A failure to ensure that white working-class children succeed is holding back Britain, the Education Secretary has said.
Ahead of GCSE results day on Thursday, Bridget Phillipson warned that four-fifths of children from white working-class backgrounds were falling short in the English and maths skills required to get on in life.
It’s almost as if the New! Improved! teaching methods and computers in classrooms don’t work as advertised. That and a heavily politicised unionised teaching staff.
When the curriculum mostly consists of installing a deep sense of White Guilt in kids of a certain background, there might be some effects in other areas.
Get back to “readin’ , writin’ , ‘rythmatic ” as the Main Course, while impressing onto the kids that that stuff is actually useful and can even be ( shock, horror….) fun, and unsurprisingly results in that area will vastly improve for 95% of the kids.
Of course… this goes right against the Consensus of “Education Experts” , so this must automatically be the right approach, so it’ll never happen..
Oh Jesus.
Has she just found out what has been going on for the last 50 years ?
It’ll be down to covid won’t it? Or Brexit, and absolutely nothing to do with what the blob has been doing to the education system since the 1960’s..
Has she just found out what has been going on for the last 50 years ?
And longer… In my home village in the Derbyshire coalfield in the 1940s and 50s children were leaving school unable to read.
“Writing for The Telegraph (read the article below), Ms Phillipson said: “There is one statistic that stands above the rest. In 2024, only 19 per cent of white British, working-class children achieved a strong pass in maths and English GCSE.”
Which doesn’t mean that they don’t have the math to get on in life. The generally useful stuff in math teaching at school ends at about 12 or 13. Can you do basic operations, decimals, fractions, estimation, probability, calculate areas, volumes, understand the three types of averages. And even then, how much does a hairdresser need to know about calculating areas?
Lots of kids around that age just stop giving a shit about school. Because it’s mostly a waste of time. If you’re going to be a cartographer or in environmental management, geography is useful. Hairdressing? Not so much. History is amusing, but mostly a waste of time. Physics, chemistry, biology? Certain fields like engineering or working with polymers but if you’re a plasterer or a chef, not really. English lit? Probably useful if you’re going to be a playwright. Not for anyone else. Art seemed to make little difference. The kids who were good at it weren’t really taught but assessed. Foreign languages are utterly useless, as we speak the lingua franca.
The kids using TikTok all day are probably learning more useful things than school is teaching them. Because apart from the fact that school loves useless academia over useful trades, it is very slow at adapting to needs and doing it well.
I see that technical schools might be making a comeback, called by some progressive groovy name, obviously to disguise a sudden lurch backwards. Just wait until someone suggests grammar schools and await the bloodbath…
I remember at grammar school in 1970 studying matrix multiplication. By that stage I’d given up my ambition to be a commercial pilot, and clearly remember thinking “I’ll never need to know this in my entire life”. I was right. It, and almost everything else I studied for O-level maths, has been utterly irrelevant since then. You don’t need matrix multiplication to play rock & roll.
Useful stuff like an understanding of compounding, that statistics have to be assessed in context, or the basic principles of economics? Shit that everyone needs to know? Completely missing in action.
Is it English – the language – or music – the art – that one fails to describe Billy Ocean as rock and roll?
Inquiring minds etc…..
Norman, perhaps it’s for the best that they don’t teach us the ‘useful stuff’ because if they did, everything would be slanted their way. Economics for instance would be of the kind Murphy would approve of…..
I’d be inclined to agree with both WB & Norman on subject matter. Except. The important thing one learns at school is learning how to learn. For which the subject matter’s irrelevant. Unfortunately they seemed to have stopped teaching that about 50 years ago.
Tim, the R&R reference is ironic. I was essentially a fusion jazzer who then had his head turned by Chic. I had to deliberately learn how to play pop – endless working men’s club gigs helped – but my background set me up quite nicely for what I ended up doing. Here, have a laugh:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZA08Ff2HVI&list=PL_9gWeiShHFGbq0EzuopoVq-0Hf1gERXB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTiruUATJ9o&list=RDRTiruUATJ9o&start_radio=1
“Writing for The Telegraph (read the article below), Ms Phillipson said: “There is one statistic that stands above the rest. In 2024, only 19 per cent of white British, working-class children achieved a strong pass in maths and English GCSE.”
She’s discovered population variation. Plucking numbers out of my arse, I would *expect* about 20% to get the top grade, about 20% to get the bottom grade, and about (errr… 100 minus 20 minus 20….) 60% to be spread across the middle.
My fledgling doctor daughter is currently being roasted as an F1 at Grimsby hospital. We’ve just been up to visit. There’s not a lot of white privilege on display there. Thanks, EU and the Common Fisheries Policy.
The education bureaucracy is obsessed with race. (With a side helping of class for white children.)
I humbly submit that categories such as
Is the TV on all the time?
Does anyone cook meals from scratch?
Is it a single parent household?
Are there grandparents anywhere to be seen?
Are there step brothers and sisters in the household?
would be more revealing, so remedial efforts could be better targeted.
GCSE grades are determined by a combination of objective exam results and subjective practical assessments and course work.
The system therefore allows teachers of an ideological nature to do their best to right perceived historical wrongs – which is bad news if you’re white, working class and male.
@John- err, no. Not since the 9-1 specs came in. There are still NEA (non-exam assessments) in subjects like Art, Drama, DT, etc but the core subjects are all exam only now.
Wait, I thought that was the plan all along?
At least you now have equity.
Andy
Thank you. I didn’t know that. Quite a positive development.
Interesting – race that has been explicitly targeted by the government for extermination is underperforming.
In other news the Pope it transpires is Catholic
jgh said:
“She’s discovered population variation. Plucking numbers out of my arse, I would *expect* about 20% to get the top grade”
Except “strong pass” isn’t the “top grade”, nor the top 20% of students.
It’s the top 5 of the 6 pass grades (4 is ‘standard pass’, 5 is ‘strong pass’, 9 is top).
It’s what most students get – the top 55%.
You CANNOT ensure that any group succeed unless you set the pass standard at zero %
Bridget Phillipson is either extremely stupid or mouthing off political propaganda: I strongly suspect the latter “blame the Tories for everything, especially anything done by Gordon Brown”.
FYI The number one villain in the list of those disadvantaging working-class white boys is Tony Crosland who imposed the *known-to-have-failed* US system of neighbourhood schools onto the UK
Crosland was a vicious, vindictive, evil cunt.