The British government said that it is a “national disgrace” for the issues facing white working-class students to have been overlooked by society.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson admitted that many white working-class children are essentially being “written off” by society and said that the government plans on publishing a white paper in the Autumn to lay out a strategy to improve the situation.
According to The Telegraph, less than one in five (18.6 per cent) of white students who economically qualify for free school meals received at least a 5 (roughly equivalent to a C+ in U.S. education standards) on their English and Math standardised tests last year. In comparison, 45.9 per cent of students overall in state-run schools scored a similar result.
“It is a national disgrace that so many young people are written off and don’t get what they need to achieve and thrive,” Secretary Phillipson said.
“Far too many young people, particularly white working-class British students, don’t get the exam results that they need at GCSE or A-level to allow them to continue onto university.”
The minister pointed to a now longstanding bugbear Westminster that after the Covid-era restrictions on schools some people became accustomed to learning at home and never returned to the state education system. Blaming this increased level of absenteeism as a potential explanation for the lagging test results, Phillipson warned that “if children see school as optional, that mindset will continue throughout their life.”
However, others, such as Oxford University Professor Peter Edwards — who grew up in a deprived white working-class area of Liverpool — previously pointed to the proliferation of leftist ideology in the education system.
Discussing the issue back in 2020, Prof Edwards said that the issues faced by white working-class students were seen as “unfashionable” and “not worthy” and that even raising them could be seen by other educators as indicating “hard-Right political thinking”. This, he explained, was that many viewed white people as having an “inherent advantage or privilege” regardless of their economic background.
The Labour Party has been at the forefront of pushing concepts such as “white privilege” in British society and, indeed, within the education system. For example, last year, then-shadow culture secretary Thangam Debonnaire argued that British schools should be teaching the concept of white privilege so that students can grapple with the “difficult questions sometimes of our nation’s history.”
The left-wing party’s commitment to the woke identity politics concept was further demonstrated in April, when it reported that Westminster City Council — one of Labour’s most important locally controlled governments — implemented a privilege test to boost hiring from the “global majority”. On the test, white males were classified as having the most privilege.
The increasingly urban elitist adherence to multicultural wokeness by Labour has been cited as a major factor in the declining working-class support for the party that was supposedly founded to advocate on their behalf. Indeed, a survey in June found that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is the most popular party among working-class voters, holding a 16-point lead over Labour.
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