Stephen Manderson, better known as Professor Green, grew up on an East London council estate where he regularly skipped school, dismissed the suggestion he apply for a scholarship to a prestigious independent school, and never dreamt of university despite having been identified by his teachers as an intelligent child.
This is the everyday reality for white working-class boys, Green reveals in his Channel 4 documentary, Working Class White Men, which follows the lives of six young white men from deprived backgrounds over a six-month period. The documentary aims to uncover the challenges faced by these young men, in their education, family life, and within wider society.
Green draws attention to the fact that most young men from poor white communities fail to reach their educational potential. They get the poorest GCSE results and are the least likely to go to university. A report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies revealed that only 12% of white British children from working class households go on to higher education, compared to 53% of black, 29% of Afro-Carribbean, 53% of Indian, and 65% of Chinese children from the same socio-economic background.
Theresa May acknowledged the issue in her first speech as Prime Minister in July 2016, “If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else in Britain to go to university.” Yet, this is not an easy problem to fix and getting more working-class white men into university is far from a simple task.
Firstly, university is expensive beyond belief. With tuition fees soaring and most students graduating £50,000 in debt, it’s no wonder that children from poorer backgrounds can’t see themselves in higher education. Green told theGuardian: ‘It’s easy to see why people don’t push their kids into it. Why would you put yourself in that kind of debt? Putting yourself into £50,000 worth of debt – explain that to someone who does not have £1,000. It’s so off-putting.’
But that’s the obvious deterrent. Green explains that the disengagement of working class white boys with their own education runs deep. ‘People have become more and more disengaged. People have fewer aspirations. From the areas I went to for the documentary, there seems to be a real lack of drive and belief in them being able to achieve anything, and there’s an acceptance of that.’
Green suggests that more support needs to be offered to these young men and their families to encourage ambition and the belief that education can actually do something for them: ‘For middle-class families, your education is your life. For working-class families, in some instances school is just school. You are not expected to do very well. You are expected to get out and do a job and earn. People have to be encouraged from early on to engage with education and think it’s for them.’
A stressful home environment can also contribute to a lack of engagement with education. For children from deprived backgrounds, education is often the least of their worries. In an interview with Channel 4 Green reveals how the stresses of working class life and anxieties about money can have a deeply traumatic effect on young people. ‘[B]eing poor creates stress. There was a lot of screaming and shouting in my household growing up, as there was in many households on my estate, just because of the situations families found themselves in. And it stays with you as a kid, it doesn’t just go away. It’s not something that disappears over time, it’s always in you. Those stresses and those anxieties still exist within me now.’
Importantly, Green’s documentary uncovers society’s neglect of these young working class white men, which has left this social group feeling abandoned and angry. And it points out a social issue that needs addressing for these young men to even stand a chance of achieving their potential.
Working Class White Men, a two-part documentary, starts on Channel 4 on Tuesday 9 January at 10pm.
Liked this? You might also be interested in:
We're Living In A New Class System And Its Depressing As Hell
Follow Annie Simon on Twitter @annieasimon
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.