"Forgotten", "Left behind", "Written off" - Schools and the white working class (Part 3)

The final post in a series about how English schools could be made to work better for children from white working class homes.

This is the third in a series of posts inspired by the Star Academies-commissioned Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes. The first post dealt with the potential for the inquiry to bring about meaningful change. The second post suggested five actionable strategies that are fiscally affordable and in-line with the Labour government’s stated policy objectives.

This post identifies structural reforms with the potential radically to improve educational attainment for disadvantaged communities, unconstrained either by cost or by politics. I don’t think this sort of exercise need be an invitation either to fabulism (“let’s wish away poverty”) or to miserabilism (“well, if we can’t do this, we can’t do anything”). Rather, I think it is a way of calibrating our ambition. If any of the initiatives listed below have a credible chance of addressing the attainment gap, then they should feature in our national conversation about how we change lives through education, even if they remain at the edges of polite discourse.

That said, my own preference is generally to focus on those proposals that are more actionable in the near-term, so this post is also shorter than the last. It can be read in whole or in part.

My initiatives are:

1. A New Structure for the School Year

2. A National Education Service

3. New Schools for Working Class Communities

4. Restore Specialist Pastoral Support for Schools

An outline case for each reform is included below.

A New Structure for the School Year

The shape of the school year may have its origins in agricultural work patterns, but it is increasingly a prop for middle class privilege. The exceptionally long summer break, in particular, serves poorer children not at all. Longer school holidays contribute to exceptional learning loss, remove vulnerable children from a safeguarded environment, and increase food and childcare costs for families on marginal incomes. The long summer break also imposes unrealistic pressures on term time attendance and workload, making the school year unnecessarily frantic. Arguments in support of the current system tend to be circular: we should retain the status quo because it is the status quo.

There are benefits to changing the shape of the school year, even if the overall number of days spent in school did not increase. More evenly distributed school breaks would be largely benign from the perspective of more affluent homes. Holidays could be taken at different times of the year. Grandparents pressed into service over Easter rather than in the waning days of summer. For poorer families, the impact could be more substantial. Learning accrued during term time would erode less over three or four weeks at home than over a break lasting six weeks. Retrieval practice could take a more routine form, and be more effective, if school breaks were more consistent. And pastoral care for our most vulnerable students would be less seriously disrupted by more frequent, shorter breaks.

I may return in the future to the different proposals for how precisely to reshape the school year. For now, I will stick to the point that our existing term arrangements were never designed to prioritise the needs of vulnerable children. Its time that changed.

A National Education Service

The term ‘National Education Service’ is bandied about every few years, sometimes as a call to arms, sometimes as a sort of ironic reflection on a schooling system that feelings increasingly fragmented. Rarely is there any meaningful discussion regarding the institutional arrangements necessary to make it a reality.

Britain is a European outlier in the extent to which it relies on the labour market to staff its schools. In France, Italy, Germany and other countries where teachers are considered more typical civil servants, teaching jobs are allocated to schools and schooling districts based on need. This would certainly compromise the degree of autonomy to determine their own staffing devolved to British Heads and governors over the past three decades. But it would also have offsetting advantages.

Not least of these advantages would be the opportunity to prioritise communities that are not currently, nor ever likely to be, well-served by the market. By some estimates, 30 to 40 percent of GCSE science lessons taking place in schools serving working class communities are being delivered by non-specialist teachers. While many of these teachers will be applying themselves earnestly, this does not advance educational equity or serve the needs of an economy increasingly driven by scientific innovation.

The public sector generally uses two mechanisms for routing talent to where it is most needed: quotas and subsidies. In the quota system, schools and universities in regions with high deprivation, or where educational outcomes are lowest—almost, but not quite the same thing—would be authorised to train more teachers. Schools and universities in more affluent parts of the country would see places capped. The subsidy version achieves the same end but by making it economically more attractive to train in poorer areas—channelling funding into the training institutions and lowering fees payable by the individual. The subsidy version is generally more effective, though it costs more. Either system, or a hybrid of the two, would move initial teacher training closer to established practice in health.

A further refinement might be to make it a requirement for anyone seeking qualified teacher status to work in the state sector during their qualification period. This would ensure that, over time, all teachers would have experience of teaching in state schools. Those state schools would bear the (heavily subsidized) cost of training new teachers but also benefit from a ready supply of teachers at the most cost-effective point in their careers. And while many teachers so trained would eventually migrate into the independent sector or overseas, some would remain in state schools, as was the history of TeachFirst demonstrates.

There are any number of practical considerations that come into play here. Many private schools and state schools in leafy suburbs have well-designed, well-run teacher training programmes; some schools in disadvantaged communities do not. Recruitment into the profession is already at crisis point in many subjects and regions; putting further obstacles between a willing graduate and a teaching job, any teaching job, may seem foolhardy. Heads of all kinds—including this Head—would bristle at the idea of a substantial dilution to their autonomy in recruitment. Still, the presence of functioning systems across the Channel should serve as a reminder that there are other ways to organise a national education service.

New Schools for Working Class Communities

The Free Schools programme was established in 2010 to bring disruptive innovation to areas of educational underperformance. The programme had its flaws. Chief among these was a failure to stay true to its original purpose. While some early free schools proved truly transformational for disadvantaged communities, others were more a vehicle for middle class ambition.¹

The Forgotten, a 2021 House of Commons Education Select Committee report, concluded that, over the previous decade, motivated, organised, typically professional parents had proven quite good at getting schools set up to educate their children; unemployed parents, parents in typically working class jobs, and those that were marginally engaged with the education system—in other words, those parents whose children were most in need of new educational opportunities—were not. Over time, even the focus on community-level activism, a pillar of the Cameron government’s “Big Society”, gave way to the expansion plans of multi-academy trusts, which were almost always better placed to shepherd new schools into existence.

Bridget Phillipson’s Department of Education pressed pause on 44 free school projects in October 2024, citing, not unfairly, the prohibitive cost of capital works alongside a need for reassurance that these projects were targeting under-served communities. There they have remained. Subsequent messaging has shifted to include a focus on protecting the viability of existing schools and colleges rather than improving outcomes through the opening of new schools.

Notably, the parliamentarians who reviewed the role of free schools as part of their 2021 inquiry came to a different conclusion. They did not call for the programme’s abandonment. They suggested instead that the Department for Education should limit free school bids to parts of the country where outcomes for working class children were poor. This seems like a sounder course of action. Over the past few years, I’ve spent significant time visiting schools in educational ‘cold spots’ around England. I have been impressed by the often-fierce commitment that people in all roles show to their communities. I have also been struck at how often people involved in the schooling system—sometimes, even the same people—have an exclusively local frame of reference for their students’ achievement. (I was particularly struck by a conversation with the head of a further education college in a former mining town whose protestation that “our bright kids do really well” was utterly unshaken by the fact that those kids went to university at less than half the national rate.)

For this and other reasons, I still believe that new schools should play a role in challenging settled assumptions and in reframing expectations of the debt that is owed to working class communities.

Restore Specialist Pastoral Support for Schools

If we are honest about the challenges of recruitment and retention in schools, three factors loom large: money, workload and status. The second post in this series suggested amendments to teachers’ incentives that might encourage more of them to work with more disadvantaged communities, short of re-basing teachers’ salaries and benefits across-the-board (though don’t let me dissuade you, Secretary of State). The social status of different professions is a complex issue, but typically bears some relation to both money and work; I’ll shelve that topic for now.

Workload is at the core of most teachers’ frustrations. I won’t shy away from conclusions that I’ve drawn elsewhere, namely that workload frustrations are, in part, a function of misleading expectations. An honest dialogue about workload would include acknowledgement that teachers’ working hours are more comparable to those of other professionals than to the students in their care. The same principle applies to teachers’ holiday entitlements.

Nonetheless, the real source of British teachers’ frustration is not simply the volume or extensiveness, but also the nature of the work that they undertake. British secondary school teachers should spend around 30 percent more time on behaviour management than the OECD norm—a figure calculated prior to the pandemic and which is likely to have risen. The gap over comparable European countries is wider still. Many teachers see this as low quality work with limited impact on learning, much of it falling far outside any definition of teaching that they understood on entry to the profession.² What’s more, from personal experience, both appetite for and expertise in managing pupils’ behaviour is rarely well correlated with expertise in scarcity subjects.

An alternative strategy would be to rebuild local children’s services in order to allow schools to focus on the substance of education. If local government is too hobbled by other pressures to play this role, funding could be provided directly to schools to employ trained counsellors, pastoral support staff, family liaison officers and the like, freeing up teachers more intently to drive students’ attainment.

1. I should point out that I have no objection to middle class ambition, but that wasn’t the express reason for the programme’s establishment.

2. It isn’t necessary to endorse these views to acknowledge their impact on our workforce.