Sophia Waugh reflects on underachieving white working class students, and says they aren't helped by their parents
I will soon be handed my class lists for the next academic year and will cast my eye over them, looking for clues to the future. Juliet might well ask, ‘What’s in a name?’ – but she did not live long enough to become a teacher. Had she done so, she’d have had a good idea. I look down my lists and smile with joy at every Eastern European or African surname I come across. These are the children we all want to teach. Twenty-five years ago, when I began my teaching career, there was one mixed-race child in the school of more than a thousand pupils. In the same town, where I’m now at a different school, the picture is very different. We are now properly ethnically diverse. We have children from Romania, Poland, Syria, Nigeria, Ghana, the Philippines, Morocco, India and Moldova, to name but a few. We...
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