English schools and the working classes

White working class kids start behind and stay behind at school, a record that dogs them into adulthood and contributes to a skewed distribution of wealth and status in British society. These are the sobering conclusions of three reports into working class (under) achievement published over the past few weeks.

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 ch…

I recently re-connected with a school friend after a gap of 30 years. Thankfully, we have more in common than memories of wet weekends in the West Midlands. For one, we were both the first in our families to attend university. For another, neither of our fathers attended our graduation ceremonies. In both cases, that absence reflected a difficult relati…