Why are white children doing worst at GCSEs?

That’s the trouble of trying to measure everything through the metric of race: sooner or later you will arrive at a situation very different from that which you intended. Namely, that in some cases it is white people who appear to be at some kind of disadvantage. At least Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is not trying to cover up the glaring disparity in GCSE results between ethnic groups. She has admitted that white working-class children are underperforming and suggests that the state has ‘failed them’. But she doesn’t really go on to ask herself how or why.

What is it about being white, for example, that makes pupils underperform in Maths and English? Last year, 63.7 per cent of white pupils achieved a grade 4 pass or above in both subjects, compared with 65.0 per cent of black p