Council to launch review to improve boys' prospects

Bradford Council is set to bring in measures to tackle underachievement among white working-class children, particularly boys, amid concerns over poor GCSE results, school attendance and future prospects.

The authority voted to carry out a district-wide review, working with schools, employers and community groups to improve mentoring and apprenticeships.

Sally Birch, Executive Member for Children's Services, proposed a motion urging a focus on the "significant" disadvantages faced by young people, in particular in white working-class communities.

She said: "Bradford has known for years that disadvantaged white boys are vulnerable to underachievement. We have the national and local evidence."

At a meeting on Wednesday night, the council voted to "ensure that no young people are left behind".

The motion highlighted that white pupils eligible for free school meals were among Bradford's lowest-achieving groups at GCSE level.

Pointing to factors including family income and employment, parental education, early development and literacy, Birch told colleagues: "A child's background should tell us where support may be needed.

"It should never be allowed to determine where that child's story ends."

The vote passing the motion was not unanimous.

Councillors across parties broadly agreed that children falling behind needed support, but differed over whether the motion should focus on white working-class children or address disadvantage across all backgrounds.

Green Party councillor Anna Watson warned that concentrating on one group could lead to "unhealthy competition between groups of children".

Other speakers stressed the need to tackle root causes like poverty and ensure support reached every child who needed it.

Responding, Birch said: "We can look at one group of children and that's not discriminatory and it's not saying anything negative about others."

Across the wider West Yorkshire, work has already begun to determine why young men disengage from education, and what would help them stay.

The Lads at the Back project, delivered by The Youth Association, trained young men to become researchers and interview their peers.

Recruitment focused on Wakefield and Leeds, and the project heard from almost 200 young men aged 13 to 23, alongside professionals working with them.

Youth worker Nathan Martin said the findings challenged assumptions that boys did not want to learn.

Asked what was driving the particular challenges facing white working-class boys, he said: "It's not necessarily about whiteness being the issue, but the class factor."

He said some boys had lowered ambitions "because no one's ever told them that they could achieve their big goal".

"Young men do want to be in education, but a lot of the barriers that are in place are limiting their experience of education," he said.

Those barriers included mental health difficulties, low motivation and uncertainty about how school or college would help them find work.

Asked what Bradford Council should do next, he said its response should begin with the young people themselves.

"It needs to come from their voices, it needs to come from their ideas," he said.

"Lads want to enjoy education, lads want to be heard, lads want to learn and lads want to be a part of the solution."

The motion to Bradford Council cited various research projects, including the Centre for Social Justice's Lost Boys report, drawing on government data.

The study reported only 35.9% of white British pupils on free school meals achieved grade 4 or above in both English and Maths in 2022/23.

That compared with 71.6% of pupils across all ethnic backgrounds who were not eligible for free school meals.

Among disadvantaged pupils of mixed white and Black Caribbean heritage, meanwhile, the pass rate was 36.9%.

The report also found only 13.7% of disadvantaged white British boys progressed to higher education by age 19.

The issue has been acknowledged under successive governments, with a Commons Education Committee inquiry examining white working-class underachievement in 2021, during the Conservative administration, while Labour's 2026 schools white paper and a subsequent independent inquiry also highlighted poor outcomes among disadvantaged pupils.

Jessica Mellor, of the Great Heights Research School in Elland, which has worked with teachers across West Yorkshire on improving outcomes, said the attainment divide remained "a really stubborn gap".

She said schools should look beyond grades, listen to pupils and identify literacy difficulties early, particularly when children moved from primary to secondary school.

"Boys are not a problem to be fixed," she said, with schools needing to "recognise within our own settings what the barriers and enablers to change actually are".

Her advice to Bradford officials was to set clear priorities, draw on local expertise and track what worked over time, rather than assume one approach would suit every school.

Council chiefs will write to the secretary of state for education, urging the government to make tackling educational disadvantage a national priority.

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