That’s the trouble of trying to measure everything through the metric of race: sooner or later you will arrive at a situation very different from that which you intended. Namely, that in some cases it is white people who appear to be at some kind of disadvantage. At least Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is not trying to cover up the glaring disparity in GCSE results between ethnic groups. She has admitted that white working-class children are underperforming and suggests that the state has ‘failed them’. But she doesn’t really go on to ask herself how or why.
What is it about being white, for example, that makes pupils underperform in Maths and English? Last year, 63.7 per cent of white pupils achieved a grade 4 pass or above in both subjects, compared with 65.0 per cent of black pupils, 74.8 per cent of Asian pupils and 88.8 per cent of Chinese pupils.
Do poor communities which are dominated by white people not deserve extra resources too?
If the state has been failing white pupils, Phillipson is unable, or unwilling, to say what she thinks it has been doing, or not doing, in order to suppress their attainment. We are left to ponder this ourselves. Nor, by the way, does she suggest any remedy other than setting up something called a ‘Best Start Family Hub’ in every local authority area. How these are supposed to improve the chances of white people in particular she doesn’t say – I presume she is not going to plaster them with signs on the doors saying ‘whites only’.
It isn’t hard to wonder whether the underperformance of white pupils – which, as Phillipson says, has been clear for many years – has something to do with years of trying to favour other ethnic groups. Governments started off with the assumption that ethnic minorities were at a disadvantage and so poured resources into those communities. In the process they failed to notice that communities without significant numbers of ethnic children were being ignored.
We didn’t have detailed ethnic statistics on education or anything else back in the 1980s, but the trend towards underperformance of white children likely began with the concentration of inner cities following the urban riots of that decade. As Mrs Thatcher said after the 1987 general election, ‘we’ve got a big job to do in those inner cities’.
Life in many of those places was transformed, beginning with the Conservatives and continuing under Labour. Endless efforts were made to promote the interests of ethnic communities, especially black-dominated ones, where the riots of 1981 and 1985 had started. Black role models were promoted, to the point of absurdity in some cases. In virtually every TV drama nowadays the police, or any other organisation, has to be led by a black woman. Then come the adverts – a world in which you would think the black population of Britain was about 95 per cent, rather than 4 per cent.
In the midst of all the activity, no one seemed to stop to ask what effect it might have on children who happen to be white. Are they not allowed role models? Do poor communities which are dominated by white people not deserve extra resources too?
The result of all this panicking over race and ethnicity is that the poorest, most disadvantaged communities in Britain have shifted from the inner cities to towns at the geographical margins: secondary towns in the Midlands and North, former industrialised areas and coastal towns. Statistically, the most disadvantaged place in England now is Jaywick, a ramshackle suburb to the west of Clacton. It is no accident that this is the parliamentary seat which first voted Ukip and has since returned Nigel Farage to parliament in his new political guise, Reform UK.
When black communities rioted in the 1980s, they were showered with resources; when white communities rioted last year in the wake of the Southport murders, the Prime Minister condemned them as ‘far right’. It is little wonder that the white working class is beginning to find its political voice. That perhaps explains why Phillipson has chosen to recognise educational underperformance among white pupils.
But it would seem to me a better way to promote educational attainment is to stop trying to pigeonhole children into ethnic categories at all. Once you do this, there is always going to appear to be some kind of ethnic disadvantage, with the implication that there is some kind of underhand racism going on. The same would occur if we collected statistics on other human attributes, such as the length of people’s earlobes. The sooner we stop collecting these ethnicity statistics and tailor education to individual children’s needs, rather than treating them foremost as members of an ethnic group, the happier a country we will be.
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