White working-class children are being failed by education and everyone has forgotten about it. 

This must be true, because Tuesday’s urgent report on the education progress of white working-class children is officially titled The Forgotten, so certain are the report’s authors of this fundamental fact. 

They were forgotten, the report tells us, when the last report on the subject came out in 2014. They were forgotten in reports issued in both 2008 and 2013 by Ofsted.

Absolutely no one was paying attention in 2013 when the universities minister suggested that white working-class boys should be targeted and recruited as if they were disadvantaged ethnic minorities, and there was absolute silence when the Conservative party’s State of the Nation - Educational Failings report focused on white working-class children in 2006.

The word they’re looking for isn’t “forgotten”. It’s ignored. 

Has the phrase ‘white privilege’ really affected working-class pupils in schools? 

If we are to believe recommendations four and five of the latest report, the explanation for decades of neglect is clear: the education of white working-class children is being ignored because of the existence of the words “white privilege” - a phrase coined by US scholar Peggy McIntosh in the 1980s, which entered common UK circulation roughly 18 months ago. 

Though the report’s authors offer no evidence that any school in the country has ever used this phrase, its terrifying power is apparently so great that it has wrought total devastation on vast swathes of the nation. White working-class children are “casualties of the culture war” waged by “our woke elites”. “Wokeism” has “crushed the working class”, while “woke dogma” has “brainwashed” children. 

“Systemic neglect” of poor white children, cry the people last seen denying the existence of systemic bias, “may” have been caused by “woke terminology”.
If it seems to you that the word “may” is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting there, you are not alone.

Maybe “wokeism” and the phrase “white privilege” have created a situation in which the poorest Britons leave school with the fewest GCSEs, the lowest rate of educational progress, and the least chance of accessing level 6 qualifications. Or maybe, as the report itself suggests, this is the deliberate product of decades of educational design.

Let us consider the evidence. Did critical race theory travel back in time and force my white working-class grandfather to leave school at 14? No? Well then, maybe Black Lives Matter - whose devilishly clever Marxist ways should never be underestimated - set up the tripartite system of education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 1945, which streamed working-class children into technical education and shut them out from academic qualifications and futures. 

Don’t like that explanation? Perhaps “wokeism” invented the distinction between CSEs and O levels and allowed nearly half of all young people to leave school in 1969 with no graded qualifications whatsoever. 

Perhaps the power of wokeism is, in fact, so great that it invented the entire, 1,000-year-old structure of the class system of the United Kingdom. It probably invented feudalism while it was at it, too. Just to be mean.

Death by a million education cuts

The “white privilege” section of the report has done exactly what it was precision-designed to do: make sure that white working-class children are ignored. Again. Lob an easy culture-war hand grenade into the mix, and the rest of the report will get conveniently lost in the resulting fog of war and words. 

And there are crucial critiques about the current trends in education being raised behind that smoke screen, the most staggering of which is the insistent suggestion that all the educational reforms of the Michael Gove era and beyond have done precisely nothing. EBacc? Nothing. Knowledge-rich curriculum? Nothing. 

Also lost in the tabloid confusion: dramatic cuts to pupil premium funding, the underfunding of catch-up plans, the closure of Sure Start centres, and all the rest of the death by a million cuts that has been slowly enacted upon education in the name of austerity.

Take a glance at the smoking ruins of the media hellscape created by this report, and one thing becomes very clear. The phrase “white privilege” has indeed allowed the educational attainment of white working-class children to be forgotten. Again. Because all anyone is talking about is the phrase “white privilege”. 

And that, it seems, is exactly the distraction intended to make us look away from decades of institutional neglect and failed reforms.

Tabitha McIntosh is an English teacher and key stage 5 manager at a comprehensive school in outer London. She tweets as @TabitaSurge