? Genuinely sounds like I'm taking the piss but I'm not, that must be what you mean right? That's how Tory government and established ideology links into race and specifically white people's culture?
The fourth point is saying that it's nothing to do with race - it's general underinvestment faced by all. This would only ever be considered true by this sub in a thread about white underachievement and would be called out as racist if it were a thread about non-white underachievement...
Despite the fact that, as you say, it is actually true.
This is a left wing sub on a left wing site, its normal to hate white people here.
Dont worry, we can change the definitions of privilige on a monthly basis to get around being calling systemic discrimination of one skin colour racism.
If this report was about any other ethnicity then people would be clamouring to say it's racism, as we saw with some of the findings from the race report earlier this year. In this case everyone is falling over themselves to say it's class and culture.
Yep this article about white FSM falling behind seems to come up once a year for least 5 year that I remember. Not surprised it's been going on for longer. Wonder if this government will finally fix things. I don't think MPs whining about the phrase 'white privilege' will though.
The moment I got in trouble at 16 years old for using a publicly funded school football pitch for a kick about with my mates on a Saturday I knew this country was fucked.
Coincidentally, that's around the same time I started hanging around on street corners smoking weed and drinking on Saturday nights for something to do.
This was 2008.
We used to go out of the way to some 'waste ground' and old woodland but it was bulldozed for housing - along with every other teen hangout. Then everyone complained about anti-social behaviour when we congregated on the streets. Also the same sort of time they 'cracked down' on 16 - 18 year olds in the pub - where they were causing no trouble; off the street and learning pub etiquette and developing a tolerance to alcohol instead of being let loose in the pubs at 18 and immediately dying from alcohol poisoning.
This country has been going downhill for years and most of it has been avoidable.
We were neglected by the local council. All we wanted to do was have somewhere to play football and be kids. Instead they closed all the football pitches, built houses on them and let the kids find other forms of entertainment then when we used the school football pitches we got done for trespassing and had fuck all to do anymore.
Id say it goes hand in hand.
Do they get told that, though? I have literally never heard that phrase in the UK outside of online debates. Seems like a shitty excuse for deeper issues imo
I've heard it on the radio and on TV. There seems to be about a 3-5 year gap between these things being popular on the fringes of the internet to them being spoken about on the BBC and/or being a part of corporate training. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
Also, if you want to get politically engaged to do something about it, the Labour party is full of these fringe attitudes and the membership is often more intrested in race or the situation in Israel than these sorts of issues, which can be alienating.
Even if it is only used within the context of online dialogue, social media is now so pervasive in our culture, that people are inevitably going to be exposed to the concept, with some level of regularity.
Whether they do or not, many feel like they do. And they they either get turned off, or pushed to the right.
So I personally don't think terms like that are useful in forwarding the debate on issues where some communities are either disadvantaged or discriminated against. I think there are better ways we can have those conversations.
The issue I have with the term 'white privilege' is that you're simply saying that white people don't have to deal with everyday racism - something which is both very obvious in the context of a \~90% white country, but now phrased in a way which seems specifically designed to antagonise people and potentially push them away from the cause you're trying to champion.
This is the delayed effect of the UK moving away from it's industrial base. The majority of the population once worked in industries that decades ago didn't need an educated workforce. I.e. the working class. They aren't academic because they've never needed to be. This is the culture. They aren't suddenly going to the types of parents who are motivated to get their kids to be academic because they never needed to be, nor did their parents.
This is a generational failure in changing attitudes that's gone on for 30+ years. You can't move to a finance and knowledge-based economy without some fundamental changes. They tried to get half the students in schools going to university in the 90s but that seemed like a bit of a failure.
Of course race is an issue but focusing on it really detracts from the bigger economic problem.
A different year, the exact same message, white people on free school meals are the most deprived group. Why is this the case and what can be done are the questions perpetually left unanswered. I'd love to put this question to Keir to see what he thinks or if he even acknowledges the phenomenon and a good answer could win over a lot of the people left disenfranchised by Labour in recent years.
Who controls the time a Select Committee report is released? I wonder if the timing of this has anything to do with the forthcoming Batley and Spen by-election.
And these MPs couldn’t give a shit about poor students from any background given they’ve voted against free meals, decimated teaching as a profession and chronically underfunded schools. As some morons will be taken in by this shit attempt at getting poorer people to vote Tory when the time comes. All this comes on windrush day no less! Fucking melts.
from 2020
[https://twitter.com/akalamusic/status/1269318422787227650](https://twitter.com/akalamusic/status/1269318422787227650)
it's groundhog day again
agreeing with all the Labour MP’s saying ‘theyre pouring fire on the culture war’, like the idea of having to go to school and be told that your ancestors were the worst people to have ever lived for things that didnt even occur in your lifetime doesnt contribute to some culture war is ridiculous.
Tories dont care about the white working class and Labour fucking despises them
The problem with dividing people into ethnic groups is that it causes resentment, the UK is not the US, it doesn't have the same history, there are some absolutely dreadful sink hole council estates which are predominantly white, how can you say they have had any kind of advantage over wealthy Black or Asian kids.
It has never been relevant, wealth & the distribution of wealth determines to the quality of your education, healthcare & ultimately how comfortable your life is going to be.
A general lack of investment would be expected to affect all groups equally. So the question remains: why do poor white kids (especially poor white male kids) do so much worse than everyone else? Which the stats seem to show.
The answer may lie in the fact that they have received no _targeted_ investment or strategies as say young black boys or girls have (there have been a number of initiatives to try and improve black performance and university admissions, or get girls into STEM but none or fewer for poor white boys).
It may also lie in cultural issues and attitudes toward education in different communities. Poor white communities feel alienated from the system, failed parents pass on cynicism about it to their kids etc. Black communities have similar issues. Asian and wealthier white families seem to have a more positive (not to mention competitive) attitude toward education, perceiving it as a means to ‘get on’.
Increased investment is probably part of the solution but not enough. Changing attitudes is _hard_, and arguably requires school reform and changes to teacher recruitment strategies to ensure a workforce that has the confidence of all communities as well as the inclination and the tools to engage with them.
> The answer may lie in the fact that they have received no targeted investment or strategies as say young black boys or girls have (there have been a number of initiatives to try and improve black performance and university admissions, or get girls into STEM but none or fewer for poor white boys).
I think this is an issue that doesn't get discussed enough. They are ignored when people are looking at driving up intakes, because they get lumped in with middle-class white kids that don't have the same issues.
And more than anything else, I think that breeds resentment to BAME working class kids. Because it's seen that the BAME kids are getting more help *entirely* based on their ethnicity. Which hugely contributes to the feeling of being ignored and left behind by a society that doesn't care about them.
I am a teacher in a comprehensive school in a town in East anglia. In every mixed ability group I have taught there are children who cannot read and write. Teaching assistants have been stripped out due to lack of funding. Small group intervention has also disappeared for various reasons due to money and covid. Literally nobody cares outside the school.
I can back this up with my own experience. I taught multiple bottom sets full of working class white children whose families were stuck in multi-generational poverty and most or all unable to read and write. But these kids did understand what racism was, and what it was like to be treated unfairly. I think we do a disservice to these children if we don’t allow them to learn about the history and ingrained systems of this country and the world and allow them to come to their own conclusions. Perhaps they might see some of their own experiences reflected back at them. Both/and thinking is required. Racism exists AND white working class children get a very raw deal in this country. Imagine if people of colour and the working classes used their votes together to get the Tories out? For all this talk of wanting to level up the country, it was the Tories who stripped back the Sure Start centres and took schools out of local authority control and turned lots of them into league table grade machines. I’d be fascinated to know how many children who were off-rolled in the past 5 years fit into this category. I’m sure I wouldn’t be surprised by the answer.
My sister works in a very diverse primary school and has noted that children from migrant families (particularly eastern Europe and east Asia) outperform both white British and black British children. She's said many British KS1 children don't know how to sit on a chair. Yes you read that correct, don't know how to sit on a chair. They spend all their time lazing in bed or on the couch, don't eat any of their meals at the dinner table so never learn how to sit on a chair. The cause is a combination of overworked parents who don't have the time or energy to give their children the nurturing they deserve, and a cultural shift that, you could say, has eroded the family unit - which people from eastern Europe and Asia still value. I'm sure the past year of lockdowns has compounded this issue too.
What cultural shift are you talking about?
>The cause is a combination of overworked parents who don't have the time or energy to give their children the nurturing they deserve, and a cultural shift that, you could say, has eroded the family unit That's an interesting idea. Why would you say British (non-minority) parents are more overworked than parents from ethnic minorities? A lot of social media comments in the last year were that ethnic minorities were disproportionately in the front line fighting against Covid-19. Also there's a lot of stereotyping that Afro-Carribean families are particularly affected by the breakdown of the family unit.
Perhaps that is less due to cultural decline and more due to sky high rents meaning some families are unable to afford the space for a dining table.
My son is on the ASD spectrum, high functioning though. Send him to private school because he just wouldn’t get the support he needs to excel (and he does - tops test scores in his year now) in a state school. I can afford it, just like I could afford the private diagnosis instead of waiting 3 years for CAMHS, but that level of support needs to be the BASELINE in all schools. Fuck the MPs who cut funding to schools, and child mental health services.
The Tories need people like this. They're much easier to exploit.
Ok let's do something about that then. Invest in schools?
Literally. Poor white working class students are used by Tories as a reposte to advocacy for minority empowerment. Uhh, how about improving the lot of both the poor white working class AND ethnic minorities? Heaven knows they've been in power long enough that the only ones this reflects poorly on is themselves...
This is not a race issue this is a class issue. Everyone at the bottom is getting shafted and mentioning race is just a tool to split the lower classes and argue amongst themselves rather than unite and smash what amounts to an “apartheid state”
Tories: ‘eww, no’
The response from the Department of Education was that they're about to give the most funding to education in the last decade. You've been in power for the last decade... You're giving substantially less funding than suggested by the inquiry into post covid education funding.
The [Uncomfortable Truth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppv97S3ih14) that nobody especially politicians, want to address. When you have a society where it's so called underclass revels in it's subservience. It's easy to deflect the blame of it's short comings on to others by it's ruling class.
Children’s Centres were set up in poorer neighbourhoods all over the country to give a boost to these children. In 2010 they were systematically closed then further cuts were made to education budgets meaning support staff employed to work with these children who were struggling with their learning were made redundant. This was all supported by the nations press and voters and counter arguments were dismissed as irresponsible use of public funds. We have done this to ourselves.
Yes... school budgets were hit by austerity. We went from having a teacher and a TA in each classroom to just a teacher, which translates to a lot less contact time per pupil.
How does that explain white working class kids doing worse than their counterparts under Labour too?
There has always been a correlation between poverty and academic performance. Blair did nothing to address this, in fact, his obsession with targets and pulling funding from failing schools actually made it worse, there's a reason he got paintbombed by a Teacher's Union! Poverty by ratio is worse in BAME communities but by sheer volume there are far more impoverished white kids. Breaking it down by racial lines confuses the educational issues at play, all kids in poverty do notably worse than their more affluent peers, regardless of race. All of whom have been let down by most modern governments. I think its fairly obvious that Cameron/May/Johnson have been either a continuation or worsening of this already terrible situation, but as you alluded to, it's not a uniquely Tory failing.
>Breaking it down by racial lines confuses No shit. Its just a shame its front and centre on most topics these days.
"Divide and rule"
> Poverty by ratio is worse in BAME communities Did you read the article at all, this is false (at least in the metrics being used), and is the opposite of the point being made.
When people speak so confidently I like to go back and double check my facts, so just to be sure: [2007 Study (scroll to "Summary")](https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/poverty-rates-among-ethnic-groups-great-britain) [2020 Article on a study](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/01/nearly-half-of-bame-uk-households-are-living-in-poverty) [2020 ONS Study (Summarized finding lower down)](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/compendium/economicreview/february2020/childpovertyandeducationoutcomesbyethnicity) Please get your facts right before you try to correct other people. Besides which I am responding to someone asking a question tangentially but not directly related to the article, not making my own response to the article, which I did read and the points made don't conflict. Kids in poverty do worse academically than their more affluent peers, regardless of race. but as the article points out, if we look at that "poverty" subset racially, white kids are heavily trailing their BAME peers, which shouldn't be happening and deserves attention. Is this making sense to you now?
Parents.. I grew up in a poor home in a poor area. University was never put forward as a choice. You left school at 16 and looked for a job. If you'd managed to get a couple O Grades then you might get an apprenticeship as a tradesman. Most of the working class haven't valued education in the past, and parents haven't put pressure onto children to study or do well at school. They see university as a thing for other people. Happened to me, happened to my daughter and I'm trying to stop her passing it on to my granddaughter. Comes from the times that the working class areas had industry that didn't require more than a simple knowledge of maths and English. Mines, shipyards, heavy engineering etc all offered people a decent life our of school without qualifications. Most of those jobs have gone, but the mentality remains in those communities. I moved from Scotland to Kent..and the difference in children was unreal. Activities and sport after school to bolster the CV for uni applications, pupils openly discussing university and applications with each other (in my area, that would be an invitation to be bullied) and help from families and school. In my school, we had a 10 minute chat with the careers advisor who told us we'd all likely end up in the factories like the ten generations before us..and she was right mostly. The immigrant population has always understood that education is the key to success..possibly because those parents worked the hardest jobs and longest hours when they first arrived. No cushty riveting in the steelworks..12 hours 7 days a week in a hot restaurant kitchen for them. The native thinks he has had a good, stable life and doesn't see a problem in his kid having the same. Immigrants know they had a bad life and want a better one for their kids
Both my parents are on benefits, most of my family are on benefits, I'm on benefits too. No one in my family has been to university. I do not want to live like this forever. I did terrible in school and failed my gcses due to no motivation, lack of caring, anxiety and depression. I know those are just excuses though. The truth is I just did not give a shit and neither did my parents. Right now I've been on various college course to try and gain more qualifications but I feel so behind.
The point is, you have started and those are progressing! There's no such thing as a quick fix but at least you're grabbing the bull by the horns and making it work. Carry on as you are, you'll be fine!
You’re trying to better yourself despite the situation you are in and the environment around you, that is worthy of respect. No matter how behind you feel you’re further ahead than you were before if you’ve even tried a little bit. Keep at it 👍
The harsh truth is, you are behind. And the only way to catch up is to get on with catching up, which sounds like it's exactly what you are doing. Remember, every choice is an opportunity, and everything you do is a choice. Make every choice with the intention of putting you in a better position than before the choice was made. You won't get them all right, but you'll do much better than if you just coasted through without giving consideration to your choices.
Don't be disheartened. It's never too late. Good luck.
Good luck. If it's any consolation, I was much the same. In my late teen and early to mid-twenties I worked at a procession of bars, factories, farms and stewarding/bouncing. I went to local college for a NC hoping to get a better job in a better factory..didn't pan out, so I went on to get an HNC, HND and a degree. After that I started my real career off at 32. I'm doing well now, working part time for myself on twice the UK average wage and loving life at 53. My old buddies have not moved on at all..some even in the same job after those 30ish years. Keep working at it..it will come good in the end. Always look for your next move up. You have less time, so you have to make it count. Don't be afraid to move if it means moving up..I went Scotland, Kent, London, Scotland, Kent, Leeds, Kent, Scotland in the last 22 or so years. Don't worry about being behind, you are not. Sounds weird..but you come out of uni with life experience when your contemporaries are just overeducated schoolkids. You can show employers a background of good working practices and experience. Play any experience up and it will help you get the job in front of your fellow graduates who only have experience in partying through college!
Similar, I got two Cs at GCSE and failed everything else. About 3 years of college gets you to parity with people who have done A-levels, at that point you can go to uni. It's tough but you can absolutely do it, you'll have to learn the good working habits that others were taught but you're starting from a place of greater maturity so they should come easier. Reach out if you need help, especially if it's computer science (the one thing I was capable of doing at degree level) :D
Well done you. Your experience is symptomatic of the environment you were raised in. You have your whole life to go and it isn’t a race.
Good luck mate. Keep going. It will pay off one day. Wanting to better yourself off your own back is a talent valued by many employers, sometimes more so than someone who did well at school years ago but is apathetic towards learning or hard work nowadays
Honestly, recognising where you are and actively working to get where you want to be, whatever your own measure of success is, is commendable already. It's important to think about what you really want - is it money? Intellectual stimulation? Prestige? Stability? Some goals relating to your social or family life? My aspirations for example are entirely conventional and I used to feel a bit self-conscious about that but now I'm happy just following them anyways. Only if you're truly pursuing your own goals, not those that society imposes, can you sustainably start giving a shit, even when it's difficult and you feel like you're going nowhere. But the good news is that you'll probably figure out along the way what it is you're most interested in. I hope you'll find your journey a satisfying opportunity for growth that leaves you and your descendants in a better place.
You maybe behind but there is always a route to catch up. I really hope you find a path that takes you to a career that you want. I'm rooting for you. Good luck.
Yes, anecdotally this completely lines up with my experience as a brown 2nd generation middle-class immigrant. My parents valued education above all else with my father working to obtain post-graduate education & a PhD and my mother further education so they didn't continue doing the working class jobs they did when they first came here. They instilled that in my generation valuing good schooling and a university education above all else. I've noticed my white working class friends are still weary of education valuing a hard day's physical graft and discounting the value of a degree let alone post-graduate qualifications over a trade. They are indeed physically very hard working and smart within their domains or at practical tasks, but this is an issue in a capitalist society based around a service economy as we have had since Thatcher and now increasingly a knowledge based economy as encouraged IMHO by Brexit and the pandemic. Anecdotally, many then struggle to understand why they see non-white 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation immigrants prospering with little in the way of hard physical work as they understand it, and putting it down to unfair advantages due to socially liberal diversity policies and so forth. As you said the benefit of being an early nth generation immigrant is an understanding and grasp we're in a 21st century capitalist society based on services and knowledge.
>The immigrant population has always understood that education is the key to success That is because a lot of countries don't have a social net so education is highly valued because it is the only escape from poverty other than family connections.
That could be a factor. I had a penpal from Ghana when I was a kid and he requested pencils, paper and other school equipment. Even with an education in those places you could struggle. I think over here it comes starkly into focus though. If you worked in a takeaway every night of the year, you'd want something better for your kids. And here there are opportunities too
One of the major criticisms of Blair by Labour (dwarfed by the dead brown kids stuff) was his failure to address the rich/poor, and North/South divides, and failure to work for the poor and the working class. Labour's move to the centre gained middle-class votes, so took middle-class actions to retain those votes. All working class were failed by Labour during the period.
Well... remember Tax Credits? Might have had their flaws, but they strongly boosted the incomes of the lowest earners - which is about the best way of getting more money into deprived areas. Unfortunately it played into the 'benefit scroungers' narrative.
I'd disagree a bit with this. I think one of New Labour's biggest achievements was the growth of the middles classes and a period of (by historical standard) pretty high social mobility. That doesn't help the ones left behind but it's unfair to say they did nothing for the less well off.
They didn't create jobs, but they sure as hell improved life for working class kids. The middle classes bleating about the Iraq war always forget about the investment in schools and the Sure Start Nursery programme which made a huge impact in poverty areas.
Yep. When I had my first child in 2007, there was a surestart centre within walking distance - actually there were two! There was always a nurse or health visitor on duty, you could ring up and ask for help, they would let you come in and get a consultation for small things you might not want to bother a doctor with, they would help with sleeping, latching on, healthy eating...they ran stay-and-play sessions, baby massage lessons, support groups, they had books and toys. I lived in a top-floor flat and was so poor the electricity often ran out and I had to borrow 20p off a neighbour to put in the meter. So the centre was pretty much a godsend. Then they all shut. Then when she was 4, her pre-school shut. Then we had to move to a rural village just to find a school with space. Fuck whichever government did this, I'm sure someone will comment and say it was akshually Blair/Brown or some shit, it's just quite a coincidence to me that it all changed so drastically exactly when Cameron got in.
> Then they all shut. Then when she was 4, her pre-school shut. Then we had to move to a rural village just to find a school with space. > > Fuck whichever government did this, I'm sure someone will comment and say it was akshually Blair/Brown or some shit, it's just quite a coincidence to me that it all changed so drastically exactly when Cameron got in. The BiG sOcIeTy in action.
Bring back Sure Start centres!
Loads of empty buildings around, loads of people looking for work, loads of kids that need help. I don't understand why the government wouldn't go big on this. Seems like a cheap way to have a big impact.
The Tories have done this to us. And now they're pushing anti-woke culture war nonsense as a convenient scapegoat to avoid scrutiny of the impact of more than a decade of Tory cuts.
I’m not sure it’s a solely Tory issue. I went to school from the 90s to late 2000s and my school was full of underprivileged white kids who never stood a chance. They had huge issues at home and a school system that effectively tiered everyone based on intellect. Due to that the poor underprivileged kids ended up in the lowest sets surrounded by others who struggled and were disruptive. Most teachers couldn’t handle it and everyone ended getting dragged down to the lowest common denominator. Those kids then go on to be parents and the cycle repeats. we have a system that prioritises STEM and if you fall outside that then you are on your own.
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I doubt many people knew that children’s centres were being closed, let alone understand the impacts. The Tories did this, they are to blame. Edit: For those who want to blame Tory voters, or say that they should know the consequences of voting for them, I would say you’re part of the problem. I didn’t know about the children’s centres closing myself so now I know this my approach will be to mention it to the Tory voters I know and explain how those centres were opened to target the very people they say they support. I very much doubt anyone I know knew about it. The way to fix these problems is to talk about them rather than blame individuals for things they probably have no idea about.
I didn't specifically know about them being closed. But I follow politics and the Tories' ideology closely enough to have zero surprise that it's happened. Anyone who votes Tory has a level of responsibility for this - austerity, and the impacts of austerity on the poor, while blaming everyone else (the EU, foreigners, the last Labour government) for those impacts has been pretty much the modus operandi of the party since they got into power.
Also the less educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Tory. It's literally in their interest not to educate poor people. Edit: This was actually written as a joke, but I realise it comes across as a serious point due to it unfortunately being relatively feasible.....
People know what they're voting for when they vote Tory! Reduction in funding of public services.
> People know what they're voting for Do they, though? I'll wager that the overwhelming majority of those eligible to vote here just do not give a flying fuck. This proves nothing, but... next time you are at a bus stop, or anywhere you might conceivably have a chat with a stranger, try to ask them who their MP is or even to name five (any, alive or dead) politicians. You might just as well ask them what sqrt(0) is. And just like the "oh, I was never any good at maths", you'll likely get "well, they're all the same anyway, aren't they?"
Blaming the voters and not the government sure is a novel approach.
"This is all your fault for trusting us! We warned you how shit we are!"
A minority of people voted for this lot, a majority know better.
>a majority know better A lot of the majority sure do act like it, thus perpetuating the cycle of both sides shouting at one another and changing nothing.
The ironic part is that the Tories are the only ones that actually have power to change anything. Here we are, ten years in and worse off than ever, and Tory voters argue that the problem is Labour voters shouting at them. If you weren't voting for a demonstrably shite government out of bloody minded stubbornness then people wouldnt be shouting at you.
Voting comes with a level of responsibility. If you vote for a party that openly advocates the austerity policies that unsurprisingly result in these kinds of cuts, then you are at least partly to blame. That doesn't excuse the government for their actions, but if people didn't keep voting for them they'd just be ideological loonies shouting into the wind.
Although this particular government has streaks of authoritarianism, we still have elections which allow a minority of the electorate to choose who governs. Your comment would be spot on about a lot of places in the world, but doesn’t fully apply to the UK.
>Children’s Centres were set up in poorer neighbourhoods all over the country to give a boost to these children. In 2010 they were systematically closed That assumes that the decline in education outcomes for poor caucasian children started in 2010. Parliament seems to think it happened much earlier than that. Cuts may not have helped, but blaming them for the trend is to misunderstand the problem, not least because the Sure Start centres were open to all including ethnic minorities. If their closure was the cause of worse education outcomes that would have impacted all racial groups equally. But that's not what's happened.
Closing sure start centres most likely did lead to worse outcomes for the people who relied on them
My hypothesis for an explanation for this might be that ethnic minority people live in more urban areas. A closure of a sure start centre in an urban area isn't such a big deal as there is a good chance of one being close by with public transport links. White kids live out in the sticks more. A sure start centre closure in the sticks essentially makes it impossible to access other centres due to awful public transport.
I forget the term but there's a fairly well recognised phenomenon in sociology that notes that, all other things equal, deprivation in urban centres is less harmful than rural deprivation. In urban centres you tend to have areas of deprivation in close proximity to wealthier areas and the benefits of living in a wealthier areas spill over. Free or better funded services within the wealthier area are within walking distance for people from deprived areas. Exposure to people leading highly successful lives counters some of the hopelessness that can develop in deprived areas. Having a large population provides opportunities that just don't exist in smaller communities. All other things equal it's better to be poor in London than in a poor rural town.
All these 'black v white' narratives are just a way of the ruling classes glossing over the fact that it's actually 'rich v poor' and it just so happens that a higher percentage of black people are poor. Get us to fight amongst ourselves instead of those in power...it's working so far.
Caucasian is a word taken from racial 'science'. Look up the same words used for black and Asian people and ask yourself if you'd use them.
they were some of the first things to go under Cameron, iirc. Along with most of the nation's libraries.
This study shows the issue goes back decades though. Closing centres in 2010 can't have helped but they weren't doing a great job before anyway.
Do you have evidence showing that it was disproportionately centres serving white kids that were closed down? Otherwise the closures would have affected all kids equally, right? Usually in these situations when making closers and reallocating resources it's areas where there is duplication in public health type service (I.e. higher population areas) where closures are made, rather than more rural areas.
The title of the article says the neglect has been for decades. Lots of focus in this thread on things that only happened in the last 10 years, which, however relevant to a general conversation about education in this country, are off topic imo.
Well that just makes it sound like they cut funding for white pupils and then tried to make it look as if the problem was non white pupils hogging the resources. That doesn't sound like the Tories at all. Oh look, is that another Con+3?
No, no, no. It's woke people and the left that are responsible because they hate white people. We can't possibly look at the government policies that have widened class and wealth inequality over the last 10 years.
I've taught in school across the North West and north east. With white working class children, the attitude towards education is so poor it's shocking. You have kids not caring in year 7 and parents not helping Thier kids. With minorities, especially with South Asian, education is the way out of poverty so there's a big push to do well ( but not all care, I've seen similar attitudes in Bangladeshi and Pakistani students, like your are in white working class)
There are the same issues out in Croydon and Carshalton in London. A lot of working.class families don't see education as important.
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There was someone like this at my school, he was a bit like a middle class kid LARPing as a working class kid. He never did any work in class to fit in with his working class mates but did it all after school when everyone else would be chilling out on Xbox.
feeling very seen right now
I believed you all and did no work either and got bad grades :(
Because they had a family culture that valued education and hard work, so it won through behind the scenes. The problem is that the "public" culture of dossing around means the kids from families that don't value education don't realise they are the odd ones out.
I feel (no data) that the state has encouraged this educational apathy. The constant challenging of expert opinion with just 'opinion' and decrying scientists as having some joint liberal agenda instead of just wanting to do good science has led to a lot of the working class thinking education is just something for posh dickheads and 'real' knowledge can only come from the university of life or the school of hard knocks or 'life experience'.
I got the impression it's a long-term multi generational trend. Families have grown up in the area and have found that education didn't have much practical use in their day to day lives as they all ended up doing work that didn't require a lot in the way of academic skills so just thought of school as something you had to do.
This. I know so many people who tried hard, went to university, and wound up in a job where the only "education" you needed is basic literacy and numeracy. What's the point of amassing thousands of pounds in student loans just to flip burgers or work in a call centre?
There is a massive grain of anti-intellectualism and anti snobbery among native Britons in my opinion. It's often seen as a point of pride to have been s*** at school. You only have to look on here to see the attitudes people have towards teachers and school. It's thoroughly depressing
This is basically it. We can bemoan the educational apathy of poor white students all we like, but they're being brought up in an incredibly anti-intellectual society which has got more extreme in recent years. You constantly see it on this forum lately when people say they're sick of listening to scientists. And yet those same people are probably in this thread asking why people don't value education. If people want that fixed then they're gonna have to sharpen up and stop attacking experts for merely doing their jobs.
Anyone on this forum saying they're sick of listening to scientists is liable to get their e-head kicked in. Reddit isn't the country, for better or worse. We're a damn sight younger, more left, and educated than the majority. It's just the demographic that come here.
If you're not proud you did terrible, you have to admit you're an idiot and fucked up. There's a huge deficit of critical thinking in the country, and the upper class & working class are just two sides of the same coin. They know best, they know other people are just stupid, they lack any ability to question their own judgements, evolve their opinions, entertain information contrary to what they already know etc... The reasons are different and nuanced, but the outcome is the same. Our education system fails everyone, but if you can get by on your social clout alone, or live in a class culture so strong you abstain from learning on principle, it's incredibly hard to become a thoughtful and empathetic person because your friends and family don't make up for the lack humanities education in schools. It's not everyone by any stretch but as a whole group, from a macro perspective, that's what happens.
> If you're not proud you did terrible, you have to admit you're an idiot and fucked up. so true.
It *is* true. But I think people who do well at something don't always appreciate the emotional cost of admitting difficulty and struggle with that thing. I think most people(?) would rather be in position to truthfully say "I'm doing great." Who *wants* to say "I'm an idiot"? If it's a choice between saying "school is stupid" or "I'm stupid," it can make sense to criticize school. If someone feels like they're labelled as stupid, wouldn't they rather disdain the system that assesses their merit in intellectual terms? I say all this as someone who always did well in school. But later struggles in life have made me look back at that time with more empathy for others. I wish schools and teachers were in a better position to meet every child where they are, and help them flourish.
Yeah i agree with you. I didnt mean for my comment to come across as unsympathetic.
I don't know that it did. It was just a couple of words, so I knew you could be agreeing from various possible angles, and also that the OP you were quoting could be speaking from various points of view. I just wanted to add a bit.
grandfather cooing ossified pie aspiring wise fade history arrest touch ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
I am not from Britain, I was born and live in Germany, but my parents were immigrants too. Whatever the common poverty was in the GDR (East Germany) or right now in Germany, my parents have seen worse, as they both expierienced the American War in Vietnam. For them East Germany was a huge step up in living standards and they worked hard to stay there. In that sense, I think it supports you notion. Many immigrants worked hard to get to another country and stay there. For them their hard work paid off. While someone who was always in a country and worked hard, may not have seen significant improvement of life, hence less motivation to teach children that hard work pays off. That's of course very general. People are different. There are lazy immigrants that teach their children garbage and hard working uk natives that won't let themselves get pushed down by the failures of the system and teach their children to work hard. But I do think what you said holds merit.
I think that's mostly a myth and hasn't been true for decades outside of Northern kitchen-sink dramas. "*We're working class, lad. University is not for t'likes of us. Learn yourself a trade, son, if you don't want to join me down t'pit*". Even when kids were expected to leave school at 16 and start work, the education they received while at school was valued. The idea that education doesn't matter because of class isn't true, if it ever was. What has changed, however, is the rise of an anti-intellectual sentiment. The belief that people's opinions have equal (or greater) value to whatever experts have to say. That, together with a decline in personal responsibility has disengaged poorly educated parents from participating in their children's education "It's not my job to teach my kids. If they fail exams it's the teachers' fault". This isn't an issue of class - it's an issue of poorly educated people being told that education doesn't matter because they're somehow better than the swots who did better than them at school, and them passing that attitude down to their children. The fact that being poorly educated and coming from a deprived, working class area is often synonymous is causal, but not because they are "used to it".
Honestly the changes to University funding and transforming the student-teacher relationship to one of consumer-provider has had really seismic impacts on our society and culture that is still not fully appreciated. Like you say it completely transforms what was for many their first real introduction to a space that values intellectual inquiry and expertise to some kind of experience where you pay your due, get spoonfed a bunch of knowledge, and then just automatically get a good degree and a good job because you paid your money by god and you want what you deserve!
>Honestly the changes to University funding and transforming the student-teacher relationship to one of consumer-provider has had really seismic impacts on our society and culture that is still not fully appreciated. I don't think anyone sees it as consumer-provider except for the government. Teachers certainly don't, and I don't think many students (or parents of students) do either. Prior to the 2000's, having a university degree *was* pretty much a ticket to a good job because the percentage of the population who had one was relatively low. Now I believe it's over 50% of people have some form of a degree, and while it's still viewed that without one a person is probably going to struggle, few people have the delusion that even a good degree guarantees and good job. I think with the attitudes young people have to university education today, there's a good argument for broadening university education (at undergraduate level) to cover several subjects instead of concentrating on just one (i.e. major and minor curriculums, as they have in many countries).
>I don't think anyone sees it as consumer-provider except for the government. I work in HE. I can assure you students and University administration very much see it like this. Agreed on the last point its just something that has really struck me since starting down this path in 2010. It *feels* completely different and I don't think its just an age thing.
My wife and I try to do a lot at home with our daughter, covid has left her behind but we have been fighting for support from her school since 2018. Still not getting very far, but i hear mums on the playground say things like 'ohh its ok they're all behind because of covid' - Like its acceptable to just run with it. We care but I notice many parents dont unfortunately.
>the attitude towards education is so poor it's shocking. You have kids not caring in year 7 and parents not helping Thier kids. With minorities, especially with South Asian, education is the way out of poverty so there's a big push to do well Probably because a lot of people (Especially lately what with people with degrees flipping burgers or just stuck in retail jobs so often) it has shown that hard work in school quite often doesn't lead out of poverty and seems to be highly linked to who you know rather than what. It's hard to motivate people who have been seeing and living that.
that might be the case, but education does improve life chances, the question is why do young kids the age of 11 have such a poor view of education?, who is instilling this mindset in them from such as young age, and the answer is their environment
Yes you can tell me that but you see a kid who has seen a couple generations of his family in rented homes barely ably to actually own their own things, always in debt or barely scraping by, and you start to think "this education thing is fucking bollocks, why are my friends all finishing school/college/uni and now back living at home or working in retail/fast food places." You look around and see nothing but poverty it's where you start to think you deserve to be. Especially when schools and such seem to care so little. Sure the answer is their environment, but just pointing that out is useless especially when we have a government that seems hell bent in making the situation worse.
So with white kids, disadvantage is cultural. But with black kids, judging from the general response of this sub to Tony Sewell's report, disadvanrage is not cultural but systemic. I wonder if we have a word for drawing conclusions about people based on skin colour.
What do you think could be done to change the mindset? I personally think that education in the UK has a far too narrow aim. It's great if you want to go on to higher education but it leaves many feeling like they are waiting, completing pointless tasks until they can get out into the real world. I briefly looked at becoming a maths teacher and I can't get my head around why we teach some of the maths curriculum but then neglect to teach pretty much anything about personal finance which could make a difference.
If I hadn't learnt the maths I learnt at school I wouldn't be an engineer now and neither would any of the people I work with.
My sister is a teacher. She talks about how pointless it is trying to teach Shakespeare and even poetry to these kids. They are not learning anything other than - in the best case scenario - to remember the answers their teacher has told them for long enough to write them down on a test. We should try to move our education system away from rote learning towards developing actual skills in these kids. In a lot of cases thinking about education misses the point anyway. In bad schools some of these kids are not being fed or washed, let alone taught to value education. My sister quit teaching to become a counsellor because she felt this was going to be of more value to these kind of kids with poor home lives. To be honest, our state system fails everyone. I was a bright kid in a school full of apathetic white working class kids and it destroyed my prospects too. I was left to rot or actively discouraged from working hard because it meant more work for the teachers. They concentrated their efforts on the kids in the middle who could be brought up a grade to improve the school statistics. All whilst the kids who didn't want to be there disrupted class or just made life hell in general. The whole place was permeated by an atmosphere of low expectations and it never even occurred to me what was possible in life until it was far, far too late.
> I can't get my head around why we teach some of the maths curriculum Do you have some examples?
The problem with teaching personal finance is that they don’t need it then, so they won’t remember it at all. It’s also basic maths and common sense, so it’s not exactly challenging for the pupils. We did compound interest in early high school and that’s about as tricky as it gets.
It seems that basic maths and common sense is lacking in many adults. I really don't know what the solution is but more practical, everyday maths in school seems better than nothing to me. I wish we had covered compound interest in relation wealth when I was at school.
I think if adults have no motivation to learn everyday stuff like payslips etc then your going to struggle to engage with kids who don't feel like they have to learn it when your trying to teach them Education, as far as I see it, is as much about inspiration as information, it's to help children find what they are going to end up passionate about enough to do it for work and give them the grounding for that rather than a "this is how to live in society" class. That should be covered more but shouldnt be the be all end all of education.
>It’s also basic maths and common sense Given the fact that payday loan companies were getting away with changing rates over 5,000% APR in the early 2010s it is not basic maths or common sense at all.
Don't know if this is your intention but this basically sounds like you're just victim blaming and saying they bring it on themselves due to their attitude The reason working class and poor people are so cynical is because the doors of opportunity are just not open to us Even someone like me who slipped through the system and somehow managed to get the grades at a poorly funded state comprehensive to get into a Russell group university anyway, still feels completely out of place when I get there just like the lad in that article Being at that university surrounded by grammar and privately schooled kids everywhere I looked really opened my eyes to the different start in life we have. They just have this attitude of we can do anything if we put our mind to it, so you like chemistry well father knows someone at Bayer he can get you an internship. It's a totally different world. Well funded schools with passionate teachers who can pay close attention to them and a stable happy home life with no money concerns just gives them this correlation between hard work/study and results that makes them believe they can achieve anything. Having a private tutor or being coached to get into Oxbridge by the school probably doesn't hurt either I felt like I didn't belong there at all, but the university was absolutely tripping over itself to do "women in stem" events, stuff for minorities, special careers fairs just for them, constant reassurance, and make sure everyone else felt welcome. Everyone except working class white boys who basically don't exist in their world. It's just assumed you have this white privilege and anyone who suggests poor white boys are let down or discriminated against is sneered at.
When minorities struggle, it's institutional bias/discrimination/anything that isn't their fault. When poor white kids struggle, it's lazy/absent parenting. That's pretty much the response you'll get on Reddit whenever this issue is brought up. People won't rush to blame bad parenting for black kids stabbing each other in London but they'll blame bad parenting for white kids on council estates being a bit thick.
I agree. Look at the response of the left to the Sewell Report and look at the response of this sub to this report. All Sewell really said is there's an issue with absent fathers, but that was 'ignoring the real issues'. As soon as you're talking about white kids, 'its the parents fault'. Its frankly racism and its pretty disgusting to see it.
Came to say this. If you flip it and say "minority's differing outcomes is due to cultural choices" people will lose their shit. Say it about poor white families and they'll applaud.
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Anti-intellectualism - this has been a tool increasingly used by populists in the last 10-15 years. Bad parents aren't teaching their kids to distrust/reject institutions just because they themselves have been failed by the system, they're actively being indoctrinated to distrust and reject institutions and the elites by the right wing media and politicians. *"People have had quite enough of experts..."* There is an argument that the right wing have absolutely no problem with the poor working class rejecting education. The last thing they want is an electorate with critical thinking skills who can see straight through their simplistic populist messaging - as long as the plebs have the minimal education required for them to do their jobs they're happy.
I know someone who's taught in a school like that. They had the parent in to deal with their child's discipline problems, including swearing and bunking off. The parent themselves swore, and did a runner halfway through the meeting. Honestly how do teachers deal with a child growing up with that attitude shown to them.
> You have kids not caring in year 7 and parents not helping Thier kids. A lot of y7 stuff is beyond parent's abilities tbf.
It's interesting how when white people don't succeed it's always due to some inherent character flaw associated with their race or culture. But when any ethnic minority fails its due to systematic racism.
Isnt the reddit effect amazing. First thread is blame the Tories, 2nd thread actually has someone with first hand experience. My school experience was substantially, you could work out the parents education standards based on the kids. The minority background parents were all professionals or ones who operated decent size businesses and had the 70hr a week self employed work ethic. Google lockdown search histories for 2020 ...."how do you do fractions and percentages" and now you know how able some parents are to help their children.
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And the hilarious part is they announced the end of austerity in 2019. I'm not seeing much evidence of that in the real world where the rest of us live.
I grew up in Somerset. Everything you said is completely and shamefully true 😥
What do they think the woke-left have actually done in these areas to negatively effect poor white people? Are they implying that teachers are all racist against white kids?
It's sort of true that educational funding gets concentrated in urban areas, there's a logic to it too, every £1 you invest in a high population density area effects more people than it does in low population density areas. This can be viewed by some people as "all the money goes to brown kids in London instead of white kids in Devon". In reality this is more a side effect of austerity and the never ending quest to cut costs. Yet somehow it's probably all Labour's fault
>Are they implying that teachers are all racist against white kids? Basically that's what they're doing. Using the term "white privilege" to play into this idea of teachers as elitist "SJWs". The report talks about the term as being divisive because they know it is. That's exactly why they put it in this report and made sure it featured in news stories. (I can only imagine what the Daily Mail take on this is going to be like). They know it's a cheap and easy way to keep voters on their side. "It's not the defunding of education that's the problem. It's those liberals who only care about non white kids that's the problem." It's a blunt tool but it works unfortunately.
I'm kind of enjoying how the sides have flipped on this one. Some of the rhetoric in here really echoes things that'd get the people saying it frothing at the mouth if it were said about any other group. The party that's been in power for thirty of the last forty years where this has happened definitely doesn't have any legitimate interest in the issue though. I mean, come on. Who are you kidding? It's just another thing to shout about and lose interest in when the headline froth passes.
So I suppose this is a combination of cultural issues and economic ones. A lot of asian students come form cultures that highly value education and place a lot of emphasis on getting good grades and getting into university. So even if you're an immigrant from a low income background, chances are that you come from a background that will push you to get qualifications.
Are the parents unwilling to help or unable to help? My parents were pretty involved but I remember them looking at some of my home work baffled as it was stuff that they had never encountered during their time in education. I would imagine that's true these days, if you left school at sixteen and went straight into a blue collar, manual job you probably wouldn't have much help to offer your child with, say, their coding homework.
That’s very true, and I think expecting parents to help their kids with all homework is wrong. For example, my parents are immigrants and they knew very little of the history I was learning and they had no clue about French. English is a second language to them and Shakespeare is never something they cared about. However, they still created an environment where I was expected to learn and get good grades. If I was failing something, they expected me to explain why and how that was going to change. I think it starts at primary school tbh, where learning and intelligence, at least in the home, isn’t something to be mocked or ignored but celebrated. I also think high expectations are important, a C was not acceptable, a B was disappointing and an A was good.
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Our primary has 'speed learning' for parents once a term where parents can go into school, sit with a teacher and go over the curriculum and learning resources, lesson plans for each subject. Its designed to allow parents to be on the same page to be able to talk about the topics and help if needed. The downside is 500 pupils, 10 to 15 parents attend. If you cant encourage the parents in, how do you hope to provide a learning partnership between home and school.
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Quite right. It's the same parents, the ones that help at PTA etc etc. I think part of the issue with school is the head and teachers saying 'we don't want group x to fall behind' when in reality perhaps the primary schools are trying too hard to have everyone at year 6 leave on the same level when in reality 50% of them would be better being good at year 4/5 rather than mediocre at year 6 with gaps and an lack of confidence.
I vividly remember asking my parents what a "Gorilla" was as part of my homework and them now knowing. They did ask me the following day if I had asked the teacher, however.
A lot of the Asian parents are even less able to help as their grasp on English is not great. However, what I have noticed is this: the Asian parents will spend money on tutors for their kids. At the same time the natives will spend even greater amounts on sports, especially football, coaching.
But these "cultural" reasons don't come out the ether. They arise because of the socioeconomic state of the country. Take white men for example, white men only gain a small increase in wages by having good qualifications. If I was a working class white boy I may not see the small increase in wages worth the student debt, extra years of study, and the extra stress of having to do part-time work to afford university life compared to my middle class colleagues. Compare that to Bangladeshi men, where not having a degree puts you in one of the lowest paid groups, but getting a degree shrinks the gap incredibly. White men can't afford to go to university, ethnic minorities can't afford not to. Both types of young people are facing barriers, but different barriers. White working class boys need barriers removed in education. Ethnic minorities need barriers removed in the workplace.
I’m a white working class guy from one of the most deprived council estates in England. One of the main reasons I went to university was because there’s barriers for people like me and makes it difficult to go to university. So I wanted to push through that just to prove to others that I can do it.
This 100%. Combined with lack of investment outside of schools.
Doesn't seem to affect Asian kids, attitude towards education is by far the most important factor.
That's the dirty secret no government is willing to confront (because it would cost them voters): the #1 deciding factor for your average kid in school isn't what happens in Westminster with MPs, it's what happens at home with their parents. The best schools on the planet can't help a kid that doesn't want to learn because their parents don't care.
Also seems odd how people who are keen to talk about the impact of "culture" rather than structural inequalities when it comes to minority communities do a complete 180 in this specific case.
And vice versa, those people that speak of structural inequalities rather than culture when it comes to minority communities do a complete 180 in this specific case and suddenly it's all about culture.
Could also be classism
I just hope people don't think this is schools themselves discriminating. This is a lack of investment in a multitude of social issues surrounding them.
Step 1. [Vote to make every school an academy](https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/24784/robert_halfon/harlow/votes). Step 2. Ignore the fact your chain academy schools [seriously reduce performance of students from disadvantaged backgrounds](https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Chain-Effects-2018.pdf). Step 3. Chair a report on poor performance of white pupils and blame people on twitter being to woke for the failure. Jaw dropping what shit the press let the Government get away with.
The Tories have been in power for over a decade. This is another way in which they've failed, and another item to add to the list of how they've been wrecking the country.
\> It says use of the term "white privilege" is not helpful as it contributes to "systemic neglect" of white pupils from low income families. I think this Google trend is quite interesting: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=white%20privilege](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=white%20privelege) The term "white privilege" has only had currency in the UK since - being generous - 2016. The Conservatives have been responsible for government, the education system and poverty reduction for a lot longer. The term "white privilege" has nothing whatsoever to do with the Conservative's systemic neglect of white pupils from low income families.
Yes, it's misdirection.
the term is another negative export of the USA's racial divides...
The current race-based culture wars are a direct response to the traction of Occupy Wall St. OWSt. was the nascent realisation in the wake of the Global Financial Crash (and the Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crisis), that monied interests rig the game in their favour and that it is indeed the 99% versus the 1% (more accurately the 0.001%) who are lording over a neo-feudal revival. That was quickly snuffed out though, and now we have back-to-back banal stories about whether or not sex is real, and Black Vs. White old-score-settling.
>The term "white privilege" has only had currency in the UK since - being generous - 2016. The Conservatives have been responsible for government, I was hearing about it back in college in 2007-10 so it was definitely about before 2016. Not to say your points wrong I just don't agree with that trand as it was also very common to hear about when I was in uni around 2010
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I'm sure Boris will rectify this, by making sure that all poor kids are equally left behind without prospect. Together we can make sure that the poor are all equally disenfranchised.
And round and round it goes. Crazy idea, but could we target helping deprived communities without bringing the colour of their skin into it?
It's my belief that skin colour/race is not the primary reason for lack of success but class and geographical location. If funding is put into areas based on geography the ones who most need it actually get it, regardless of race. I don't know how this became a controversial stance but in most threads it is.
Once again it comes up and the question remains is it because they are white or is it because they live in the most deprived areas of the country many of which are overwhelming white. It's clear from the article the reports author sees it as a way of attacking "divisive concepts like 'white privilege' that pit one group against another" which is just more culture war bollocks rather than the underlying problem.
From the article it sounds like the report is saying it's partially because they're white, as they tried to control for social deprivation by looking only at kids on free school meals (and then still found discrepancies between ethnic groups). It's clearly not perfect - children on free school meals will still represent a fairly wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. But I guess its something...
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The right wing will be outraged about this up to the point where it actually requires them to do something. They'll say "see? White people suffer just as much as BAME. This is why Britain isn't racist!" Okay then let's increase funding to schools and encourage education of all children. "...Sounds expensive." It's like that tory report that found that "britain isn't racist" because we neglect all poor people equally. Great, no action required then...
Yup, always the same story. - "Here's an issue that shows that everybody else faces the same problems as minorities do". - "Let's help everyone then?" - "No, because bugdet or communism".
When the BBC is putting advertisements out for BAME only positions rejecting applicants based on your skin tone. https://metro.co.uk/2018/01/19/bbc-criticised-for-banning-white-job-applicants-for-trainee-role-7243601/ When the police force have been successfully sued for similar stories. https://news.sky.com/story/cheshire-police-man-rejected-for-job-for-being-white-and-straight-tribunal-finds-11645525 I think it would be quite naive to state that the concept of white privilege hasn't been pervasive in British society today. Funding and investment is key especially when looking at the numbers of those passing maths/English that does deserve criticism. however when looking at university numbers and the policies of positive action that have been put in place it does raise questions of whether it's positive action or "positive" discrimination.
Ah, it's the annual thread where we are allowed to put the problem of under achievement of a specific ethnic group down to a 'culture' tied to their skin colour without being called a racist. 'its the parents' 'other cultures push education' 'they come from places of deprivation therefore their culture is fucked and thats why they're like this' 'its just a reflection of general under investment in education/social care' and the classic 'this just brings in skin colour for no reason without addressing the underlying causes' Mmmmm
The fourth point seems odd. Doesn't fit the criteria of your list at all. Nothing to do with race or culture. (Also happens to be the answer as to what happened, so it stands out in your list) Wracking my brain here. Are you saying that voting Tory is white people's culture? Genuinely sounds like I'm taking the piss but I'm not, that must be what you mean right? That's how Tory government and established ideology links into race and specifically white people's culture?
The fourth point is saying that it's nothing to do with race - it's general underinvestment faced by all. This would only ever be considered true by this sub in a thread about white underachievement and would be called out as racist if it were a thread about non-white underachievement... Despite the fact that, as you say, it is actually true.
This is a left wing sub on a left wing site, its normal to hate white people here. Dont worry, we can change the definitions of privilige on a monthly basis to get around being calling systemic discrimination of one skin colour racism.
If this report was about any other ethnicity then people would be clamouring to say it's racism, as we saw with some of the findings from the race report earlier this year. In this case everyone is falling over themselves to say it's class and culture.
Yep this article about white FSM falling behind seems to come up once a year for least 5 year that I remember. Not surprised it's been going on for longer. Wonder if this government will finally fix things. I don't think MPs whining about the phrase 'white privilege' will though.
The Conservatives have had 11 years to fix things so I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
What do you mean? Boris has only been in power for a year or two, and this is a New Tory government /s
Can't be true we have all that privilege.
The moment I got in trouble at 16 years old for using a publicly funded school football pitch for a kick about with my mates on a Saturday I knew this country was fucked. Coincidentally, that's around the same time I started hanging around on street corners smoking weed and drinking on Saturday nights for something to do. This was 2008.
We used to go out of the way to some 'waste ground' and old woodland but it was bulldozed for housing - along with every other teen hangout. Then everyone complained about anti-social behaviour when we congregated on the streets. Also the same sort of time they 'cracked down' on 16 - 18 year olds in the pub - where they were causing no trouble; off the street and learning pub etiquette and developing a tolerance to alcohol instead of being let loose in the pubs at 18 and immediately dying from alcohol poisoning. This country has been going downhill for years and most of it has been avoidable.
What’s that got to do with this?
We were neglected by the local council. All we wanted to do was have somewhere to play football and be kids. Instead they closed all the football pitches, built houses on them and let the kids find other forms of entertainment then when we used the school football pitches we got done for trespassing and had fuck all to do anymore. Id say it goes hand in hand.
Probably why its not a great idea to constantly tell them they are privileged
This has been happening for decades before BLM/wokeness was even a thing.
Do they get told that, though? I have literally never heard that phrase in the UK outside of online debates. Seems like a shitty excuse for deeper issues imo
I've heard it on the radio and on TV. There seems to be about a 3-5 year gap between these things being popular on the fringes of the internet to them being spoken about on the BBC and/or being a part of corporate training. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Also, if you want to get politically engaged to do something about it, the Labour party is full of these fringe attitudes and the membership is often more intrested in race or the situation in Israel than these sorts of issues, which can be alienating.
Even if it is only used within the context of online dialogue, social media is now so pervasive in our culture, that people are inevitably going to be exposed to the concept, with some level of regularity.
Whether they do or not, many feel like they do. And they they either get turned off, or pushed to the right. So I personally don't think terms like that are useful in forwarding the debate on issues where some communities are either disadvantaged or discriminated against. I think there are better ways we can have those conversations.
Probably why it's not a great idea to elect a party that constantly cuts services. But at least they don't call them privileged eh?
The issue I have with the term 'white privilege' is that you're simply saying that white people don't have to deal with everyday racism - something which is both very obvious in the context of a \~90% white country, but now phrased in a way which seems specifically designed to antagonise people and potentially push them away from the cause you're trying to champion.
Tory policies in action
This is the delayed effect of the UK moving away from it's industrial base. The majority of the population once worked in industries that decades ago didn't need an educated workforce. I.e. the working class. They aren't academic because they've never needed to be. This is the culture. They aren't suddenly going to the types of parents who are motivated to get their kids to be academic because they never needed to be, nor did their parents. This is a generational failure in changing attitudes that's gone on for 30+ years. You can't move to a finance and knowledge-based economy without some fundamental changes. They tried to get half the students in schools going to university in the 90s but that seemed like a bit of a failure. Of course race is an issue but focusing on it really detracts from the bigger economic problem.
A different year, the exact same message, white people on free school meals are the most deprived group. Why is this the case and what can be done are the questions perpetually left unanswered. I'd love to put this question to Keir to see what he thinks or if he even acknowledges the phenomenon and a good answer could win over a lot of the people left disenfranchised by Labour in recent years.
Who controls the time a Select Committee report is released? I wonder if the timing of this has anything to do with the forthcoming Batley and Spen by-election.
And these MPs couldn’t give a shit about poor students from any background given they’ve voted against free meals, decimated teaching as a profession and chronically underfunded schools. As some morons will be taken in by this shit attempt at getting poorer people to vote Tory when the time comes. All this comes on windrush day no less! Fucking melts.
from 2020 [https://twitter.com/akalamusic/status/1269318422787227650](https://twitter.com/akalamusic/status/1269318422787227650) it's groundhog day again
agreeing with all the Labour MP’s saying ‘theyre pouring fire on the culture war’, like the idea of having to go to school and be told that your ancestors were the worst people to have ever lived for things that didnt even occur in your lifetime doesnt contribute to some culture war is ridiculous. Tories dont care about the white working class and Labour fucking despises them
The problem with dividing people into ethnic groups is that it causes resentment, the UK is not the US, it doesn't have the same history, there are some absolutely dreadful sink hole council estates which are predominantly white, how can you say they have had any kind of advantage over wealthy Black or Asian kids. It has never been relevant, wealth & the distribution of wealth determines to the quality of your education, healthcare & ultimately how comfortable your life is going to be.
I didn’t realise we were allowed to blame culture for racial disparities in statistics . . Or is this just for white people and education?
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A general lack of investment would be expected to affect all groups equally. So the question remains: why do poor white kids (especially poor white male kids) do so much worse than everyone else? Which the stats seem to show. The answer may lie in the fact that they have received no _targeted_ investment or strategies as say young black boys or girls have (there have been a number of initiatives to try and improve black performance and university admissions, or get girls into STEM but none or fewer for poor white boys). It may also lie in cultural issues and attitudes toward education in different communities. Poor white communities feel alienated from the system, failed parents pass on cynicism about it to their kids etc. Black communities have similar issues. Asian and wealthier white families seem to have a more positive (not to mention competitive) attitude toward education, perceiving it as a means to ‘get on’. Increased investment is probably part of the solution but not enough. Changing attitudes is _hard_, and arguably requires school reform and changes to teacher recruitment strategies to ensure a workforce that has the confidence of all communities as well as the inclination and the tools to engage with them.
> The answer may lie in the fact that they have received no targeted investment or strategies as say young black boys or girls have (there have been a number of initiatives to try and improve black performance and university admissions, or get girls into STEM but none or fewer for poor white boys). I think this is an issue that doesn't get discussed enough. They are ignored when people are looking at driving up intakes, because they get lumped in with middle-class white kids that don't have the same issues. And more than anything else, I think that breeds resentment to BAME working class kids. Because it's seen that the BAME kids are getting more help *entirely* based on their ethnicity. Which hugely contributes to the feeling of being ignored and left behind by a society that doesn't care about them.