Here’s the thing about narratives: once they’re set, they’re nigh-on impossible to shift. And the story about white working-class boys in this country, told over and over again and now set like concrete, goes something like this: they achieve less than girls at every stage of education, they go on to earn less, they are in every way the ones we’ve left behind.
This is a “betrayal” that is systematically ignored, as are they—“the forgotten demographic” according to Conservative-founded thinktank the Centre for Social Justice—despite acres of headlines and policy analysis, countless studies and calls for a reckoning. And even as it’s crystal clear that “white working class” has in fact become shorthand for “white working class boys” (see ITV’s report on the independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes that applied the data about white working-class children as a group to just boys, with the g-word—that’ll be “girls”—not appearing once).
And this zero-sum game is also played skilfully by Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK. This week, in his debut essay on Substack—“Britain is a two tier state - against white people”—he gets stuck in to bias in education, writing about “white students”, “children” and “boys”. The g-word, once again, is the only word he doesn’t bother himself with (he only mentions white working-class girls in a paragraph about “grooming gangs”). Nor does the word “girls” appear in his follow-up Facebook post that begins, “White working class boys are being failed on a mass scale.”
Which isn’t to say that they’re not, by the way, that the question being asked over and over— why are they being failed—isn’t bang-on. Nor is it to suggest that white working-class boys are not carrying the weight of very real issues (especially when it comes to the likes of school expulsions and suicide rates).
But that question is a shot clearly missing a chaser: what about our white working-class lasses? Because if you want to talk about who’s honest-to-god being ignored—by the media, politicians, thinktanks and the public alike—you’re going to have to get past “f” in the dictionary. As today’s report on opportunity from the Sutton Trust makes clear, “despite widespread focus on ‘white working-class boys’”, it’s actually girls suffocating inside the bell-jar of an escalating crisis.
While white working-class girls still do a little better at GCSE-level than boys—with 38 per cent vs 35 per cent achieving the “expected standard” —this number has dropped dramatically over the last six years, while boys are seeing change in the opposite direction.
These same girls now have worse absence rates than the lads like them (53 per cent are persistently absent—missing at least 10 per cent of school sessions) and report enjoying school the least.
And, terrifyingly (for them), school is as good as it gets. In work, they’re plunged into an earnings gap that’s more like a yawning chasm, with boys earning higher wages even when they’ve left school with fewer qualifications.
This is the double disadvantage that these girls are walloped by: class and gender (the Social Mobility Foundation has put the class pay gap—which is on top of the gender pay gap—at £6,855).
So, while MPs like Tory Charlie Dewhirst demand a strategy to improve social mobility for boys in deprived areas, and the Department for Education in England pledges to ensure that “working class pupils—especially boys—are supported to thrive”, who’s demanding better for our girls? Or even acknowledging their now much-evidenced decline academically and economically? The very minimum is to begin working out a fix within a system of prevention and intervention that is currently built around boys.
And these calls needn’t be at the expense of white working-class boys. It’s actually not a zero-sum game—but it does require carving out space to talk about girls, to name the quicksand they’re sinking in, specifically.
Unless, as I fear, there isn’t the same urgency given they’re not just girls, but our poorest girls. Education’s a nice-to-have, essential for some, but them? When there are babies to bounce, potatoes to boil and home fires to light? When there are homes to be operated like prisons?
It’s certainly telling that, when asked about spiralling absence in girls from low-income families, secondary teachers cited their growing responsibilities within the home (41 per cent said they’ve seen an increase for these girls)—a surge met publicly with a shrug. The same goes for the research linking absences to poverty, abuse and trauma.
Perhaps even wilder than those who don’t care are those who don’t believe this is happening. They refuse to accept that girls in our most deprived areas simply don’t have it better. It is as though we’re living in a back-to-front Gilead, where female privilege greases the path for women and girls—pausing only to stomp on a testicle or two en route to snatching opportunities that aren’t theirs. Yes, even our poorest.
And isn’t that the truth, tucked into the very heart of this? That we still consider girls doing well to be evidence of a problem, because by default we expect boys to do better? Because when working-class white boys are leaving girls in the dust (see A-levels), it’s certainly something to be cheered. Perhaps the most stubborn narrative is this: that white working-class girls don’t have inherent and equal value, or as much right to dreams, to success, as their working-class brothers. That as a society we simply care about them less. Go on, prove me wrong.
