Every year when exam results are published, reports highlight the same uncomfortable truth: that white, working-class children are among the lowest-achieving groups in our education system.

Politicians lament the problem, conferences debate it and headlines recycle the statistics. But what’s missing is the most important part - solutions that work.

For proof that outcomes can change for this group, we need only look across the Atlantic to Steubenville, Ohio. Once a proud steel town and now a byword for post-industrial decline, more than 30 per cent of its children live in poverty.

On paper, it has every reason to follow the depressing educational trends you can see around the world. Yet for more than two decades, its primary schools have consistently outperformed the state average in reading.

The reason? A clear, consistent focus on structured literacy teaching through a programme called Success for All.

White, working-class education

Steubenville didn’t have an economic revival. It didn’t see massive injections of new funding or a wave of fresh technology. What it had was something simpler: consistency, evidence-based practice and political will.

It had teachers committed to daily 90-minute reading blocks, regular progress checks, close work with parents and whole-school support. In short, the kind of joined-up, long-term approach that we rarely sustain here.

The Fischer Family Foundation is asking: if Steubenville can do it, why can’t Sheffield, Burnley, Peterborough, Newcastle or Leeds South?

These are communities with similarly deep industrial roots, high child poverty and predominantly white, working-class populations - but, unlike Steubenville, their literacy outcomes tell a bleak story.

Analysis by the Fischer Family Foundation shows that in the Leeds South parliamentary constituency just 63 per cent of children meet the expected reading standard at age 11. In the Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough constituency, the figure is 64 per cent; in Burnley and Peterborough, only 65 per cent.

These are not places failing because of their pupils. These young people are being failed by a system that hasn’t given them the sustained, structured support that early literacy requires.

The good news is that England isn’t starting from scratch.

There are early literacy programmes already running in English primary schools that achieve positive outcomes for pupils, and especially for those who are eligible for free school meals - precisely the children who are too often written off in the debate about white, working-class underachievement.

But these are not currently available in all schools, or for all children who need them.

Poverty is not destiny

What Steubenville proves - and what England must learn - is that poverty is not destiny. Cultural identity and community history matter, but they do not have to predetermine outcomes. The gap facing white, working-class pupils is not inevitable.

We need MPs, and especially those representing our former industrial heartlands, to move beyond warm words.

They should be asking why one in three children in Burnley or Peterborough still leaves primary school unable to read well, when we know exactly what works.

And they should be pushing for long-term investment in evidence-based, whole-school literacy reform, not short-term initiatives that vanish at the next spending round.

The debate about white, working-class underachievement will keep surfacing - as it should.

But unless literacy is put at the heart of the response, it will remain a debate rather than a solution. Steubenville shows us what is possible.

England’s working-class communities deserve nothing less.

Mike Fischer is founder of the Fischer Family Foundation

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