The media are reporting that Winchester and Dulwich Colleges
have rejected an offer of an endowment that would provide a scholarship for a
white working class boy (not a girl apparently) to attend one of these elite
public schools. The reported reason for
the rejection is that the schools do not want to discriminate on grounds of
race. While they each may have had the
best of intentions, both the donor and the schools have got it wrong.
Racial discrimination
Direct discrimination on grounds
of race is of course illegal in most circumstances, and indirect discrimination
is also illegal unless it can be justified on objective, non-racial grounds
(e.g. if the ability to speak and write good English is genuinely an essential
qualification for a job). However, there
are exceptions. Positive discrimination
can sometimes be justified if it is seeking to remedy a disadvantage suffered
by a particular ethnic group. Thus, when
I worked in local authority housing, I was able to reserve trainee posts for
black or Asian candidates on the grounds that these ethnic groups were
under-represented in the workforce, which was otherwise predominantly white and
perceived as unsympathetic to the needs of ethnic minority communities. (The
scheme was called something like “positive action for training in housing” –
acronym PATH).
So the colleges would have been
wrong to reject the donor’s offer without considering whether there was an
objective justification for positive action to remedy an injustice – namely,
the low educational achievement of white working class boys compared with (some
of) their peers in other ethnic groups.
However, this raises other issues.
Educational disadvantage
In the first place, although the
educational achievement of white working class boys lags behind British Indian,
African, Vietnamese and Chinese boys, it is not as retarded as that of Caribbean
boys.
In any case, is the provision of
scholarships for isolated, individual pupils the appropriate remedy? Readers of a certain age may be familiar with
the chapter “Scholarship boy” in Richard Hoggart’s “Uses of Literacy”, where he
describes the problems sometimes encountered by working class boys uprooted
from their local and family environment, their sense of not belonging to any
group, and the effect this has on their future lives. Surely, the answer to social and educational
inequality is not to promote a few “lucky” individuals from a council estate to
a public school, but rather to ensure that all pupils attend schools of
equal esteem where they all receive the education appropriate to their
needs and abilities.
Moreover, although your average “bog
standard comprehensive” (Alastair Campbell's term) may not offer the
educational opportunities of Winchester or Dulwich, it probably would enable an
outstandingly bright or ambitious white working class boy to get into one of
the UK’s 100-odd universities and to make his way in the world. The problem with some (by no means all) bog standard
comprehensives is not so much that they fail the bright, ambitious youngster as
that they fail the majority of his less able white working class fellow students
(including of course the girls).
The reasons behind the
under-achievement of white working class boys are complex. They probably include poverty, absence of books
or lack of space in the home for study, prevalence of lone parent households, parents
who don’t talk to their children or encourage them in their studies, the anti-education
culture of their peer group, lack of jobs to aspire to (to make it worthwhile
to study), lack of role models etc etc.
So scholarships are not the solution.
What should the donor have done?
It is his money of course, but if
he genuinely wants to remedy the injustice of white (and black Caribbean) working class boys and
girls unable to fulfil their potential, perhaps he should consider endowing his
local comprehensive – or even junior school or pre-school nursery, where the pattern
of disadvantage is first established. Local
teachers will know what the real needs are, but examples could include: free
breakfasts and lunches for all pupils (so that they are able to concentrate on
their lessons rather than being distracted by the pangs of hunger); a book fund
and a specialist librarian for the school library (if it still exists); free school trips to local, national and international cultural facilities; specialist teachers and equipment for subjects outside the national curriculum (e.g. music, drama, art).
So the schools gave the wrong
reasons for rejecting the offer. The donor,
however philanthropic his intentions may have been, was wrong to offer a
scholarship that would simply reinforce the fundamental educational injustice
of society: a separate educational system for the wealthy (leading to secure
positions in the universities, the professions, the civil service, the military
and company boardrooms) – contrasted with a different system, of variable and
patchy quality, for the rest.
The educational disadvantage that
the donor presumably was seeking to redress can only really be tackled by
disbanding the public schools and redistributing their resources (and their pupils)
around the state system. Then we might
see a genuine impetus to improve the general standard of state education and an
erosion of the class system that the public schools exist to promote.
© 2019 Robin Paice
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