Privilege
The arrant nonsense espoused by Critical Race Theory should be banned from schools
According to a report from the BBC the Education Select Committee have concluded that;
Poorer white children underachieve and have been “let down and neglected”.
The Committee's comments have been reported widely, but is this really news? This is after all, an issue that we have known about for years. As mentioned in my earlier post, Whose Lives Matter, as long ago as 2010 Nick Clegg, the then deputy Prime Minister, produced the report Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: A Strategy for Social Mobility, where it was revealed that 20% of children received free school meals (FSM), and yet this group represented just 1% of Oxbridge students. This disparity affected children across all ethnic groups.
A further report completed for the Department of Education in 2015, Ethnicity, deprivation and educational achievement at age 16 in England, contains the following;
Among those entitled to free school meals (FSM) all ethnic minority groups achieve greater success than White British pupils. In 2013 relative to White British students the odds for Chinese pupils achieving 5 good GCSE's including maths and English (5EM) were 6.9 times greater, for Indian students 3.4 times greater, for Bangladeshi 3.0 times, for White other 1.6 times, for Black Caribbean 1.5 times and even for the lowest achieving minority group, Mixed White & Black Caribbean students, the odds of achieving 5EM were 1.26 times (26%) higher than for White British students.
The latest report from the Education Select Committee simply emphasises the point that children from deprived backgrounds continue to under achieve, that nothing has changed in the last decade. Furthermore, it is also quite apparent that white children from deprived areas are not privileged, anymore than the skin colour of a child from an ethnic background is akin to a disability. The arrant nonsense espoused by Critical Race Theory should immediately be banned from schools, and instead all children, regardless of their ethnic background, should be given the training and encouragement they need to make the very best of their lives.
22nd June 2021