But Spielman is having none of that. “We are having to grapple with the unhappy fact that many local working-class communities have felt the full brunt of economic dislocation in recent years, and, perhaps as a result, can lack the aspiration and drive seen in many migrant communities,” she told her audience at Wellington College in Berkshire.

And she is right. More study needs to be done to identify the reason why poorer white working class kids don’t push themselves to attain excellence at school and, more importantly, why their parents don’t do the pushing on their behalf.

But undoubtedly the disconnect between the government and the governed, exacerbated by events since the 2008 financial crisis, continues to take its toll, continues to undermine the unspoken social contract that says that if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll get further than your parents did.

For (many) immigrant families, this is almost an instinctive mantra: study hard, get good grades, go to university, become a doctor/lawyer, become wealthy. For white kids living on a housing estate, where the local school isn’t funded properly and whose teachers are swimming against the tide of cynicism and defeatism, the prospect of a shiny, confident future is confounded by a belief that the cards are stacked against them from the start. So why bother hanging around to be dealt a hand?