University ‘inaccessible or irrelevant’ to white working classes

The UK needs to move beyond a higher education system “dominated by the traditional three-year residential degree” and develop more flexible routes, according to an inquiry that found universities “lack relevance” in the lives of white working-class children.

Just 22 per cent of white working-class pupils believe university is “important for getting a good job”, according to polling conducted for an independent inquiry into the educational outcomes of this demographic, while more than half (55 per cent) do not rate their schooling positively for “helping them succeed in the future”.

In comparison, by year 12 and 13, nearly half (44 per cent) of white middle-class children say going to university is “part of being successful”, with 44 per cent of non-white children from the same social class reporting the same.

Overall, 52 per cent of white working-class pupils told researchers that they were likely to attend university, versus 82 per cent of their peers.

The Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes, commissioned by multi-academy trust Star Academies and supported by the Department for Education (DfE), was commissioned because education is not working for white working-class young people “in the way it should”.

Led by former Labour education secretary Estelle Morris and chief executive of Star Academies Hamid Patel, it also found that white working-class children are less likely to feel confident about navigating post-16 and post-18 options.

“Careers guidance was often experienced as generic, too heavily focused on university pathways, and insufficiently connected to local labour markets and employment opportunities,” the researchers write, with parents’ own experiences often compounding this sentiment.

“Parents frequently described their own lives as evidence that success is possible without strong academic qualifications,” the report notes, with communities witnessing a weakening in the belief in education as a “reliable route to success”.

One parent told a focus group in the North East: “Even young people leaving university are often now working on minimum wage in Aldi.”

Another participant, based in Hartlepool, said: “We spend all them years saying do school, college, university…to get nothing.”

In response, the inquiry is recommending several interventions for education providers and for policymakers.

Recommendations reflect the “scale of the challenge”, with the key ask of the tertiary education sector being that it moves towards a “more coherent and flexible” system.

“Government and higher education providers should move beyond a system dominated by the traditional three-year residential degree and expand more flexible routes that allow young people to combine work and study over time,” the report urges.

It recommends that universities be incentivised to align their provision more closely with local labour markets and to collaborate with further education colleges to do so.

It also argues that young people should not feel they have to leave home or take on “excessive financial risk” to access high-quality higher education.

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has welcomed the report as a “really important piece of work”, while the social mobility charity Sutton Trust said it “lays bare the cost of leaving whole communities behind”.

Sutton Trust chief executive Nick Harrison said: “Ultimately, this isn’t about ethnicity in isolation. It’s about the interaction between disadvantage and place, entrenched poverty, communities that have been left behind, and too few routes to good jobs and better lives.”

He added: “Until every young person has a genuine chance to fulfil their potential, Britain will continue to waste talent on a scale our economy simply cannot afford, while deepening the sense among many communities that the country no longer works for people like them.”

georgia.luckhurst@timeshighereducation.com