The school system is failing working class children, who are subjected to a regime of “teaching to the test”, harsh discipline, and a narrow, fact-driven curriculum. This leaves little room for creativity, critical thinking or self-expression – and leads to worrying levels of alienation, writes Diane Reay. What can be done?

A tsunami of unhappiness is sweeping over British schools. According to international research surrounding children and young people’s sense of well-being in school, the UK was ranked 24^th out of the 29 richest countries. While the research did not look at social class differences among British children, The Children’s Society found that the UK was the European country with the largest gap in average life satisfaction between the 25% most advantaged and the 25% most disadvantaged 15-year-olds. Children and young people in the UK are generally unhappy at school but it is working class pupils who are the most unhappy.

My book, Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Class (Policy Press, 2025) examines why schools continue to fail working class children, neglecting to provide them with either a meaningful education or the opportunity to realise their potential. I draw on my own extensive research going back over 30 years of researching in English schools, bolstered by interviews I conducted with pupils and teachers in 2022 and 2023, as well as contemporary research which reveals the depth of unhappiness caused by being labelled a failure by our remorseless testing regime or by being placed in the bottom sets.

Two-tier teaching: “novels and poetry” vs “basic literacy worksheets”

Social class attainment gaps open up early in school and, I would argue, are exacerbated by the current curriculum and assessment system. One of the graphs – Figure 5 – in the Government’s Curriculum and Assessment review interim report shows that since 2020 these gaps are widening, leaving behind a large minority of learners who struggle to succeed in an educational system which is not working for them. 

Yet the report also concluded that the existing assessment system was broadly working well, including the phonics screening check, the multiplication tables check, and national tests at the end of the key stage two.

Much of the recent empirical data tells a very different story, however – especially if we focus on children’s wellbeing. The Independent Commission on Assessment in Primary Education found that 93% of teachers and 82% of parents were unsatisfied or very unsatisfied with the assessment system, both groups often citing the negative impact on children’s wellbeing. Yet of the seven early years teachers I interviewed in 2023, five were using the test results from the Phonics Screening check, carried out when children start school, to group their 5 to 6 year-olds into ability groups.

As one commented: “it is difficult because it’s nearly always the poorer children who end up in the bottom ability group”. Placement in bottom ability groups erodes both confidence and motivation, with research showing that children are aware of the ability group they are in, and internalise a negative sense of themselves as learners.

The injustices of the testing system, placing children in achievement silos from the age of 5, are compounded by the differences in the curriculum offered to middle and working class children. Academy schools in working class areas have been instrumental in reducing the range of the curriculum and increasing the amount of repetition and routine memorisation.

The injustices of the testing system – placing children in achievement silos from the age of 5 – are compounded by the differences in the curriculum offered to middle and working class children

As one Head of English in an academy told me in 2023: “if you are working class and in the lower sets for English you have no access to books, novels, poetry, or plays but rather a daily grind of basic literacy worksheets”. In 2019, 56% of schools had started to teach GCSEs from year 9, rather than the recommended year 10, with increasing numbers starting as early as year 7. A recent example is the predominantly working class, ethnically diverse London academy which now begins the GCSE syllabus from year 7.

The impact of a narrowing curriculum for working class self-expression

While the private sector continues to prioritise creativity and the arts, the state sector has steadily reduced them in the curriculum to the point where we now have “what could realistically be described as a system of educational apartheid”. While more middle-class state schools are managing to hold on to some music and art education for their students, it is the working class schools that have been most affected by the narrowing of the curriculum.

As one teacher commented in recent research:

“In the last decade, the group that has suffered most are those that are the most marginalised… The education for those students is not fit for purpose… and it fails them horribly… we have students who will leave school with no GCSEs, currently having a diet [of] 28 periods of English, maths, science, supplementary-English or supplementary-maths and then a solitary double period of PE… that student is battered by the system [and] ultimately made, in many instances, to feel worthless”.

As this quote makes evident, the consequences for working class self-expression are grim.

Any opportunities for self-expression are further eroded by the excessive focus on control and discipline in predominantly working class schools. A European survey found that it was English working class students who were suffering the most from the intensive focus on discipline as their schools prioritised highly managed behaviour policies over the more liberal climate of open debate and discussion found in predominantly middle-class schools – to the point where such schools have become sites for “the politics of humiliation”.

“I actually hated it, you had to walk in silence, chant these mantras, wear suits. The last straw was when one of my best friends was asked to leave for talking in the corridor. There are all these rules, and kids are not allowed to talk”

For example, Tania, a Black working class student, described her Academy school as “a military camp”. She said “I actually hated it, you had to walk in silence, chant these mantras, wear suits. The last straw was when one of my best friends was asked to leave for talking in the corridor. There are all these rules, and kids are not allowed to talk”. As Tania makes clear, while the working classes may not be getting much in the way of creativity and critical thinking in schools, they are getting plenty of discipline, control and regulation (Miseducation, 2025).

The urgent need to reverse the miseducation of the working classes

Where does this leave us? Education has become toxic, particularly for working class young people. A regime of teaching to the test, along with a narrow, fact-driven curriculum, harsh discipline and an excessive focus on competition – with little opportunity for creativity and critical thinking – leads to disengagement in learning and a deep sense of alienation.

This, in turn, has consequences for working class students’ commitment to learning and to their sense of belonging in school. England’s teenagers have a lower sense of “belonging” at school than their peers in almost all other countries, with the percentage of those feeling this way more than trebling between 2015 and 2023 to 36%. However, it is working class students who have the lowest sense of belonging within school.

Far too many working class children are absorbing a belief that they are rubbish learners – and that means they have limited prospects as adults. The most recent interviews I conducted for Miseducation confirmed the message from earlier research that growing numbers of working class children believe they are bad at learning, will be unsuccessful in their adult lives, and that the best thing about school is the shrinking amount of breaktime.

When success is measured in the context of UK education, the usual focus is on how well we are doing in the international league tables. But relative success in international rankings masks huge failures in democratic engagement, attending to children’s well-being, realising working class potential and valuing the voices of working class children and young people.

It is time to listen and consider whether we are providing a good enough education for all our children rather than just the privileged few.

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Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Class, published by Policy Press, is out now.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s). They do not represent the position of LSE Inequalities, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credits: photo by TiffanyBurke via Shutterstock.