\n<\/p>\n
White pupils from low-income families in England start secondary school with far lower levels of enthusiasm or effort than other ethnic groups, according to new research that may partly explain differences in academic results and behaviour.<\/p>\n
Both girls and boys from lower-income white families reported weak levels of engagement from year 7 onwards. Girls were less likely to enjoy being at school while the boys made less effort with their school work.<\/p>\n
Only half of low-income white children said they worked hard at school, compared with about 70% of disadvantaged pupils of south Asian ethnicity.<\/p>\n
The study measured pupils\u2019 levels of engagement in questionnaires taken by children at more than 120 schools, which tested response to statements such as \u201cI don\u2019t feel bored at school\u201d and \u201cWhat I learn at school will help me in the future\u201d.<\/p>\n
Prof John Jerrim of University College London\u2019s social research institute, who conducted the study, said the results revealed a difficult problem for policymakers at a time when improving education for white working class children was high on the political agenda.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat you do see is that even on entry to secondary school, white working-class pupils tend to have lower levels of various measures of school engagement than other groups, both more advantaged groups and pupils of different ethnicity,\u201d Jerrim said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s different across boys and girls. Girls struggle more with certain aspects such as peer relationships and enjoyment of school, whereas among white working-class boys, it\u2019s more around valuing school and effort.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the questions we asked is about self-reported effort and that\u2019s probably the most interesting part where white working-class pupils stick out. If you ask them \u2018how much effort are you putting into school?\u2019, they really stand out from other groups in a bad way, and it\u2019s because they are not properly engaged.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Last month Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, said that \u201cthe lack of progress for children from white working-class backgrounds is particularly concerning\u201d, and promised to tackle it in the forthcoming white paper.<\/p>\n But Jerrim said that changing the group\u2019s attitudes would be a \u201clong-term slog\u201d, and added: \u201cThis is a hard nut to crack. It\u2019s likely to involve a lot of investment from an early age, following through these young people\u2019s lives. A big message we all need to take away is that this isn\u2019t going to change quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n The study also found that pupil engagement with school declined over time across most groups, and Jerrim noted that black pupils had particularly poor relationships with their teachers compared with other groups.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" White pupils from low-income families in England start secondary school with far lower levels of enthusiasm or effort than other ethnic groups, according to new research that may partly explain differences in academic results and behaviour. Both girls and boys from lower-income white families reported weak levels of engagement from year 7 onwards. Girls were<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[311,14558,14557,4873,583,293,334,588,2168],"class_list":{"0":"post-23900","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-england","9":"tag-enthusiasm","10":"tag-lowest","11":"tag-lowincome","12":"tag-pupils","13":"tag-report","14":"tag-school","15":"tag-schools","16":"tag-white"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}