Too many exams, too many pupils let down: Whitehall plans reset of GCSES

Strategy to help failing white working-class boys will be included in plans to rethink policy on exams and training. But how far will leaders be prepared to go?

- Rachel Sylvester

The actor Eddie Marsan is an avid reader who studies complex texts to learn his lines. But when he was growing up on an east London council estate, the first time he picked up a book for pleasure, his father grabbed it and threw it across the room.

"The things that held me back were cultural," he says. "In my experience, for the white working class, because they'd experienced poverty over generations, everything was short term - economically, educationally, morally."

White boys eligible for free school meals, like Marsan was, consistently underperform in education. Only a third in England achieved a grade 4 or above - the equivalent of a pass - in English and maths GCSEs in 2023. This means almost 30,000 failed.

By contrast, 60% of Asian boys and 53% of Black boys on free school meals passed the crucial educational hurdle. Among white working-class girls eligible for free school meals, the figure was 38%. The total rate across all students was 65%.

Only 14% of white British boys on free school meals go on to university compared with 68% of male Chinese pupils from a similar financial background, according to social mobility charity the Sutton Trust.

"The performance of white working-class boys is really worrying," says one senior source at the Department for Education (DfE). "There's something not working. That's a group where it really jumps out."

A strategy for white working-class boys will be included in a forthcoming white paper on schools in England that is also going to set out proposals for reforming special educational needs and disabilities (Send) provision. It is part of what is being described in Whitehall as a "reset" of education policy. The question is: how radical are ministers prepared to be? As thousands of children take their GCSEs, senior Labour figures are agitating for exams at 16 to be either scrapped in their current form or slimmed down.