The edition is sponsored by Charles Stanley, one of the UK's leading wealth managers, providing

bespoke investment management and financial advice. Find out more at charles dash stanley.com.

Hello and welcome to the edition podcast from The Spectator. I'm Cindy Yu. This week, as school breaks for the summer, I take a look at how white working class boys are actually doing the least well in school. And I also speak to two people who have been cancelled about where this tendency is going. And at the very end, Harry Mount, editor of the oldie, tells me about

his office romance. First up, it's not an argument commonly heard, but looking at the statistics,

as Christopher Snowden from the IEA, has done for this week's cover piece, a rather dramatic picture

emerges of how white

working class students, especially boys, do so much worse in school than BAME communities.

Only 17% of white British pupils eligible for free school meals achieve a strong pass in English

and maths, whereas students from Bangladeshi, black African and Indian backgrounds

in the same category are more than twice as likely to do so. This is also an effect that you see

in university admission and on other stages of education. So are the white working class being left

behind in his education? Christopher Snowden joins me down the line now, together with Mary Kernock Cook, the former head of UKAS.

So Christopher, can you tell us about what it is that white working class boys are doing, or rather not doing?

Well, they're falling further and further behind in terms of educational qualifications and going to university,

falling behind girls, falling behind other ethnic groups,

and the gap seems to be getting wider. And this is occasionally noted. Sometimes when the

GCSE results come out, it might get a mention somewhere in the news article, but nothing ever seems to

be done about it, nothing ever seems to be attempted. We don't have the kind of targets at

university that we do for BME, ME people, for example. So Oxford University only a couple couple of weeks ago, was boasting about how it had

been making steady progress. It said steady progress in its efforts to make its campuses more

representative of wider society. And that was on the back of their most recent intake of students, British students, not foreign students, but British students,

22% came from a black or ethnic minority background, which is great, but that's actually significantly above the proportion of black or ethnic minority people of that age in Britain.

...