The university system doesn’t work for white working-class kids – here’s how we can fix it

I was the first person in my entire extended family to go to university. Conversations with relatives went like this: I was told about tuition fee debt, reminded that some trades paid better than graduate schemes, and, most destructively, it was strongly implied that university was for other people. Not for people like us. Not for working-class people. At no point were the joy and opportunity that might come from breaking out of the lives we lived, explained, discussed, or encouraged.

A lot of my family’s reaction made sense. The system can feel rigged against working-class people – because to some extent it is. Children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds start school 4.5 months behind and then go on to finish school 18.1 months adrift of their more affluent peers. And that’s before we get to the 7 per cent who are privately educated in our country yet still disproportionately dominate all the top jobs and influential positions.

Attitudes need to change. When I won a scholarship that paid the fees for my Masters degree and gave me £5,000 living costs, rather than encourage me to accept, my parents urged me to turn it down and go full time at the pub where I was working as an undergraduate. They believed that earning £15,000 a year pulling pints was far better than a debt-free post-graduate degree. For some, this might be right. But in most cases, this lack of aspiration in white working-class communities holds young people back when we should be pushing them forward.