Gaby Hinsliff spoke to a few people in Hull and thinks she now knows exactly why white working-class boys don’t get to university (Our boys need to be rescued, and it’ll take a new kind of role model, 18 November). It’s all their fault, of course, for not valuing education and “our” fault for colluding with them. She feels no shame in casually labelling physically active four-year-olds in reception as “at risk”.
As a teacher I taught lots of lovely exuberant boys – and girls – the social skills needed to learn successfully in a classroom. I also taught lots of quiet compliant children that being first at the top of the climbing frame can be fun – and useful – too.
Schools now value more the things learned while sitting still. Perhaps that’s why we have shortages of engineers and scientists who begin with practical activities and observation, before turning to theory.
White working-class boys should, of course, be given every opportunity and encouragement to get to university if they want to. A Guardian journalist could look at educational research in this area and come up with a plan.
Perhaps we should also give middle-class children the opportunity to be, for example, roofers, plumbers and chefs – like one of my middle-class sons – and pay them appropriately well for doing those jobs we all need to be done.
Pauline Michell
Bristol
• I agree with Arifa Akbar that the British publishing world is “stubbornly white and middle-class” (Britain is still dreaming in white, 18 November). I can also see that this exclusivity might help to turn ethnic minority children off reading altogether. But how many of Ms Akbar’s estimated 1,000 literary debuts in 2016 reflected the experiences of those “poor white boys who lag behind” ethnic minority boys in our schools, as described by Gaby Hinsliff in another article in the same day’s Guardian? My hunch is not many.
More damningly, with so many of those ill-served white boys now finding education such a turn-off, they are unlikely to “see themselves in the books they read”, since they lack the motivation or capacity to read anything at all.
Haydn Middleton
Oxford
• Gaby Hinsliff mistakes a symptom for the cause of poor white boys failing in school. As a teacher, I recognise that “mucking around” is a way boys save face when humiliated – sometimes continually, throughout childhood – by failing at a curriculum designed for an academic minority.
To see how things might be different, take the Netherlands, where children are offered a choice of respected secondary education tracks that enable them to develop technical skills and find secure and well-paid employment. My Dutch relatives, who loved their educations, were established as a hairdresser and an IT technician in recent years.
(For research backing my arguments, see, for example, the report into Quality and Equity of Schooling in Scotland by an international OECD team from 2007.)
When will progressive parties in the UK ever have the courage to grasp the nettle of academic bias in the school curriculum that was intentionally designed – in Victorian times – to reproduce inequality?
Mark Merrell
Edinburgh
• It will be very difficult for education to play its full part in motivating and encouraging young boys to achieve within the current framework. What is needed is a broad curriculum designed to develop the skills, talents and aptitudes of all school students, not the deeply reactionary Ebacc, with its echoes of the 19th-century public school curriculum and the school certificate abandoned in the 1940s.
Such a restrictive approach to secondary education is unlikely to be a real motivator for more than a few. More a burden to be endured by many, even of those who succeed under the current regime.
Gaby Hinsliff seems more concerned with forcing children into an ill-fitting mould than in finding a better fit for all. Her message seems to be knuckle down now or life will get even worse in future. Hardly a recommendation, let alone a motivator. The secondary curriculum is an ill-fitting garment. Bespoke tailoring is needed.
Roy Boffy
Sutton Coldfield
• No, Britain does not suffer from a “deep social mobility problem” (Ministers to focus on struggling families, 19 November). If households are struggling to cope on incomes of £12,000, the answer is not that they should aspire to be more middle class. It is that it should be possible to work at a working-class job and still make enough to live a reasonable life with.
Being working class doesn’t need to be escaped from, it needs to be made a more viable option again.
Sylvia Rose
Morleigh, Devon
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