Breaking the cycle of white working class underachievement

The groundbreaking study was commissioned by the NUT and NCSL against a background of growing national concern about the educational performance of the low income white working class

Future head teachers should spend time in schools where white working class pupils are successful to learn how to disrupt the cycle of serious under achievement endemic in this group of young people since mass education was introduced in the Victorian times, according to new research from Manchester University, commissioned by the National Union of Teachers and the National College for School Leadership.

Some schools are successfully bucking the trend in which white boys and girls on free school meals are the lowest attaining group in the country, apart from Gypsy and Traveller children, and future school leaders need to see these schools in action and learn from them how to challenge social stereotypes based on class, says the report.

The training of teachers and school leaders has to tackle class stereotypes in the same way that it does ethnic and gender stereotypes, argues the report “Successful Leadership for Promoting the Achievement of White Working Class Pupils” by Dr Denis Mongon, Senior Research Fellow and Dr Chris Chapman, Reader in Educational Leadership and Improvement, at the School of Education, University of Manchester.