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A government watchdog that was consulted on a parliamentary report on disparities in education has condemned its language as “awful”.
Published by the Conservative-dominated Commons education committee on Tuesday, the report said schools could be breaking the law by promoting “divisive” terminology such as “white privilege”.But the Social Mobility Commission (SMC), which monitors progress in improving social mobility in the UK, and contributed to evidence gathering for the publication, described the language it used as “awful”.
Sammy Wright, the lead commissioner on schools and higher education for the SMC, acknowledged the report highlighted important issues but he said to focus on white pupils underachieving was to put the cart before the horse.
“Many people reading this will identify as white working class and think this is about them – but it’s not. This is about the white poor, and to say that use of the term ‘white privilege’ (which has really only become part of the discourse in the last few years) has a role to play is to ignore how long term and systemic these issues are,” he said.
Wright explained that educational underachievement is only part of the picture. Referring to the watchdog’s 2020 report, The Long Shadow of Deprivation, he said they found that even if students got good qualifications, in the least socially mobile areas of the country, they still faced a wage gap of up to a third.
“These groups are economic not ethnic, and working class is not the same as disadvantaged. Using these terms interchangeably is wrong,” he added.
Other critics described the report, which examined why poor white children underperform compared with other disadvantaged groups, as a “complete whitewash” and the latest attempt by ministers to ignite a culture war.
Nazir Afzal, former chief prosecutor for north-west England, described the report as a “whitewash” saying he was hugely offended by the suggestion that any focus on white privilege contributes to deprived white children being left behind.
“Colour is an additional obstacle that only BAME kids face. A report that fails to put the blame squarely on class differences is quite simply a whitewash,” he said.
Afzal, chair of a further education college in Rochdale that has a disproportionately high number of working class children of all races, said decades of underfunding impacted greatest on education.
“Put a black boy in a suit and he will probably fare better than one who can’t afford one, but even he will be more likely to be stopped, arrested, charged and convicted than a white boy in a suit,” he added.
He added: “Working class children are the victims of government priorities, but black children are also the victims of racism. To suggest otherwise is dishonest.”
Meanwhile Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, said the report was the latest attack in the government’s culture war, using the politics of division to rally people around a very narrow version of British identity.
“The message is clear that it is immigration, immigrants and their descendants who are the problem, drawing much needed attention from struggling white communities. Just like the Sewell report, it is based on a complete misuse of the data. There is no measure of class in the school system.”
He said the truth was that steep funding cuts had affected every pupil over the last 10 years. “But rather than focus on the real problem the government hides behind the immigrants and minorities who are supposedly getting all the attention.”
The report, called The Forgotten: How White Working-class Pupils Have Been Let Down, and How to Change It, highlights that in 2018-19, 53% of disadvantaged white British pupils – those eligible for free school meals – met the expected standard of development at the end of the early years foundation stage, one of the lowest proportions of any disadvantaged ethnic group.
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