Oral evidence: Underachievement in education of white working class children, HC 727Wednesday 29 January 2014

Oral evidence, 29 January 2014.

Witnesses

Alex Burghart, Director of Policy, Centre for Social Justice, Owen Jones, Author, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, Professor Denis Mongon, Visiting Professorial Fellow, Institute of Education, University of London, and Chris Wellings, Head of Programme Policy, Save the Children, gave evidence.

Chair

Good morning. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us this morning to discuss the underachievement in education of white working class children. We have think-tankers, authors, provocateurs—and that is just a description of Professor Mongon. It is a pleasure to have you all here today. Research released by Demos, the think tank, yesterday suggests that the gap between the attainment of children on free school meals and others widened in almost half of local authorities in England last year, and that in 66 areas the gap is now wider than when the pupil premium was introduced. It is possible effectively to tackle educational inequality through education policy?

Professor Mongon

It is in part. The variance across the country and across local authorities demonstrates that schools can make a significant difference, but there is a glass ceiling against which they will hit their heads. That was explored extensively by your previous panel in terms of the work expectation and the opportunities for jobs, and there are other issues I am sure you will explore with us in the next hour.

Chair

We had quite a focus on vocational education in the last panel. Is it true that successive Governments obsess about the lives that the members of those Governments typically have had, of an O-level, GCSE, A-level, university route, and that insufficient attention is paid to vocational and other pathways? There is an obsession with academic achievement, and that leads to both a demonisation of those who follow other routes and also a failure to ensure that they are as high quality and valuable as they can be. Do you have any thoughts on that or my first question, Alex?

Alex Burghart

Gosh, what a question. I am not really best placed to tell you what Governments too far before this one and its predecessor have got up to. There is certainly a sense in some areas and in some schools that vocational education is not well presented enough and is not able to deliver the results that it can in other countries. There is certainly a risk that we condemn everyone who tries to follow vocational paths to poor teaching and poor outcomes. There are a huge number of improvements that are being attempted in this area at the moment, and your previous session covered a good deal of them.

Chair

The Demos report suggested it might not be taking us in the right direction. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Chris Wellings

You can link the two questions and say there is not one answer to educational underachievement; there are different answers. Different children need different things spanning the vocational/academic divide; there is not one silver bullet here. We have done lots of work on literacy and in-school interventions and making sure every child is a strong reader by the time they leave primary school, but we also know that you need a whole framework of support, because children’s educational pathways are shaped by a whole range of things. We need a multi-dimensional approach to really get on top of this issue.

Owen Jones

One of the key points in terms of the specific question you asked there is the disappearance of some of the traditional non-academic routes to secure, stable, relatively well respected jobs. That is because of this hourglass economy effect, where we have the growth in middle-class professional jobs at the top and then low-paid, often very insecure service-sector jobs at the bottom. That means, if you are a school leaver where you could have got, as a boy, an apprenticeship as a route, therefore, to a skilled job, that does not exist so much. There is a growing need to academically prosper. The problem is successive Governments have focused on structure rather than looking at some of the underlying factors behind educational inequality. Inequality begins in the womb, because the birth weight of poorer children is lower than that of children from affluent backgrounds. There was a fascinating study by Growing Up in Scotland in 2011, and it found that the gap in vocabulary by the age of five years old between a child of affluent degree-educated parents and a child from a poorer background was 18 months. What you are seeing is a huge gap, which widens at the earliest possible age. The problem is often education gets scapegoated for those wider inequalities, when there needs to be far more focus on earlier years to stop that gap widening when it is too late, effectively, for it to be narrowed by education.

Chair

Successive Governments have tried to focus on that. We have had the growth of the children’s centres. The evidence of the efficacy of those interventions is light at best.

Owen Jones

If you are going to narrow the vocabulary gap, that needs an emphasis on things like nursery education. It is cultural capital, as it is called. A middle class child will be exposed to broader vocabulary from the earliest age, will be surrounded by books, and is more likely to be read to by parents.

Chair

We know that, but what do we do? The question is: what interventions will be most likely to succeed in improving the early vocabulary of a child? If they then have a weakened vocabulary in the early years, they are, we know, statistically likely to remain behind and even, in fact, to fall further behind as they go through schooling. Do you have any thoughts on that, Professor Mongon?

Professor Mongon

What you are pointing us towards here is the question of parental involvement. We need to separate induced from spontaneous parental involvement. People like us have spontaneous parental involvement. We are there and active from the start; we are active through the school years. What the evidence shows us is that inducing parental involvement does not appear to be very efficacious. I think that is in part because it is always coming from outside; it is always some national centralised strategy driving down into local communities. What we are not very good at is doing what in the jargon would be called the local ethnographic work: finding out who are the people in these communities—and every community has them—who can help us to build it up from the ground upwards in locally architectured forms. Those things from outside where you come along and say, “This is what we are going to do for your community” are far less likely to work.

Chair

What evidence do we have around those grassroots-upwards movements? If you think of the past, you think of the union movement, education libraries, the Fabian Society—the traditional left-wing institutions, if you like, were grounded in education in a way that seems to have been lost. Is there any truth in that?

Professor Mongon

The whole of our education system is built on that 19th century local community approach. That is where we started from. It was working very well before we nationalised the system in the 1880s. I would not go back to that evidence, but we have got pockets of work that organisations that I, for example, work with, like the Innovation Unit—and I will reference it for your team in more detail later—are beginning to do with local communities that is beginning to pay a dividend. What we have got to be very canny about is tracking what the impact on the youngsters is. The evidence shows us that when we do this kind of work, the professionals enjoy it, the parents enjoy it, and the kids—well, maybe it makes some difference or not, but we are not quite certain. We have got to be more sophisticated.

Chris Wellings

This is about deeper local change—driving changes in the home learning environment and changes in child-parent interactions—and that is sometimes different from the mechanistic change that you try to have around school reform or pre-school reform. It is recognising that that deeper community change is difficult and has hit problems, perhaps, in the past, but that does not mean that we give up on the idea of trying to change children’s whole environments. It is deep change, and it is difficult.

Chair

The idea is all very well, but we are trying to work out what we do about it. Professor Mongon has suggested the top-down centralised approach is not working and we need to rediscover, if you like, a more community-driven self-help approach. Do you have anything to add?

Chris Wellings

Yes. We have put out two reports on what we are now calling children’s communities. It is Save the Children’s proposal for that locally driven approach where you work across a coherent community; you try to understand what the strengths of that community are, so you get under the skin of the problem, and also what is going wrong in that community; and you strategically map support from cradle to career across children’s family, school and community lives, all with a very robust evaluation. The aim is not just to improve schools, but to support children’s whole environment—the environment in which they learn and develop.

Chair

What does that mean, Chris? I do not understand what that means. They are nice words.

Chris Wellings

It means a local partnership coming together in a community.

Chair

Who is this partnership? Is this led by the local authority? Is it led by Save the Children? Who is doing this?

Chris Wellings

We are scoping in three areas now. One example would be Wallsend, where you have a whole range of schools working together as part of a federation. Schools are coming together.

Pat Glass

My son is a head there.

Chris Wellings

David Baldwin. Primary schools and secondary schools are sharing staff, but they are also working with local GPs, the local police and the local authority. They are coming together and trying to build a really deep understanding of their community—of the strengths of their community and what might be going wrong in their community—to map that support.

Alex Burghart

I just wanted to go back to the point that Denis started, which is that often the best people to find the solutions are people who work in schools. We know that one in seven schools manages to buck the national trend for performance of children on free school meals. That is to say the children at those schools on average do as well or better than the national average for all pupils. Those schools that are clearly doing something right have clearly developed interesting means of working with their pupils and their parents. At the moment, I do not think that we have the mechanisms available to help share the learning that those schools have already developed with other schools that would benefit from it. We should probably start with what is already succeeding in the system.

Mr Ward

Can I just return to this issue of whether we are trying to find solutions to the wrong problem? One of the reasons I oppose the 11‑plus is that at too early an age it is, “You go that way; you go that way”, but it actually was not too bad because the ones who went that way left school on a Friday and started work on the Monday. That just does not exist now for many young people. Whether it is in terms of vocational UTCs or whether it is in terms of improving their educational attainment, there is nothing there for far too many young people to do. There is no end point for them at all. This is an international change in labour markets, and unless we do something to change that, with all these other things we are trying to alleviate a problem rather than solve it.

Chair

Back to Owen’s hourglass. Do you want to come back on that, Owen?

Owen Jones

I will just go back to the point I was making before, which is the problem with an hourglass economy where you have a lack of what were the middle-income secure skilled jobs that existed, which gave a dignified route, without needing an emphasis on prospering academically at school.

Chair

Are there not the working class jobs anymore? Is the biggest thing we need to do to say, “Stop being working class; become middle class, because there is no other route to success and prosperity”?

Owen Jones

I would argue—and it is broadening it out a bit—there needs to be some sort of industrial strategy to replace the lost middle-income jobs. If you look at Germany, where academic and vocational qualifications have more parity of esteem, they have a far bigger and more modern industrial sector than us to support that. We do not have that here. But the wider points are things like housing, which I do not know if you are discussing or addressing. Shelter have looked into this. Poor housing conditions increase the risk of ill health amongst children by 25%; they make them more likely to suffer slow growth, asthma and mental health problems. There are problems with things like the private rented sector; in the five years after 2007, the number of families in the private rented sector doubled. That often causes insecurities in a child’s development, because they have to shift from school to school, which is disruptive. This is the problem. Often it is not looking at these wider issues—things like housing or the lack of secure jobs—when we are discussing these things.

Chair

You will be delighted to know that there is the largest affordable housing build in 20 years going on right now, then, I am sure, Mr Jones. Professor Mongon.

Professor Mongon

David Ward is right that this will not come right until there are sufficient jobs in the economy, but that is not primarily the business of this Committee. The business of this Committee, I would have thought—it is not my job to tell you what it is—is to say, “In the meantime, what do this range of public services, but primarily the education service, do, acknowledging that problem?” The qualifications issue is a key one, which David makes. Let me just try to give a quick example. I noticed last week in the statistics the number of youngsters in the bottom 20% of the socio-economic groups getting one A-level has increased considerably, but what you can get for one A-level has decreased considerably, because the kinds of jobs that you could once upon a time get with A‑level you now need a degree or a masters degree for. My third and final point is your point about abandoning it being working class is an interesting cultural point. We are not perfect at it, but in broad terms we have got to the point in our system where, if you are from an ethnic minority and successful, you can still remain proud of being from that ethnic minority. If you are a woman and successful, you can still be proud of being a woman and feminine. If you are working class and successful, you have got to abandon your mates and your community, because our system requires you to move on and be different. It is a big cultural ask for some youngsters at that very tense teenage point.

Neil Carmichael

Owen has really already asked this question, but the ASCL has pointed out that by interfering with the schools, we are trying to fix a problem that was really well established long before we start. That is a point that you have made, and presumably the three of you would concur with that. I am going to make three general points and I want you to comment on them. The first is this. We now have 30 million people employed. That is an issue with Owen’s hourglass question as well, because some of those jobs are not where you would have expected them to be, let us say, in the 50s and 60s, which we were discussing before with Professor Alison Wolf, who noted that we had an apprenticeship time in the 50s and 60s. We also had a situation where your career would be the same career from start to finish; it would be in the same factory, or in the same place. That is not the case now. We have got more people at work, but it is a more mobile workforce. That is the first point I want to make. The second one is this productivity question and the fact that we have the inability to suck out the right skills from all over the place. How can we deal with that and create a culture where everybody feels part of that new economy? That is something I would like to talk about. The third question is about the north/south divide. The assumption most of you have been making is that it applies everywhere. It does not. We have greater problems in the north with this issue about white working class children than we perhaps do in parts of the south, though not necessarily all over London. I would just really like to draw those three things together. Do you think the real problem is the way in which our structure of society and economics has changed? Is that causing this problem?

Alex Burghart

Society has changed and the economy has changed, but it is up to education to evolve likewise. I certainly agree with your first two points, that we have quite a lot of employment in the economy at the moment—some people would contest whether it is the right type of employment—but we also have a great deal of workforce mobility. If that is going to remain the norm for the next 20, 30 or 40 years, then we need to ensure that people leaving school have basic core skills—let us start with English and maths—and yet a very high proportion of pupils, particularly pupils on free school meals, leave without those basic qualifications. The work that we have done and the work that a lot of other people have done has shown that that might not necessarily be a bar to your first job, but it will certainly be a bar to your second. Your chances of progression in employment are substantially reduced if you do not have core skills. The evolving economy is a weird, monstrous and beautiful thing, but the only way we can prepare our pupils for it is by making sure that they have simple transferable skills.

Chair

I always wonder whether there is this aspect that, “I left school at 15. I do not have any qualifications. I did alright. You will do alright as well, son.” To what extent is it about understanding that the first rung of the ladder—or, as you rightly put it, perhaps the second rung of the ladder—has risen up and if you have not got these qualifications, however dull they may be to attain for some people, you are going to be disadvantaged in the long term?

Alex Burghart

There are a lot of people in the system who do not understand that and who have never had it explained to them. I have spoken to people who work in further education who teach children who are doing media studies courses and who want to be journalists but have not passed English GCSE, and nobody has explained to them that that will make life very difficult for them. That is tragic. On your third point, Neil, about the north/south divide, there is a north/south divide of sorts, but when you look at some of the poorest educational communities in the country, they are in towns like Margate and Great Yarmouth—seaside towns—where you have a very high proportion of long-term unemployment, a very low skills base in the population, and also a very high proportion of white children on free school meals. It is not just the areas of the de‑industrialised north that require attention; it is also parts of the south.

Owen Jones

Even amassing qualifications is no guarantee of climbing those rungs, because now, a third of new graduates are doing non-graduate work.

Chair

Though is it necessary, if not sufficient. Has there been a change in the labour market?

Owen Jones

This is why I am saying it is a shift. Believe it or not, I finished my A‑levels in 2002, though you probably think it was last week or something. Back then only a quarter of new graduates were doing non-graduate work. This is all to do, as you say, with that general shift in the economy. I find it fascinating when people talk about aspiration, because I am not quite sure what people are asking people to aspire to. I do not want to glamorise a world that was disintegrating before I was born, not least because—

Chair

But you will anyway.

Owen Jones

No, no, these are my caveats. It was very male, dirty, back-breaking jobs and all the rest of it, but there was a sense of dignity, if you like, attached to those sorts of skilled work rather than new jobs that have replaced them. Now there are a million people working in call centres, which is as many as worked down the mines at the peak of the mining industry. The second biggest employer is retail.

Ian Mearns

Owen, I have been a school governor in Gateshead for 30 years almost, and I have come across far too many youngsters, particularly—it drives me up the wall—bright girls. You ask them, “What do you want to do?” and they say, “I want to be a hairdresser”. Hairdressing is a great profession; some people get paid 90 quid for cutting the Prime Minister’s hair and get a gong for it, but that does not happen to every hairdresser. With the best will in the world, places like Gateshead do not need 500 new hairdressers every year. There is a problem about aspirations amongst white working class kids.

Owen Jones

Yes, if you take hairdressing, the average salary is about £12,000; it is a terribly low-paid sector. Although hairdressing has massively expanded in the last 15 or 20 years, there needs to be far more work looking at the sorts of skilled middle income jobs, which have disappeared, that people can aspire to. You are right; you do not necessarily want everybody to aspire to be a hairdresser. The question I would pose is: what is the alternative? Generally it will be working in a supermarket or call centre for millions of people.

Chair

But there is a great skill shortage in this country. There are lots and lots of jobs that are going wanting and they cannot fill the places. They are well paid and people are simply not being prepared for them. The idea that there is this complete hourglass that means there are no jobs that people can aspire to and get is not true. They simply are not being prepared properly in order to get them, and they are not aware that they are there or what they need to do in order to get there.

Owen Jones

Engineering is a classic example of that; there is a lack of skilled engineers in this country. In a broader sense, though, there are obviously less middle income skilled jobs in the economy than there were 30 years ago; of course there are.

Chair

There was some research last year asking 15-year-olds what they wanted to do in life, and then comparing that with where the jobs are expected to be. 20% of jobs are expected to be in financial services, and only 4% of people aspired to go into it. One reason for getting your GCSEs.

Professor Mongon

Far from giving the impression that this is a homogenous problem, and far from thinking of it as a north/south problem because we could look at the south-west as well. What Chris and I are saying, and Alex’s writing says, is that actually working class communities are highly differentiated around the country, and highly localised. That is the first thing. The second thing is you asked a very specific question earlier in the morning about the early years. One of the things we need to recognise is that all the research shows us that the ambitions of the parents and children from white working class backgrounds are virtually indistinguishable from those of middle class backgrounds until the age of about 13 or 14. At that point their ambition—which you can separate into aspiration and expectation because they are different things—and comparative attainment haemorrhages; it collapses. A gap that has been steadily increasing through the years just goes wide. That draws us exactly into what the Chair was asking about, which is this connection between the secondary curriculum and vocation and community, and how you manage, as Ian Mearns asked earlier, to give high status to that alternative pathway.

Neil Carmichael

I certainly agree about the high status of the alternate pathway. Thank you for drawing the point out that I made earlier, but I have got two questions remaining. One of them arises from Sir Michael Wilshaw’s points last week when we were talking about social services. He was frequently referring to the difficulties of broken families, family life and so forth. He was really highlighting the area that we are now talking about in this particular session. My question to all of you, specifically to Alex and Dennis, is whether this is really one of the causes of white working class underachievement—it is not the only cause; I buy that—and if so, what sort of policy mechanisms should we be looking at?

Alex Burghart

There is undoubtedly a relationship between poor educational attainment and family breakdown; it is well established. Obviously it is not the only factor at play that we have seen. Famously, black boys on free school meals have started to close their attainment gap, whereas white boys on free school meals have not. I think you see similar levels of family breakdown in both communities, so it cannot be described as the only feature, but it is none the less an important one. There is stuff you can do about it through school. That is to say, you have to create role models and stability within school, but there is probably more that you can do in the wider community to try to help families, where possible, stay together. Family relationship support is pretty miserable in this country. It is one of the things we will be looking at over the next six months.

Professor Mongon

There is a correlation, but it is not a direct correlation, so we have got to be very careful not to demonise one-parent families. One of the key issues is the extent to which we can help the parent who is moving away to maintain a strong relationship; that goes back to the support we are giving. The truth of the matter is that that is much easier to do for people who have some wealth and good income. It is much easier to run two homes and maintain those relationships than if you have got very little income. Poverty, which is an underlying context of our whole conversation, is a factor. Being poor affects your health. One in six families, at some point, have difficulty in maintaining their gas and electricity, never mind having a laptop.

Neil Carmichael

One thing that worries me is the tendency of people, if they are going to be successful, to think that the best thing to do is leave the regions and get to London, in broad terms. I think that leads to the hollowing out of some of our cities and communities from the people who need to be there. It works in the other direction as well. People do not necessarily want to go back to do the job. We have seen that through the movement of teachers, for example. We have touched upon that in this Committee. You have one-way traffic going away from the very places that actually need the high achievers.

Chris Wellings

That is why educational disadvantage and response needs to work on lots of levels. One level needs to be in school, one level needs to be out of school, and one level needs to be parents’ education themselves, not just what they can do for their children. Another level needs to be longer-term economic prospects in the area. What Denis and I are saying is that areas are very different, so responses need to be tailored, deep and understand the local area. That might start to challenge some of the ideas about family breakdown. We found that in working class communities you could have very, very strong family networks, arguably stronger than you would often have with more middle class families now, where you have got people moving to London so there is huge distance between them. It is about getting an understanding that your low expectation—the hairdresser point—is perhaps a presenting symptom. What is causing that over a number of years? How can we actually get to the core of that rather than just say, “That is your presenting problem; let’s bring in a programme that tries to tackle that”? Let’s look to the causes of it, and the causes of it, and the causes of it.

Owen Jones

Just to go back to family breakdown quickly, the Children’s Society have looked into this in great detail, and their findings were that conflict within families has 10 times more of an impact on a child’s development than the family structure. The point you have made about the underlying issue being poverty—single parents are far more likely to live in poverty, and that is something that you cannot separate. All the evidence shows, for example, middle class students do well whatever school they go to. There was one study in 2008 that found that middle class kids at inner-city schools did excellently well, and 15% of them ended up going to Oxbridge, of the ones they studied. So there has to be this constant focus, not on things like family breakdown that in some senses are constantly emphasised wrongly; at all structures of schools, it is to do with class and income.

Alex Burghart

I am going to bring it back to family breakdown, because it seems that we are in danger of saying, “Let’s allow family breakdown to happen because we think we can clear up the mess afterwards”. What we would propose is that you should try and reduce conflict within families and help families stay together and work, because we know that—

Chair

What evidence is there that the intervention works?

Alex Burghart

If you can find interventions that work, and there are—

Chair

That is the question: can you?

Alex Burghart

There are relationship interventions that work. They are not 100% effective, but they are more effective than doing nothing. If you work with families then you are more likely to improve outcomes for children today and tomorrow and so on. You are also not going to allow families to suffer loss of income stability they would have if they split up.

Chair

What should we be recommending in our report on this particular front, in your view, Alex?

Alex Burghart

There should be much better relationship support services for families that are in difficulty.

Chair

Can you be more specific? I am just seeing the report now and it says, “We call upon the Government to bring much better relationship support than we have now.”

Alex Burghart

I would be very happy to supply the Committee with a list of interventions that are known to be effective. My colleague, Dr Samantha Callan, is an expert in this.

Owen Jones

This point about conflict and family breakdown—when we talk about conflict and how damaging it can be, it is estimated by the Government that 1 million women face domestic violence each year. When you have violence within a household between two partners, this idea that that is somehow better than a single, loving lone parent is grossly misleading.

Alex Burghart

What would be better would be to not have the violence in the family, would it not?

Owen Jones

Obviously, but often the best way of remedying that is separation.

Alex Burghart

It is important to look at that in the first instance rather than to—

Owen Jones

Is your view that—

Chair

We will ask the questions.

Alex Cunningham

The Government had their big programme to intervene with the 50,000 most problem families in the country. To their credit, that has had some positive outcomes, but it is hugely resource-intensive. I used to be an optimist on these things, but I am now very much a pessimist because I do not know where the resources are coming from in order to make this happen. Sure Start Centres achieved some good things. Pupil Premium is successful in part. What is the answer? Is it about resource with families? What is it?

Professor Mongon

I know you had earlier evidence on this, but the funding issue is not about the quantum; it is about how well you spend those funds. Particularly on some of those interventions, if you are paying professionals to intervene then it becomes very, very cost-inefficient. If you are paying people to begin to build up the kind of community capacity and social capital, in the jargon that Chris is talking about, then in the longer term that is an investment that pays off because you do not end up with the professionals being paid to do stuff. You get the local community to behave differently.

Alex Cunningham

We need professional leadership in order to do that. All the support services we hear about do not seem to exist anymore.

Professor Mongon

It needs a professional catalyst, I would argue, but sometimes that catalyst needs to make a space for the voluntary and other community sectors. While I have got the floor, Chair, can I say, on the question of distribution and movement, we have no strategic capacity to direct our best and most effective leaders into our most needy areas. The description of the education system as a system at the moment is misleading. If John Lewis or Marks & Spencer had a failing store in Gateshead, and we think they would allow half a dozen local customers or the chief executive of a local franchise to decide who would take it over, then we are misleading ourselves. They would know who was their best north-east troubleshooting manager and they would send them there.

Mr Ward

Just two areas: back to aspiration, and then media portrayal of the working class. First of all, we have all seen the experiment with the fleas in the glass, you put the lid on and eventually they stop jumping when you take the lid off. I think you said, “Aspiration to what?” Is it that they are just battered down, there is nothing there, and that there are unlikely to be opportunities for them? How much does that affect the aspirations of people from the working class?

Alex Burghart

During the course of our research, I talked to a guy called Phil Beadle, who was the Secondary School Teacher of the Year a few years back. He is a white working class guy himself, and he said, “Name 10 white working class role models for kids that are not sportsmen or women”.

Mr Ward

Or in the Cabinet.

Alex Burghart

I think that is something some schools find difficult, and something that people in those communities can find difficult.

Chris Wellings

Although it is much more hopeful than that. We are talking about average achievement being low amongst white working class pupils. That is not to say that there are not lots of examples of white working class pupils who do very well. We examine what that is, and it could be because they have got a parent who was particularly supportive, or they met an inspirational youth leader. The encouraging thing is we know that there are things you can do that can buck that average trend.

Owen Jones

When we talk about role models, often what we are saying is there is a lack of representation of working class voices generally, particularly in the public domain. There is a wide range of reasons for that. If you look at the media, for example, the Sutton Trust looked at the top 100 journalists, and they found over half of them were privately educated. Only just over one in 10 went to a comprehensive school. Driving that are things like the proliferation of unpaid internships, which force people to work for free, and only those who can live off their mum and dad can afford to do so; the disappearance of local newspapers, which were a foot in the door; and the emphasis on ever more expensive qualifications, like having to go to City University. That has pushed out working class voices from the media, which has an impact on portrayal. If you have fewer working class voices that are actually writing stories and running the media, you will have less of a platform for working class voices. That is one of the key issues in terms of what you are talking about.

Professor Mongon

It is worth separating ambition into aspiration and expectation. Aspiration is what you hope for, and that remains extraordinarily high for most people in the groups we are talking about well into their teenage years. Expectation is what you really think might happen. For a long time I believed in Father Christmas, and my aspirations and expectations were fulfilled. But actually when I got to my teenage years, I became disappointed, and I think that is what begins to happen for lots of teenagers in this category. Their aspirations remain high, but it begins to dawn on them that those kids that are four or five years older, that you adored when you were 11 and they were 16, because they were the bees knees in your school, you move on two or three years and where are they? They are on the street corner in some cases, and you think, “Well, so what was all that about? My nan and my granddad are still on this estate, and my dad and my mum, and it did not work for them.” So expectation begins to haemorrhage in those years. That comes back to your earlier point about vocation and curriculum. How do we begin to experiment in a system that is tightly bound by its accountability measures? You talked earlier about savvy head teachers. You want savvy head teachers; of course they will manipulate the system. Any savvy professional does. We have got to begin to look at that accountability system. The Secretary of State has a power to innovate and set aside any regulation that applies only to schools if there is a good reason to believe that an experiment in that area will work. It has been used in a handful of occasions in the past dozen years because schools are too reluctant; they do not have that sense in the profession of taking a risk and inquiring because the consequences are too dire. The Secretary of State has not done a lot of innovation in that experimental local way. It has hardly been used. Why are we not using that to look at one or two areas and try something? What we have now is not working.

Chair

Quite rightly you talk about aspiration and expectation. Has work been done on the work rate among children of different social classes, in terms of likelihood to do their homework? There are issues around housing and the support for that, but to what extent does the high aspiration lead to low expectations in the end because people are not doing the work they need to do? Do we have anything quantified on how hard—insofar as we can measure—children work from different backgrounds?

Professor Mongon

I do not know of that evidence, but what I do know is the evidence shows us that it is much harder for those youngsters we are talking about to do their homework, as my youngsters were able to do, in a room where nobody was eating, watching television or doing anything except their homework. I know it is harder for those youngsters to join clubs, however well schools create clubs, and some of them do it brilliantly well. If you are in a rural area—we have talked about that—and the school bus leaves at four o’clock, it is hard to stay for a homework club that is on till five. All of those things mount up. I do not think there is any intuitive natural disposition to not do the work. Lots of youngsters from this background get their five A* to Cs. It is this incremental, corrosive, drip, drip, drip of poverty and experience. You talked earlier about the quality of schools in some areas.

Chair

We know this. We have got this race issue in here; there are some immigrant communities in dire housing and dire poverty whose children do well at school because they work harder. They put more hours in and they get the results. They turn up at school. There is quite a lot around making sure you are in school; make sure you do the work you are supposed to do at and beyond school. Then funnily enough you might just get your C, which means you can get the apprenticeship; if you have not got it, you do not. To what extent is that an issue? The danger is we purely talk about the outside issues and we do not focus in on the behaviours that could help people escape from poverty and educational underachievement.

Owen Jones

When we talk about odds being stacked against people, if it is 10 to one, then obviously 10% of people will overcome that particular obstacle. When we are looking at housing, overcrowding simply means lack of places for people to study. Some people get around that; it just means you have a far greater obstacle to overcome. The wider point about homework again comes back to cultural capital. If you have parents who themselves are professional middle class university-educated people, then they are in a far better position to be able to help with homework.

Chair

Are they in a far better position to be able to suggest the television is switched off?

Owen Jones

That is one particular issue.

Chair

If the television is permanently on in a limited space then it is going to interrupt, is it not?

Owen Jones

I do not know what the evidence base is for how much people leave televisions on, to be perfectly honest with you. But we do know that there is an evidence base when it comes to cultural capital and the link that has in terms of how well children do. If I think of my own primary school, it was in the bottom 5% by results. I was the only boy to go to university or sixth form. In fact more went to prison. That was not because I was brightest, but because I had odds stacked in my favour. Some of the parents of the people I grew up with had learning difficulties, for example. It was just far more difficult for them to get the sort of support that others from middle class professional backgrounds are privileged enough to benefit from.

Chair

I am just trying to get at the behaviours and whether there are different behaviours, and whether we can identify that, and, if so, do anything about it.

Professor Mongon

There are two things happening there. One is that immigrant communities do not have the historical narrative of “education has not worked for us”. It did not matter that education did not work for us in the 1950s and 1960s. There might have been an ethical problem, but it was not a practical problem because there were jobs to go into. Where I come from, on Humberside, if you are living on the edge of a council estate—

Chair

There is no Humberside.

Professor Mongon

There is no Humberside; Yorkshire and Humberside.

Chair

East Yorkshire or North Lincolnshire, whichever one it was.

Professor Mongon

Okay, I was born and brought up in Goole, and went to secondary school in Hull. If you are living in some of those areas, there is now a historical narrative that education does not work. More importantly, whatever our national narrative about immigration is, the fact of the matter is if you get you and your kids into this country, if you have hiked your way across Somalia to get here, if you have hiked your way across Europe to get here, you are not a typical family. You have got some bite about you.

Chair

I was just trying to unpick the behaviours, because we need a balance of Owen’s points about housing and poverty and the issues of good behaviours; if we get those both right—

Professor Mongon

I think that gives you the drive to try to understand those behaviours; you get on your kids’ backs in a different kind of way.

Alex Burghart

I would certainly agree with what Denis has just said. What we are talking about is parental engagement in education. That often comes from one’s own experience of education and the workplace, and whether you have faith in the power of education to be transformative. A challenge for a lot of schools is obviously reaching out to those parents who had negative experiences both of education and employment, and persuading them that things can work this time round. There are some schools that do this well. There are means of both showing children that school is worthwhile, and showing parents that it is worthwhile. Some schools are achieving great things by going about things this way.

Ian Mearns

Just over 20 years ago, in Gateshead, less than a third of the kids were achieving five good A* to Cs. That means that 70% of the kids did not. Those 70% are part of a population who are now in their mid-30s, and they have quite often got kids of their own who are coming up to their own GCSEs. The trouble is all too often I come across parents who see no value in education, having failed in the system themselves. Of course, those same parents, because of their own lack of educational achievement, have got far less capability of supporting their own children through the homework process. Is that not a big factor for an awful lot of these communities?

Alex Burghart

Of course it is. It is a huge factor, but you have to take it in stages. If you persuade parents that homework is worthwhile doing, even if they do not feel they can help with the quadratic equations, they can still help to try to create an environment and a structure in which the homework will be done.

Chair

Turn the telly off.

Alex Burghart

And explaining that it is important to do it. That is the first thing that schools can do, but obviously some parents will be able to give their children additional help by helping with the homework itself.

Ian Mearns

Additionally, we have now got a situation in the north-east of England where we are approaching 25% youth unemployment, for 16-to-25-year-olds. For youngsters who are struggling in schools and have got this kind of family background, that hope and expectation thing becomes even more difficult given the local economic situation as well.

Alex Burghart

Absolutely.

Chris Wellings

It is not always about highly intensive support. We have a programme called Families and Schools Together, and we know what parents want. There might be a “how do we do it?” gap, but they want the best for their children. That programme again comes back to this building cultural capacity. It is not about targeting particular families; it is about whole-year groups coming along—families, schools, communities, managers of local football teams, vicars—coming together at the start of primary school and spending time with their children in the school environment to try to knock down those barriers. We have a graduation session after eight weeks; the parents come along and they make graduation—caps and gowns. The parents are hugely proud, so what you have got there are parents with a real burning ambition for their children to do well. It is not about a big intensive programme; it is about building that capacity in the community.

Mr Ward

David Jones was before us, who is a head teacher in Bradford. In 1980 I was a councillor for that ward, and in the 1980s there was no male unemployment. In 1985 there was 70% male unemployment as the local factories closed down. That is the area that Dave represents. He made a comment about it not just being about education, but about all of us not accepting the type of coverage that the working class families and people get. I just wonder to what extent you think that is true. I know you have written extensively on it, but what impact do you think this portrayal of the working class has on them, and also the people they come into contact with when they are going for an interview or applying for university?

Owen Jones

Do not, as a Committee, take this as a criticism, but even the terminology you are using here is problematic: “white working class”. Firstly, I do not like the term. For a long time there was this idea that the working class no longer exists, and that we are all middle class now. Then it re-emerged in a racial form, and it was this idea that in a multicultural society, the white working class is a besieged ethnic minority competing with other minorities. According to the last British Social Attitudes survey, six out of 10 people think they are working class. What you are talking about here are pupils who are white who are on free school meals. You are talking about poorer kids. The reason it is also problematic is we have some of the highest levels of interethnic relationships in the world, and those tend to happen in working class communities more often than middle class communities. Suburbs are more likely to be white than inner-city working class areas, but no one ever talks about the white middle class. I just find the whole terminology problematic. The problem we have is the airbrushing out of existence of the reality of the modern working class. It is very rarely shown on television, and when you do get either positive portrayals of middle class families or often grotesque extreme caricatures on the other end, the extent to which people internalise that is something that needs to be looked at. I speak at a lot of schools, and it seems to me anecdotally that does have an impact. Barnardo’s have looked at how young people are portrayed. Generally when working class young people are portrayed, it is as social problems to be contained, as threats, antisocial behaviour, feral youths and all that sort of thing. That does genuinely have an impact on people’s esteem. That is something that has to be looked at. What is more problematic is that the reality is airbrushed and therefore the actual issues are not properly addressed because we have such a misleading picture in the mainstream.

Mr Ward

Coronation Street is highly moralistic and—

Owen Jones

Coronation Street I do not think is—again, EastEnders is fascinating, really. There are quite a lot of interesting pieces about it.

Chair

Owen, not that this is not fascinating, but this is not an academic seminar, notwithstanding some of my own contributions and questions in it. We always have to remind ourselves that the business end of what we do is recommendations to Government, so not exploring this other stuff. We have to keep coming back to what we can do, even in a small way, creating an improvement, and make things better.

Ian Mearns

Can I take issue with something Owen said, though? He said what we are talking about here is kids who are on free school meals. No, we are not. Where you have concentrations of youngsters who are entitled to free school meals, you have living and working with them, cheek by jowl, lots of kids who are not entitled to free school meals but whose family income is not far above the threshold. Therefore we are talking about those kids as well.

Owen Jones

Okay, fair enough. Just in terms of the recommendations, what we need is to change the debate in terms of the way we get the representation of working class people. It comes back to actually having those voices in the mainstream media, and that means taking on things like unpaid internships and other barriers which turn those sorts of sectors into closed shops.

Chair

Are you certain that is the right answer? A tiny minority, but unpaid internships in the last Parliament included someone who would work flat out for two years from a working class background in the north-east, who then saved up in order to come and intern with me. Now you watch the doors closing, and the only people who will get in here are either the small number who get paid or the people who come in, friends of friends, and ask if they can have a couple of weeks. At that point, it could be that the anti-unpaid intern creates a filter that blocks access.

Alex Cunningham

We should certainly have bigger budgets in order to be able to pay interns.

Chair

That is true. I recognise the tensions.

Owen Jones

You might get minorities who can afford to do that, but it is very difficult.

Siobhain McDonagh

The issue might not be paid and unpaid internships; it is the fact that some kids do not even realise that there is such a thing as internships, and how they assist. So it has not even got to the stage of—

Owen Jones

In the media, people have to work for free often for months without even getting a job at the end of it. On top of that you have the decline of local newspapers, which were apprenticeships effectively for aspiring journalists, and the emphasis on expensive postgraduate qualifications from the likes of City University. It is very difficult for an aspiring journalist from a non-privileged background—I am not even talking about working class backgrounds—to get in, and that distorts media coverage; of course it does.

Alex Cunningham

What are we going to do about the 14-year-old who has been disconnected, losing hope, losing aspirations, the stuff that Denis spoke about? What are your recommendations that we should be doing? It is all very well saying the Government can allow areas to experiment, but what should we actually recommend the Government to do to help those 14-year-olds and turn them back on to education or prevent them from turning off?

Professor Mongon

That is a question about what is the nature of the experiment, though; that would vary from area to area. There are now a number of experiments going on. There is one that is being very considerably funded by the Education Endowment Foundation, looking at project-based learning, which is rooted in the local community activity. That experiment has struggled to recruit sufficient schools because the schools are nervous about what will happen if our accountability slips, because we might not do so well in our five A* to C, but we might be better in other ways.

Alex Cunningham

Denis, we have experimented for donkeys’ years trying different things under different Governments, different leadership models and all manner of things. There must be something out there that is working for young people that we could recommend.

Professor Mongon

I think in previous sessions you have covered that ground. One is that we need to do intervention, and we know what kind of interventions work in the early years. We need to provide the teaching profession with a set of skills, which we have not yet provided them with. We need to focus on their professional development, and I think Kevan Collins spoke at length about that requirement. We need to help teachers to work with these youngsters so the gap does not expand. We need to look very carefully at how we organise primary and secondary transfer, because some places do that very well. We need to think about how we deploy our most effective leaders. The evidence for how schools are single units or groups of units can make a difference. It is there; it just needs applying. What you then get up against is the glass ceiling of the economy, poverty and other factors that we have begun to talk about that you need to connect with. But the evidence for what you need to do is there. If you need a note, I will write you a note.

Pat Glass

I agree with you. We know the things that make a difference: good teaching and good leadership. When this Committee went to Singapore, we saw the system there, which we were always told we should learn from. Head teachers there do not apply for jobs; they are allocated. They are like your John Lewis; the Government decides, “We need this kind of head teacher here; that is where you are going after your next three years are up.” Would you be saying to this Committee that we need to have something in place to direct the best teachers and the best leaders to the most challenging areas?

Professor Mongon

You need something in place that is not operated by national Government that works at some more local and perhaps regional level.

Pat Glass

Paying off their tuition fees: ‘We need you to go there so we will pay off your tuition fees”.

Professor Mongon

I avoided the word “direct” because I do not think that culturally we can get anywhere near that point very quickly.

Chair

Teach First does it. If you sign up to Teach First you undertake to go to any region that they say.

Professor Mongon

But you have to sign up to do that. The next two generations of head teachers and school leaders did not sign up to a profession in which they would be directed to where they would go. It would be a massive, massive difference.

Chair

Singapore is a small island.

Pat Glass

I am not talking about direction. The levers are not in place at the moment to make it available.

Professor Mongon

Absolutely, there needs to be levers, and some of those levers would be inducement. I remember being in Australia for a short while, and you could not make career progress in Sydney unless you had spent a time in an outback school, because they needed people to do that training. Why should that not be part of our cultural expectation? We need to look at how you do it, and we might move towards more direction, but I think inducement would get better people there.

Pat Glass

Yes. So looking at inducements to get the best people into the jobs. We would be interested in any inducements that you want to let us have, so if you want to write to us and let us know what the inducements should be.

Professor Mongon

It is not always cash. The idea that any Secretary of State would know what was the best head teacher for any school is not one we would want to entertain.

Pat Glass

That is one part of the equation, but I was interested in what you had to say: that for a working class kid to do well they have got to leave their communities and their friends behind. We had a discussion at the last hearing about “working classness”, and the way in which our schools are full of middle class teachers trying to rescue working class children, and the lack of respect for that “working classness”. How much of the culture and ethos within our schools that does not respect working class children has an impact on this, and what can we do to change it?

Professor Mongon

There is a thread of research that shows that there is a seam of low expectation in the profession, but again, it is not universal so we have to avoid tarnishing the whole profession. This is about the professional development of teachers. We have to say, “If we offer you these skills, the evidence is that these skills in other places have dealt with this issue”. We have got to raise that skill and expectation base. You do not train a dog well by banging it on the nose with a stick; you train it well by giving it rewards and inducements. I do not want to make a direct comparison—I have suddenly realised I am in a hole and digging—but beating people up is not going to work in the end.

Chair

We have got four minutes and we have got four of you—about a minute each—so just final thoughts.

Alex Burghart

More working class teachers. Teach First is very good at taking graduates out and spreading them round the country. Why do we not have more projects that are home-grown, local talent and keeping them in the area, deploying them in our schools?

Chris Wellings

How children do educationally is shaped by their family, school and community at all different stages of their childhood. We need a holistic response that gives children the support services, the opportunities, the support networks and the enrichment they need in a comprehensive way. It needs to be localised and tailored, and we should be trying to do that in some specific communities.

Professor Mongon

The function of central Government above all should be to do no harm, and it often does. It should set a very strong, clear, purposeful, strategic direction and a set of expectations, and then it should avoid tinkering in the detail of curriculum pedagogy or local governance arrangements.

Owen Jones

Far more resources for early-years and nursery education, particularly to narrow the vocabulary gap. In terms of a holistic approach, it has to deal with housing, diet, and the stresses that poverty can put on some people’s lives—obviously that differs—instead of the constant focus on school structure, which I think successive Governments have done. You have to look at the broader factors if we are going to address the educational inequalities that just reflect the social inequalities.

Chair

One word that has not been used in the whole of today is “parenting”—parenting classes, preparation of parents better able to support their children, giving them an understanding of what it is they need to do and how they do it. Any thoughts on that?

Owen Jones

Again, what you are getting at is that one of the big problems is parents leaving televisions on too much and that sort of thing. When we have an increase in overcrowding, which is going on at the moment, hundreds of thousands of children are living in overcrowded homes. There is nowhere for them to study. Things like that are the issues that are helping to drive educational inequality. When we have a society where even the birth weight of children differs according to how rich their parents are, that just shows how entrenched inequality is in this society. Educational inequality reflects that.

Chair

Children on free school meals who are Chinese do better at maths than rich white children. That is not to say that you do not have a substantive and valid point. It is just that if we only bemoan the fact that the poor are with us, and we do not provide them with the tools to understand that they can do more than they realise—it is self-empowerment we need to provide, and we need to do that in a way that is not patronising and that is ground-up. How do we do that? That is what I am trying to get at. I am not trying to demonise people who leave the telly on. If they do not know how damaging it is because no one tells them, and they do not know how important two hours’ extra homework every fortnight is, and would in fact make it 40% more likely that your kid will get a pass in the GCSEs, or whatever the facts may be, if we do not challenge that then we are not serving those communities very well.

Owen Jones

It does go back to cultural capital again. Obviously poorer Chinese children are likely to do worse than a middle class Chinese British student, for example. So class always comes in, regardless of which group you are looking at. If you come from, for example, an immigrant family background, where they may, as Professor Mongon talked about, have travelled huge, vast areas of land, or may themselves come from a relatively middle class background. Cultural capital is a huge factor, and that is one of the things I have talked about. Of course, that can be a factor when you are looking at particular ethnic groups, even if their children are poor.

Pat Glass

Can I just say, Chair, that ethnicity can be very misleading. I worked in an authority that was a gateway authority. We took immigrants, assessed them, and then moved them out. Those kids were raising our SATs results. The first people out of any conflict are the able and the skilled, so it is wrong to assume that—

Chair

The point is they are in the same circumstances as the white working class indigenous population, but their behaviours mean that, despite all the issues that do afflict them, just as they afflict others, they manage through behaviours to support their children to do better.

Owen Jones

With more cultural capital. As we say, it is the more able and skilled who end up coming here. They have more cultural capital—I know it is an annoying phrase—but they are able to transmit to their kids in a way which other people are not, even if they are superficially in the same economic background in this country.

Chair

The final word, Denis.

Professor Mongon

I will reference an early-years project that was sponsored by Reading Borough Council and the Innovation Unit, which is in exactly the territory that you are in. My final word is that Sir Michael Marmot’s health inequalities review made two really important points in its conclusions that are relevant to this Committee. One is you will not close this gap entirely, but it does not need to be as big as it is. The second is that the things that will have the highest leverage will not be things that only improve the attainment of the lowest attaining groups; they will be things that will improve the entire system.

Chair

An excellent note on which to end. Thank you all very much. If you have any further thoughts, particularly around recommendations, please do send us an email, however short, to prompt us. Thank you. Oral evidence: Underachievement in education of white working class children, HC 727 2