England’s white working-class inquiry: the disadvantage is familiar, the structure that sorts it is not…

An inquiry into white working-class underachievement in England published its report this week. Northern Ireland will be tempted to read it as a study of its own working-class Protestant boys. The disadvantage transfers, the category does not, and the structure that distributes it here is one that the English inquiry was not designed to confront.

The Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes, commissioned by the Star Academies, supported by the Department for Education and chaired by Sir Hamid Patel and Baroness Estelle Morris, sets out figures that are by now familiar in England: 36% of White British pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) achieve grade 4 or above in English and maths GCSEs, compared with 72% of non-FSM pupils, with the gap already visible by age five and widening through childhood, particularly at transitions. The inquiry’s framing is unambiguous. This is, in its account, a disadvantage of the white working class: an ethnically marked group that the education system fails at every stage.

Why the category does not transfer

The inquiry’s analytical force in England depends on ethnicity: a White British FSM pupil fares worse than FSM pupils from most other ethnic groups, and that comparison structures the whole report. In statistical practice, the term “white working class” is used to mean White British and FSM, a workable measure of low income but not a sociological classification of class. The comparison has little analytical purchase here, where the 2021 census recorded 96.6% of the population as white. Where almost everyone is white, whiteness cannot pick out a disadvantaged group. The dominant divide in Northern Ireland is socio-economic; community background, gender, place and school type then shape how that disadvantage is distributed rather than replacing it as the principal axis. The census records 45.7% of the population with a Catholic background and 43.5% with a Protestant and Other Christian background, including Christian-related backgrounds, but a religious headcount does not show where educational disadvantage falls.

The substitution that suggests itself, “Protestant working-class boys” for “white working class”, fails for a different reason, and our own evidence has already shown why. When the Executive established the Expert Panel on Educational Underachievement under New Decade, New Approach, its remit was to examine the links between persistent underachievement and socio-economic background, with particular consideration of working-class Protestant boys. The panel’s 2021 report, A Fair Start, set that concern within a wider poverty-related gap: Protestant boys eligible for free school meals (FSME) recorded a lower attainment rate than their Catholic counterparts, though more Catholic FSME boys fell short of the benchmark in absolute terms, and the much larger disparities throughout were between FSME pupils and the rest. Working-class girls share many of the same disadvantages. A category fixed to a single community and a single sex describes fewer children than the problem contains; the English label, for its part, at least covers FSM pupils of both sexes.

What does transfer

The evidence beneath the inquiry’s label is what carries over. Its durable findings concern the pattern of disadvantage rather than the ethnicity of the pupils it affects: gaps emerge early, widen at the transitions between phases, and resist the two explanations successive governments have reached for, that the problem reduces to income and that it reflects a deficit of aspiration in families. The English evidence is precise on the first point. The House of Commons Education Committee found in 2021 that fewer than 18% of White British FSM pupils achieved a strong pass in English and maths in 2019, against 22.5% of disadvantaged pupils overall. The same poverty proxy produces unequal outcomes, and that is what makes the English research worth reading here. The transferable lesson is therefore not that Northern Ireland reproduces the same ethnic ranking, but that the effects of poverty here are shaped by community background, gender, place and school structure.

Selection as the structural difference

Academic selection at eleven is not the organising principle of England’s national school system, which remains predominantly comprehensive even where grammar schools survive. In Northern Ireland, it is an institutionalised transition between grammar and non-grammar sectors. The previous article in this series set out how need and disadvantage are concentrated together in the non-grammar sector, and how the transfer process channels them there. The inquiry recognises institutional sorting: it recommends widening access to the highest-performing schools precisely because their intakes are far less disadvantaged than the communities around them. But that recognises uneven admissions within a common system, whereas Northern Ireland operates a transfer structure that concentrates disadvantage in one sector. The 2024/25 figures make the scale plain: FSME pupils were 11.3% of grammar enrolments against 30.8% in non-grammars, and 78.4% of the FSME Year 12 pupils included in performance returns attended non-grammar schools. A report written for a predominantly comprehensive system can register unequal admissions; it has no need to address a structure that sorts children between sectors at eleven.

The diagnosis we already had

The deeper lesson has little to do with England’s findings, many of which are familiar here. Northern Ireland produced its own costed action plan in 2021: A Fair Start set out 47 actions across eight areas; the Executive endorsed it, and the panel costed delivery at £180 million over five years. In 2023/24, the Department of Education allocated £2.5 million towards it, against the roughly £21 million the plan had profiled for that year. The Northern Irish difficulty has never been the absence of a diagnosis, since inquiry after inquiry has reached the same conclusions for decades. It is that we name the group, endorse the plan, and decline to fund it at anything approaching the scale its authors thought necessary, while the public argument stays fixed on which community’s boys are meant.

Borrow the evidence, not the label

None of this is an argument against learning from the inquiry. The English approach cannot simply be copied: its categories do not fit, its instruments are not ours, and its recommendations are addressed to a department that does not run our schools. But its evidence corroborates findings already reached here at a moment when ours has gone quiet, and its catalogue of interventions in the early years, at transitions, and in the rebuilding of vocational and tertiary routes is worth adapting, once separated from the English system that would deliver it. The soundest way to borrow is to use FSM eligibility as the closest common measure, because it transfers where identity labels cannot, and then disaggregate it by the factors that pattern disadvantage here: community background, gender, and grammar or non-grammar placement. That is what A Fair Start did when it treated the particular difficulties of Protestant working-class boys as one part of a wider poverty-related attainment gap affecting children in both communities. Northern Ireland does not need another diagnosis; it needs to fund the one it has and to confront the selective structure through which disadvantage is concentrated.

This is the fourteenth article in a series examining educational governance in Northern Ireland. Previous articles: ‘The Transformation Majority That Doesn’t Count’ (I); ‘It’s Not Just Protestant Schools’ (II); ‘Take Down the Hurdles’ (III); ‘The Irony of Integration’ (IV); ‘Time to Flip the Switch’ (V); ‘Beyond Indoctrination’ (VI); ‘Eight Per Cent After Forty Years’ (VII); ‘Good in Parts’ (VIII); ‘Gone Girls’ (IX); ‘New Wine, Old Wineskins’ (X); ‘Epistle to the Parents: RE Withdrawal’ (XI); ‘After JR87, the question is not how parents withdraw, it is why they need to’ (XII); ‘Built Into the Structure: SEN and the School System’ (XIII).

Sources: Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes (2026), commissioned by Star Academies; House of Commons Education Committee (2021) The Forgotten: How White Working-Class Pupils Have Been Let Down, and How to Change It; Expert Panel on Educational Underachievement in Northern Ireland (2021) A Fair Start: Final Report and Action Plan; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (2022), Census 2021 main statistics: ethnic group, and religion or religion brought up in; Northern Ireland Assembly Research and Information Service (2025), briefing on educational underachievement in Northern Ireland, for the 2023/24 allocation against the panel’s costing; Department of Education (2026) Year 12 and Year 14 Examination Performance at Post-Primary Schools in Northern Ireland 2024/25, for free-school-meal enrolment by sector; Gallagher, T. and Smith, A. (2000) The Effects of the Selective System of Secondary Education in Northern Ireland.