Why are poor white boys doing so badly at school? It's about culture, and we've got to change it
When social scientists try to explain something, they look at all kinds of factors they can measure.
Take education. You could try to explain variations in pupils' results by looking at their parents class or wealth or education. Or we might look at school performance, teacher quality, class sizes and so on.
Social researchers don't like saying that things are caused by differences in "culture" much, because that tends to mean something they can't measure or explain. And if problems are to do with the culture, it's probably going to be difficult to change things. Politicians often talk about "changing the culture", but this is a mammoth undertaking, and few succeed in it.
Any yet, I can't help thinking that so much turns on culture. In fact, that it explains most things.
Take the gender gap in schools. It is apparently widening again, with girls pulling further ahead of boys:
Figures show that more than a quarter of exams taken by girls this year scored top grades compared with less than a fifth of those sat by boys. The gap in results between the sexes is at a record level – and four times wider than when GCSEs were first introduced in the late 1980s.
The gender gap tells you something really powerful about the importance of culture, compared to the direct effects of government policy.
After all, girls and boys have the same social backgrounds, the same parents, and go to the same kinds of schools – but they end up with significantly different results.
The explanations have little to do with genetics. Girls are slightly ahead of boys at age 3, but by the time they have started school at age 5, the gender gap has disappeared altogether.
However, for the rest of their time at school the gap widens steadily. And by GCSE 7.5 per cent more girls than boys are getting above a C grade.
Politicians would kill for a 7.5 per cent improvement in the overall score. Why is is that girls are achieving so much more, given exactly the same resources? Culture.
The anti-education, anti-aspiration culture that dominates most schools in Britain has much more pronounced effects on boys. The ideas that it isn't cool to learn, that real men work with their hands, not their minds, and that school doesn't matter, are all pretty deeply ingrained in our culture.
You can see big differences in culture again if you look at how different ethnic groups are going.
About one in seven children in Britain is eligible to get free school meals. Broadly speaking, these are children from poorer households. There's a big gap between how they perform, compared to children who aren't on free school meals.
But differences between different ethnic groups are bigger still. The graph below shows the proportions of different ethnic groups getting 5 GCSE's at C or above, including English and Maths.
Chinese students who are on free school meals do better than children from other groups who aren't. They do roughly three times better than white pupils who are – like them – eligible for free school meals.
There are relatively few pupils of Chinese origin in Britain. But looking at larger ethnic groups the differences are still very pronounced. Asian girls on free school meals do better than black boys who aren't.
Poor black boys do better than poor white boys. But strikingly, for less poor black boys the situation is reversed: they do worse than their white peers. That's why there's a dent in the red bar on the right hand column that stands out like a missing tooth. What's happening there? What are less poor black boys hearing from our culture that is holding them back?
At the very bottom of the pile are poor white boys, a result that some people might find surprising. That's partly because we are looking at GCSE results here. At the start of school children from most of Britain's ethnic minorities are behind their white peers – particularly if they start with English as a second language. But they have caught up and overtaken by the time they sit GCSEs.
The upside of this data is that Britain is, ever more, a country where people from all racial backgrounds can get ahead.
But it poses some uncomfortable questions too. Questions about the culture of poor white communities. About the widening differences in aspirations between different parts of the country. And about whether we are prepared to change our education culture enough to cope in the hungry, competitive world of the 21st century.
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