Schools are failing white, poor, working-class children and should adopt an approach similar to the British Olympic team to help bolster their performance, a thinktank has recommended.



The study by ResPublica says white British children could benefit from the adoption of the “marginal gains” approach used to great acclaim by the Olympic cycling team. It would focus on making small, closely monitored improvements across the board, from teaching to school leadership, which would cumulatively add up to academic success.

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The report by the independent thinktank was commissioned by Knowsley council on Merseyside as part of its attempt to tackle the borough’s dire educational performance. It is the lowest performing authority in England for pupils achieving the government’s benchmark of five A* to C grade GCSEs, including English and maths.

Knowsley, where more than 95% of the population is white British, is the second poorest borough in England and 15% of the working population have no qualifications, compared with the national average of 8%.

It was found that those children from disadvantaged white backgrounds were performing worst in schools, compared with other ethnic groups. It was attributed in part to a lack of academic aspiration at home, with white working-class parents less likely to take an interest or engage with their children’s schooling and perpetuating a culture of “narrow horizons”.

While the study focused specifically on Knowsley, the authors advocate a broader major overhaul of the education sector nationally, from the way teachers encourage pupils to achieve to how heads work collaboratively and how schools are funded and run at local and national level.

It recommends a “northern teaching premium”, offering higher wages to talented teachers to entice them to schools outside of London.

Mark Morrin, the principal author of the report, said: “What we’ve identified in Knowsley is that the series of reforms that governments have advocated over the years haven’t worked for white, working-class children. The link between low income and low educational performance is widely accepted but other ethnic groups have managed to overcome that, possibly by a culture of attainment and aspiration and valuing education more than the indigenous white working-class population.

“So that’s why schools that are predominately white working-class need to work that much harder to convince pupils and their families that education is useful. They have to be so much better. Average in a place like Knowsley is not good enough to set these pupils on the trajectory to achieving at GCSE level.”

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The report is supportive of Theresa May’s pledge to bring back grammar schools, stating that one in Knowsley could be “transformative” for white, working-class children who are chronically underperforming.

In a speech in September, the prime minister highlighted the “burning injustice” that “if you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else in Britain to go to university”.

Their research showed there was a “brain drain” in the area, where bright children were actively going to school outside the borough, something they argued could be halted by introducing a selective school.

Phillip Blond, the director of ResPublica, said: “For too long, white working-class children have been left behind by an education system which is not working properly.

“Re-introducing grammar schools is potentially a transformative idea for working-class areas where there are little or no middle classes to game the admission system. We know that selection improves the performance of those white working-class children selected; the trouble is too few of them are.

“We recommend that new grammars in the first instance are exclusively focused on the needs of white working-class children.”

Elaborating on the report’s suggested adoption of the Olympic sport concept of marginal gains in schools, Morrin said: “The Team GB approach is about looking across all the variety of inputs that can affect performance in the classroom, putting the right strategies in place and collecting data and measurements to identify what works and focus on getting the maximum returns. Those small gains can then add up to something bigger than a sum of its parts.”