Tory lessons on class, privilege and poverty

As members of the education select committee, we have spent months listening to evidence from experts for the report on education and white working-class pupils (Tory MPs accused of adding fuel to ‘culture war’ in education report, 21 June). There is no doubt in our minds that there are children in this country that have been badly let down, but as Labour members on the committee we decided to vote against it.

The evidence we received clearly indicated that the main determining factors of poor educational outcomes were class and regional inequalities caused by more than a decade of austerity. Put simply, where a child is born and raised has much more of a bearing on academic outcomes than their ethnicity does. Despite this, the Tory committee members decided to include a whole section on “white privilege”.

We all heard the same evidence, so how is it that we came to such different conclusions? We are concerned that this report will be used to fight a divisive culture war instead of addressing the problems at hand.
Fleur Anderson MP, Aspana Begum MP, Kim Johnson MP and Ian Mearns MP
Labour, education select committee

• Weaponising the underachievement of white working-class pupils by focusing on white privilege detracts attention from key issues in relation to the social class education achievement gap. First, we appear to have given up trying to measure social class underachievement. Free school meal numbers, which is used to measure social class in the report, is a gross underestimation of who is working class, and is a poor proxy.

Second, we need a recognition of the historical legacy of what Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden in their 1960s book Education and the Working Class called a system of “selecting and rejecting in order to rear an elite”. Since the Education Act of 1870, a central function of education for working class people has always been about control and discipline rather than educating and empowering. We are still providing different types and qualities of education provision for different social classes.

Third, as a consequence of that still powerful historical influence, white working-class people have very different relationships to education compared with that of many black, Asian and minority ethnic groups. While white working-class people often bring a collective memory of educational subordination and marginalisation to schooling over many decades, some BAME groups bring histories of educational achievement in their countries of origin, although migration has often brought economic impoverishment and downward mobility. Others, despite a lack of educational credentials, bring a strong conviction that a fresh start in a new educational system will provide crucial opportunities for educational advancement that were denied to their parents. These different relationships to the educational system contribute to different outcomes.

As we come out of the pandemic it is more important than ever to implement fairer policies aimed at providing a good education for all children rather than the privileged (and still mainly white) few. Otherwise, there will be little positive progress, regardless of how many education select committee reports are written.
Prof Diane Reay
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Robert Halfon revealed his ignorance of the concept of white privilege when stating: “Privilege is the very opposite to what disadvantaged white children enjoy or benefit from in an education system which is now leaving too many behind.” White privilege is not based on economic status or class position because white working-class children enjoy a set of social privileges that people of colour largely still do not have. The wealth of “underprivileged white working-class children” is that they are white. Unwittingly, Mr Halfon correctly observes that the concept of white privilege is alien to many children and this is precisely because it is an invisible set of cultural privileges granted to them solely because they are white.
Alexander Verney-Elliott
London

• The criticism of the term white privilege in the education committee report is based on the Tories’ straw-man definition: white people benefiting from particular advantages in society. White privilege is a lack of systemic racist obstruction. All white people benefit from that – racism is prejudice plus systemic power.
Chris Hughes
Leicester

• It’s nauseating reading accounts of the report. Robert Halfon’s statement – “Never again should we lazily put the gap down to poverty alone” – disguises the fact that poverty is the major factor in educational underachievement. It affects all ethnic groups and sociologists have documented the link between poverty and underachievement for the last 70 years. Yet the obvious answer – do something about poverty – has been largely ignored by successive governments. The breaking up of the power of trade unions, the failure to build council housing, the facilitation of zero-hours contracts and the rise of insecure agency work have led to the increase in inequality and poverty that we see today.
Jack Gingell
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

• The Commons report is a shoddy piece of work whose integrity is undermined by its implied pretence that the children it talks about are, in some strange way, the victims of racial discrimination and “wokery”. All working-class children are discriminated against by our education system, but the obstacles that white working-class children face, being derived from our industrial history, are peculiarly difficult for them and their families to overcome. As Halfon says, the education system has been letting down working-class children “for decades”. Since the 1954 Gurney-Dixon report, Early Leaving, there have been countless inquiries into this problem, followed by reports whose mostly excellent recommendations have been met with little beyond tinkering by governments that are determined to resist any threat to the existing social hierarchy. Expect more of the same.
Michael Pyke
Campaign for State Education

• Having taught in multi-ethnic London comprehensives and a semi-rural comprehensive in Leicestershire that was composed of 95% white British students, the one thing that stood out was the significant difference in funding. Many schools outside London have traditionally received barely two-thirds of the funding that schools in London receive. This has a huge impact on class size, support, etc. If the Tories, instead of pathetically trying to divide the nation with their culture-war agenda, funded schools across the country more generously, then many of the measures that have been successful in London may be replicated. The local schools know what they need to do – now give them the tools.
Bill Dhadli
London

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