White students who are left behind: the importance of place

These questions, and my attempts to answer them at the Education Select Committee earlier this month, made me think about Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. ‘I’m me and nobody else,’ he says. ‘Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not.’

I might expect to hear this if I use the category ‘working–class’, given the complex mix of working and living patterns, income and wealth that now characterise English society. Or if I focus on students receiving free school meals, given the high rates of higher education entry by some in this group.

My dad was the same age as Seaton – 21 at the time of the 1960 film adaptation – and he loved the character, even though (perhaps because) his choices were quite different. While Seaton was working on the production line of the Raleigh factory in Nottingham, he was among those using education – and what Seaton calls the ‘propaganda’ from employers, churches, sports clubs and unions – to move on, in his case from school in Oldham to university in Hull.

Seaton’s attitude to hard work and merit provides a healthy challenge to any nostalgia you may be feeling for the ‘golden’ three decades of education-based social mobility following the Second World War, or indeed connections you may be making with your own position. So do the facts about higher education then and now. In the early 1960s, at the time of the Robbins review, there were around 200,000 full-time students in higher education, well under 10 per cent of the age cohort.

As a recent history of mass education in Britain has identified, there was already demand at this point from all types of families for their children to go on to higher education. A survey of 1962 found that ‘more than 80 per cent of working-class and middle-class parents wanted university for their children.’ These ambitions, coupled with successive governments’ belief in graduate human capital, has propelled growth to the level of 2 million students and around 50 per cent of the cohort in higher education today.

But some people and places have not benefited from this. As you can see below, the rate of progression into higher education for white British students who are eligible for free school meals is only 16 per cent. This compares with rates of 47 to 73 per cent for Asian students on free school meals and 32 to 59 per cent for black students in this category.

Proportion of pupils in England starting higher education by age 19 in 2018-19

Source: Department for Education widening participation in higher education.

Free school meal entitlement gives us a proxy for relative poverty and this is an important factor for educational attainment and progression. As we have seen during the pandemic, the different levels of resources available for learning between families and schools have a profound effect on the ability to learn. The gap between the entry rates for white British students who are and are not eligible for free school meals is particularly large, at 25 percentage points.

But if you really want to understand the issue concerning the Select Committee, you need also to consider the influence of place. For white students who receive free school meals in London, the entry rate has pulled away from that in other parts of the country, and is now nearly eight percentage points higher than any other region (see below). In London, less than half of the population is white, compared with 80 per cent across England as a whole.

Proportion of white FSM pupils in England starting higher education by age 19 by region

Source: Department for Education widening participation in higher education.

Returning to Nottingham, every postcode in the constituency of Nottingham North is in a low-participation neighbourhood. The same applies in Great Yarmouth, though the history and circumstances of these places are quite different. Virtually all of the lowest-participation neighbourhoods across England are in places like these: formerly industrial towns and cities across the north and midlands, or coastal towns.

Parliamentary constituencies with the highest proportion of postcodes in neighbourhoods with low higher education participation

Note: ‘POLAR’ = ‘Participation of Local Areas’

Using a new Associations Between Characteristics (ABCs) measure, the Office for Students (OfS) is identifying how the combination of factors such as race, poverty and place, together with other important influences such as gender, affects the likelihood of progression into higher education. Through this work, we have identified that 90 per cent of the students in the lowest-participation quintile using this measure are white British, and have either received free school meals or grown up in a low-participation neighbourhood (see data note below). These are the people and places that have been left behind. During 2021, we will be exploring how this new measure can improve support for the most underrepresented groups of students, which is regulated through the access and participation plans universities and colleges agree with the OfS.

Why are we seeing these patterns? The most important ingredient for higher education participation is the level of attainment in school. In areas where there are lower levels of attainment, you will often find higher levels of unemployment, ill health and poor housing, and lower household income.

But it is the experience across successive generations that perhaps distinguishes these communities from those with higher proportions of ethnic minorities, as in London. The expansion of educational opportunities, and the belief that equality of opportunity would flow from this, have not delivered for them. So they are less likely to see education as the way to improve their lives.

Research suggests that this is not about low aspirations or wanting any less for children; it is about expectations – a realistic assessment of the barriers to getting on. Schools can do a lot to shift expectations, but as recent focus groups have shown, people in left-behind towns feel the decline of local institutions and civic engagement – the ‘propaganda’ that used to help shape identity and ambitions.

The Social Mobility Commission has identified the need to join up educational interventions with other measures to improve local prosperity and it is now better placed to drive this across government through the Cabinet Office. As I have argued elsewhere, universities and colleges can bring this together in their local areas through the breadth of their subject interests, their relationships with businesses and public services, and their bridging of education and skills with research and development. This equips them to create pathways through all levels of education, both full-time and while in work, and for adults as well as young people.

The OfS-funded Uni Connect programme, which funds 29 partnerships of universities, colleges and local agencies across the country, supports this by engaging not only with pupils in schools and colleges, but also their parents.

Arthur Seaton figured in a sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 2001, but Alan Sillitoe died in 2010, so we can’t know what happened to him. Given his age, I would like to think that he has just been given a coronavirus vaccine, perhaps at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. He could then head over to the site of his old workplace and meet his grandchildren there, on the university campus that replaced it.