"Forgotten", "Left behind", "Written off" - Schools and the white working class (Part 1)

The recently-announced Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes has an opportunity to re-frame the narrative around white working class educational achievement.

This is the first post of three dealing with the year-long Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes. The article below deals with the scope of the inquiry and its prospects for bringing about real change. The second article proposes a handful of initiatives that could benefit white working-class students without fundamentally changing the schooling system. The third is a more ‘blue-sky’ exercise that would require structural change in the system. Readers can read them in sequence or jump to whichever article most piques their interest.

The independent inquiry into white working-class educational outcomes commissioned by Star Academies Trust is the most important educational initiative in recent years, not only eclipsing but superseding a national curriculum review that increasingly looks hobbled by overcaution.

Disadvantaged white children fall behind their peers at every stage of education. In only a handful of primary schools do white British children keep pace with their peers. Just 18.6 per cent of white British pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) achieved a “strong pass”—grade 5—in their English and Maths GCSEs in 2024, according to Department for Education (DfE) data. That compares to 45.9 per cent of all state school pupils—itself hardly a cause for celebration. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has called white working-class children’s under-representation at British universities “a national disgrace”. Soon-to-be announced data for 2025 is unlikely to reveal a significantly different picture.

This pattern of educational underachievement is inextricably linked to poverty, but poverty alone cannot explain it away. Poor children from almost all other ethnicities do better in school than their white classmates. As The Economist’s social affairs editor Joel Budd observes in his recent, highly readable, book Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class:

“It is as though poverty is a virus that harms all children, but white Britons run an exceptionally high fever.”¹

I should disclose a personal perspective here. I grew up on a council estate in the West Midlands, mostly cared for by a single mother, attended local comprehensive schools, and received free school meals. I was the first person in my family to leave school with formal qualifications, or to attend a university. That was some time ago. Today, I am a fully paid-up member of the middle classes—a function of the self-indulgent amount of time I spent at that university and others like it, my choice of career, income bracket, and cultural preferences. Nonetheless, my investment in the subject of white working-class education is as much personal as professional.

Previous enquiries

The Star commission will not be the first body to interrogate the challenge of white working-class underachievement. Ofsted published the results of its own inquiries in 2008 and 2023. The House of Commons Select Committee on Education looked into the topic in depth in 2014 and again in 2021. The Office for Students did the same in 2021, focusing on these communities’ under-representation in higher education. There have also been countless reports by academics, think tanks and educational charities.

Substantially all these reports agree that white working-class underachievement is at the centre of a scrum of factors, each jostling for position from place to place. These include: the fact that Britain is one of the most geographically unequal countries in the developed world; that a lack of opportunity weighs heavily on families in some parts of the country; that unemployment and low levels of adult qualifications contribute to intergenerational disadvantage; that public transport often fails to support disadvantaged communities; that social cohesion shows signs of waning; and, not incidentally, that there is widespread disengagement from formal schooling, often rooted in family experience of education. Levels of school absenteeism amounting to a schools legitimacy crisis in these communities in the post-pandemic period has served to underline the last point.

There has also been ample criticism of the schooling system itself. The Education Policy Institute found evidence of implicit bias in Ofsted inspections as long ago as 2016. The EPI concluded that inspectors consistently treated middle class cultural norms as synonymous with positive learning behaviours and working-class cultural norms as their opposite. Two years later, the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) concluded that Progress 8 and other statutory measures of school effectiveness did much the same. Both fit neatly into the definition of what conservative policy analyst David Skelton has described as “the new snobbery” afflicting poorer communities.²

All these observations form a vital starting point for the Commission’s work, but no more. None of these inquiries has effectively catalysed government, or the schooling sector, to transform the lot of white working-class students. Why should this inquiry, launched outside of government, be any different?

Will anything change?

Part of the answer must lie in the raw politics of the moment. A populist domino effect is claiming white working-class communities the length and breadth of the country. Polling by consulting firm PublicFirst suggests that more than half of white working-class voters are planning to vote for Reform UK at the next general election.³ In May, Reform won outright majorities in 10 local councils and is attempting to govern as a minority administration in three more. In a clear nod to Reform-curious voters, Phillipson has added to the lexicon of grievance when addressing the topic—“these [white working class] children have simply been betrayed [by] politicians,” “left behind”, “in society’s rear-view mirror”. None of this suggests that the attempt to address white working-class under-achievement is insincere, but the Labour government has an electoral incentive to pursue a change agenda.

What is unclear is whether this government has the capacity to pursue such an agenda. In some policy areas—such as curriculum reform—a Labour government is likely to find it easier to jettison, or reengineer, elements that owe more to ideology than to any evidence that they improve the lives of working-class children. The more pointed findings of the 2021 House Select Committee Report, The Forgotten, included criticism of the then Conservative run Department for Education, concluding that ministers and civil servants demonstrated “muddled thinking” and an over-reliance on policies that had ceased to close the attainment gap between poorer and better-off children well prior to the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic.

On the other hand, the Labour party’s affinity with teachers’ unions may make it less willing to address restrictive features of teachers’ employment that can get in the way of combatting the effects of poverty. And the sheer parlousness of the public finances are likely to rule out reform proposals that involve substantial investment, at least for the life of this Parliament. The single largest boost that the government could give to these communities—removing the two-child benefit cap—likely falls into this category.

There is also the sobering, not to say depressing, fact that immigration remains a more salient political issue than education. Absent delivery on the British public’s expressed desire to see a sharp decrease in inward immigration, it may not be possible for this government to deliver on other policy areas past 2029.

Expert leadership

Then there is the formidable expertise of the commission itself. The Commission will be chaired jointly by Sir Hamid Patel, chief executive of Star Academies, one of the country’s best performing school groups, and Baroness Estelle Morris. Baroness Morris is that rarest of politicians: a former teacher who has held high political office, having been a minister in the Department of Education for six years, including a brief stint as Secretary of State. The rest of the commission includes Nicky Morgan, another former Education Secretary, leaders from some of the largest and most effective multi-academy trusts in the country, the heads of professional associations and academics working in the field.

Collectively, this group is close enough to government to be influential, far enough removed to be independent and to follow the evidence where it leads. Enough of the commission’s members have not only first-hand but ongoing experience of operating schools in the communities under investigation. This seems qualitatively different from previous inquiries, however valuable, which have relied on expert testimony rather than expert leadership.

As Budd writes in Underdogs: “no large group of people in Britain is as badly misunderstood as the white working class”. One might well ask: Misunderstood by whom? The answer is those in positions of power and influence. White working-class communities are almost universally governed, represented and, yes, educated by people with backgrounds different from their own. We must hope that the membership of the commission is at least one step closer to the communities at the heart of this inquiry.

1. Budd, J. (2025) Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class, London: Picador

2. Skelton, D. (2021) The New Snobbery: Taking on Modern Elitism and Empowering the Working Class, London: Biteback

3. Albeit the sample is broader, using standard electoral classifications based on occupation and not being explicitly limited by ethnicity.