The Forgotten Report Analysis Part 2: The Extent of the Issue & Influence of Place

 If you haven't already...

If you're a first time visitor here, hello! I'm currently engaged in action & research on the hidden issue of Cultural Poverty found in our education system. If you don't know what Cultural Poverty (Or C.P as all the cool kids are calling it) is, go and check out my explainer blog here.

This blog is the second part of a multi-part series that is exploring the House of Commons Education Select Committees' report entitled "The Forgotten: How white working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it". I've already tackled a few elements of it and analysed the context of this report in the previous blog post so go and read it here before you carry on, please & thank you. 

Focus areas of Part 2

I'll be analysing the relationship of two sections in this blog:

Access to cultural wealth is limited

1. The extent of the achievement gap for disadvantaged White pupils, found on pages 18-22 of the report

&

2. The Influence of Place, pages 24-31

What I'm really trying to do here is take pertinent information from these sections and analyse them through the lens of cultural poverty, rather than analysing the report through more general metric.

1. Mind the Gap

This chart shows 9-4, rather than 
"strong pass" 5

It's hard to really pull data from this spreadsheet on page 18/19 that isn't racially angled. I mean, that was the point of the article title change after all, to make this more of a divisive topic than it needed to be. 

What it did identify to me is that this report links the reception of free school meals with cultural poverty pretty early on and as I've said before, there isn't always a direct link between food poverty and cultural poverty. Their metric also considers a grade 5 to be a strong pass in English/Maths, when in fact a 4 is considered a pass. 

Where is does link into C.P is on page 20/21, where a statement from the previous Edu-Select Committee raised concerns on how learners who lack in cultural aspects do not achieve as well as those who do. They also mention how a lack of linguistics contribute towards C.P.

Here, an early solution presents itself. 

Literature is clearly a driving factor in opening up cultural experiences for low cost from a young age. Are our educational institutions doing enough to promote literacy, contributing to a good vocabulary and "worldly" understanding?

Points 44 and 45 on page 23 talk about how a longer school day, extra enrichment activities must all have a focus on improving mental health in learners. With the evidence I have, I cannot see a direct link between the two as mental health as a term is far too broad to really comment on. 

Will Cultural Enrichment reduce anxiety? Yes! Travel and experiences help a person to deal with the outside world! I have known students who won't even leave the town because they are afraid to do so. 

The question here is: If you're going to give them longer days and enrichment activities, are you going to give us the funding and frameworks to deliver it? 

If you want any advice, Government-Person-Who-Reads-This-Blog, do drop me a line. Happy to project manage it!

Where we learn
matters

2. The Importance of Place 

Finally, we start seeing from the get-go some very telling quotes that call out the spread of C.P. The first, taken from page 24 part 47, talks about how that there is no exact defined cause and effect of C.P but we do know that a lack of community centres, adult skills education and real/digital experiences outside of the immediate area causes cultural poverty. 

It does go on to mention that the reason white working class families tend to be the most impacted by a lack of culture is that by comparison, many ethnic minorities have a greater family/community unit with clear defined heritage.

Let's just stop there, shall we and examine why that is?

Ethnic minorities are just that, a minority and there exist few publicly funded initiatives to push forward greater culture sharing initiatives. I have been personally blessed with good relations with my local Bangladeshi community due to the sheer scale of community meal events they hold in my area. This effort comes from them, rather than from government. 

So rather than holding up the "Poor white people with no culture how sad." banner here, why not attack the power structures that refuse to work against integrating communities together?

Alright, back to it...

The issue, according to this report, is most pronounced in rural areas. North East, West, South West- it's these places most effected by C.P and from my direct experience I can agree. The report spends a few pages (26-29) throwing statistics that back this up. I would argue the reason London has greater social capital is because it's London. Museums, free/cheap transport, foreign culture is all there for students. 

I didn't know until recently that school trips can use TfL (Transport for London) services for FREE. Meanwhile up here in the North East if I want to take students to York for the day I'll be shelling out £20 a ticket. No wonder learners are culturally poor when travel is restricted for the educational establishments that serve them.

The report states following this that there will be more money pledged to develop community programs in the worst hit areas. What we need is:

• Trips Away: Young people need to see the wider world from a young age, frequently and fully. Cities, Market Towns, Heritage Sites, Forest Walks, Mountain Hikes. Yes, we all know the Duke of Edinburgh Award exists for this but you try getting the remission to run it in our cash strapped schools and colleges!

• Life & Family Support: Broken homes impact young people. Obvious statement. Give single parents and dispossessed children actual places to go for help, advice and community. Many children are born into a family unaware of how life is going to go. Let's end that.

• Career Advice (Career, not just work): Heritage of profession is dying. Let's celebrate what we had but work towards new growth areas. Career prospects need to be given the spotlight for young people who may not be aware what jobs are even out there. I can't accept a person wanting to just work in their dads kebab shop for the rest of their life cash in hand for example. How do we grow as a people if we accept that?

Conclusive Thoughts

These sections highlighted the problem: Cultural Poverty is growing and initiatives to solve it don't bite down deep enough. Playing the race card, as this report has done, is focused in the negative whereas they could have framed it in the positive. 

More experiences for our young people will begin to raise them up and out of Cultural Poverty.