Generalised approach has failed disadvantaged white pupils, MPs warn
Following its inquiry into left behind white pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, the House of Commons Education Committee published a report this week entitled, The forgotten: how White working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it.
While the focus of the report is white pupils from poorer backgrounds, the recommendations are an important contribution to discussions around all disadvantaged students and inequalities in education. The report notes that when it comes to white disadvantage, this isn’t an ‘ethnic trait’, nor solely an issue of poverty.
Rather, the committee identified two key areas that are contributing to the relative underperformance of disadvantaged white pupils: place-based disparities (such as poor infrastructure, struggling job markets and lack of opportunity, and multi-generational poverty and unemployment) and cultural factors (including family structure, experience of education, and access to community assets).
Although Conservative MPs make up the majority of members of the Education Select Committee, the report criticised the ‘muddled thinking’ of the Department for Education, expressing concerns that the department was insisting on ‘the same policies and generalised approach which has failed to close the disadvantage gap over recent years will redress this long-term, complex issue.’
It is encouraging that national policy makers are beginning to take seriously this complex and long-term issue of disadvantage, and its impact on educational outcomes. In considering these factors of place and culture, the committee recommends the following:
- Funding needs to be micro-targeted to level up educational opportunity. To do this, we need a better understanding of disadvantage, and better tools to tackle it.
- Disadvantaged White families must have access to strong early years support and Family Hubs.
- We need to communicate the different but equally valuable vocational training and apprenticeship options alongside traditional academic routes. Boosting access to higher education through improving careers guidance and specifying targets for disadvantaged White pupils.
- Attract good teachers to challenging areas
This evidence-based approach that looks beyond schools and traditional academic routes is a welcome development, and chimes with Schools North East’s Manifesto for Education, published in 2019.
However, much of the media focus has been on a fifth recommendation, that calls on schools and government to find different ways to talk about racial disparities in education, primarily raising concerns that the discourse of ‘White privilege’ is too divisive. Labour MPs on the committee have been critical of the inclusion of this recommendation, claiming that it is stoking a ‘culture war’.
This controversial addition to the report has unfortunately distracted from the important debate around educational disadvantage. In our manifesto, we called on policy makers to depoliticise education policy, and it is crucial that we don’t allow the wrong voices to obscure the long term contextual challenges schools face. Schools North East will continue to lobby on your behalf, to ensure these real challenges of disadvantage are not left off the policy agenda.