Andy Cook: White working-class boys are being left behind – but we need the courage to say why

Andy Cook is Chief Executive at the Centre for Social Justice

Getting on for twenty years ago, I set up a charity to get young lads living on my estate in Loughborough into work and onto a better track in life. Most left school without any qualifications.

Many grew up with violence at home. Still, I was struck that with the right direction and an arm around the shoulder, the sky was the limit for these kids.

It took blood, sweat and the odd tear to get several hundred of them into local jobs, but this was all worth it when you saw the pride in their faces buying their mum a bouquet of flowers with money they had earned themselves – or their first Friday pint.

And so it saddens me to my core when I read about the soaring numbers of young men at drift today.

As it stands, half a million under 25s are not in education, work or training (NEET). But this drift is starting earlier and earlier. As the Centre for Social Justice revealed earlier this year, there is now a crisis of Britain’s ‘lost boys’.

Consider the following. Just 60 per cent of boys start ‘school ready’, compared to three in four girls. By GCSE, boys are on average half a grade behind girls; by A-level, it’s 1.5 grades. And in the job market, the gap turns into a chasm: the number of young male NEETs has risen by 40 per cent since the pandemic, compared to just 7 per cent for young women.

I remember one lad, 17, who’d barely been in a classroom since Year 9. He was smart, funny, and capable – but had no dad at home, no work role model, and no one expecting him to succeed. That combination is still tragically common. But particularly so among a group often overlooked given the fashions of our time: white working-class boys.

That’s why this week’s intervention from the Education Secretary was so striking.

Bridget Phillipson’s description of the plight of white working-class children as a “national disgrace” broke a long-standing political taboo. When former Tory MP Robert Halfon’s select committee investigated this phenomenon in 2021, he faced a barrage of criticism. Since then ministers have sometimes acknowledged the problem (memorably, Kemi Badenoch raised the alarm as Minister for Equalities), but action has been piecemeal.

What on earth has race got to do with it, you might reasonably ask?

Across all ethnicities, poorer children tend to do worse than wealthier ones. But the gap among white pupils is especially stark. For example, among pupils eligible for free school meals, just 18.6 per cent achieve a grade 5 or above in English and maths at GCSE, less than half the national average. Staggeringly, only 13.7 per cent of poorer white boys progressed into higher education in 2022/23 – the lowest of any demographic.

So the Education Secretary is right to highlight this. But the response must go beyond the usual Whitehall solutions of dashboards and toolkits.

It must create a culture of high expectations, enforce higher rates of attendance, and create skills routes that lead to real jobs. In Manchester, Andy Burnham’s “MBacc” is trying the latter – aligning vocational education with the local economy to give teenagers a sense of purpose.

Yet the harder truth is this: you cannot close the gap for white working-class boys without addressing the collapse in family stability. This is arguably even more uncomfortable territory for politicians in 2025, but without fathers, boys are more likely to be excluded, truant, or drift into long-term worklessness.

Marriage rates among, for example, Chinese or Asian populations are high across all income groups. But among white children, while you have a 96 per cent chance of two parents at home if you come from a well-off family, in our poorest communities this drops to just 28 per cent. Children without a stable home life are twice as likely to educationally underachieve, and it is these disparities which help to explain what is really going wrong.

Of course, loving families come in all shapes and sizes (as I know from my own experience). And lone parents are heroes. Yet we cannot ignore the data on family, and its impact on education, if we want to turn the tide on poor outcomes for these lads.

So far, only Reform UK has squarely entered this space – controversially spurning the two-child limit as a tool to encourage family. Nigel Farage himself has said “making marriage a little bit more important” was “the right thing to do”, as it gave children “the best chance of success”. Whether you agree or not, he’s spotted a vacuum in the debate. And with votes for 16–18-year-olds now in play, rising NEET rates, and deep frustration in left behind communities, this is fast becoming a new political battleground.

Phillipson has smashed the Overton window from the left.

The real question now is: who will be brave enough to point out the family shaped elephant in the room? The Tories could restart that debate, and Britain’s lost boys would surely benefit.