Gravestones and Ghost Jobs: How Britain Forgot to Teach Its Working Class
- David Salariya
- Aug 21
- 10 min read
Updated: 11 minutes ago
Understanding the White Working-Class Education Gap
First of all, I am not an expert in education policy. I don’t pretend to have the magic answers. However, I can look at the problem from the outside. As a creator, designer, writer, and publisher of children's books, I am fascinated by how we remember work and learning.
Gravestones and Ghost Jobs
Walk through Balgay Cemetery and you see Britain’s lost curriculum carved in stone: master weaver, shipwright, jute worker. These were lessons in identity before the phrase “human resources” existed. What we now call the white working-class education gap is, in truth, the story of gravestones and ghost jobs - a country that forgot to teach its working class not just algebra and grammar, but purpose, pride, and belonging.
Gravestones tell us as much by what they omit as by what they include. Take William Blain's tombstone in Balgay Cemetery, Dundee. On his stone, he proudly proclaims himself the author of Witch’s Blood, a novel of Dundee witches published in 1946. What the stone doesn’t tell you is that Blain was also one of the most influential editors in British comics history. He was the man behind The Wizard, The Skipper, The Hotspur, and ultimately, the editorial guiding hand who helped launch The Dandy and The Beano. Later, he was responsible for Bunty, Judy, Jackie, Mandy, and The Victor. By the time he retired in 1970, he was Managing Editor of all of DC Thomson’s comics and annuals. Yet the gravestone chooses one thing: Witch’s Blood. His novel, not the comics empire that shaped generations. That’s the paradox. In death, a life is reduced to a line and sometimes to the work that was least significant in shaping the world.
But wander through a modern cemetery, and the story is different. The markers no longer carry trades because the jobs themselves have become harder to name. Who is remembered as a warehouse picker, a call-centre operative, or a delivery driver? Today’s working class is too often defined not by skill but by insecurity. Work has become generic and invisible, the kind of labour that leaves no trace on stone.
Documentaries of mid-20th-century workers - from the Singer Sewing Machine factory in Clydebank to the Linoleum Works in Kirkcaldy - often capture pride rather than despair. People complained about management, of course, but the work gave them community and dignity. They were skilled. Entire towns were built around industries: jute in Dundee, weaving in Paisley, mining in Lanarkshire. This work structured people’s lives and gave shape to their children’s futures. It was backbreaking and disciplined—the early starts for manual workers, the deathly 9.00 am trudge for office workers, teachers, and children into a world where there was a place for everyone. Everyone knew their place. Not a world I would particularly want to return to.
A Quick Reality Check on the White Working-Class Education Gap
But there’s another side to this story. For several decades now, some communities have had generations with little or no experience of regular work at all. The loss of industries left gaps that were never properly filled, and families slid into long-term reliance on benefits. That legacy is corrosive. Children grow up without seeing what daily work looks like. They miss absorbing the rhythms, the pride, and the frustrations that once gave meaning to adulthood. When schools are expected to compensate for this absence of role models, they face an almost impossible task.
Compare that to today’s wider labour market. The language of work has shifted from “trade” and “craft” to “human resource.” Too often, the workplace is less about belonging and more about targets, toxicity, or precarity. Children are expected to prepare for this world without the anchoring certainty their parents or grandparents might have had. That means schools carry a double burden: not just to educate but to provide the stability and scaffolding that industry, community, and even families once supplied.
Reading itself has changed. For many children, their first sustained act of “reading” is scrolling a phone—horizontal swipes, vertical skims. This is very different from holding a book, following sentences, or dwelling in a paragraph. If language development begins at home and is now mediated by screens, and if the culture of work is no longer something children can observe directly in their communities, then schools have to bridge an even wider gap. This blog is an attempt—not from expertise, but from observation—to ask why white working-class children in particular are being failed by the systems.
In 2024, only 19 percent of white British working-class children achieved a strong pass in maths and English GCSE.
The statistics are stark. They are the group least likely to achieve strong passes in English and maths, least likely to attend regularly, and least likely to move into fulfilling work. Many of the ideas that follow are ways of looking at the problem, not final answers. But if we don’t at least start asking the questions—about learning to talk, attendance, reading, exams, and the dignity of work—then we are preparing a generation for failure before they have even begun.
The Problem Isn’t One Thing. It’s an Ecosystem.
1) Early Talk Beats Late Tutoring
Language is built before school: baby talk, eye contact, turn-taking, nursery rhymes, and stories. The Education Endowment Foundation is unequivocal: high-quality adult–child interaction in the early years moves the needle. The Sutton Trust keeps flagging the same point: treat early years as education, not just childcare.
A much-cited (yes, older) Dundee Research Study carried out by Dr. M. Suzanne Zeedyk also found outward-facing buggies/prams correlated with less parent–infant talk. This is useful as a metaphor if nothing else: design decisions shape dialogue. (Use with caution; it’s indicative, not gospel.)
Add today’s media diet: Ofcom’s 2024 report shows just how saturated childhood is with screens. Fewer words in, fewer words out.
2) Attendance is Both Cause and Effect
By autumn 2024/25, 17.79% of school pupils are persistently absent; 2.04% are severely absent (148,000). The worst absence is concentrated among the most disadvantaged. Miss Year 4 and Year 9, and you’ll likely miss everything that follows.
The CSJ’s tracker puts hard numbers on the slide since 2019 and the long-term cost if we shrug.
3) Assessment: The Pendulum and the Gender Skew
We spent the 2000s experimenting with coursework and modularity; then the 2010s swung back to linear, exam-heavy GCSEs. Government-commissioned analyses are nuanced: coursework tends to benefit girls; high-control, exam-heavy specs narrow that advantage—but the overall effects by exam structure aren’t as simple as talk-radio says. The key point is consistency and clarity, especially for families far from the system’s codes.
4) A Reading Diet That Doesn’t Fit the Child
Reading enjoyment is at its lowest since records began. The National Literacy Trust found only 34.6% of 8–18s said they enjoyed reading in 2024 (and the 2025 update is no rosier). Kids who do read often seek non-fiction, comics, and graphic novels—forms still patronised in too many schools.
In parallel, publishing’s sales tilt has favoured fiction while non-fiction stumbled in 2024. If your tastes run to “how things work,” the market hasn’t always had your back. (There are bright spots; comics are booming.)
And yes, there was a long, kitschy gendered phase pre-2014 that I loathed—“pink glittery books” and all that—which never helped reluctant boy readers (or girls who preferred gears to glitter). This was, in a way, pandering to supermarket and toy shop criteria as promoted by the sales reps.
The Beautiful Girls' Colouring Book—garlanded with butterflies, cakes, and flowers—with the navy-blue The Brilliant Boys' Colouring Book—armoured with axes, helmets, and a space-zapper—the campaigners suggest that publishers are sending out "very limiting messages to children about what kinds of things are appropriate for girls or for boys."
The Let Books Be Books pushback was needed.
5) “White Working-Class”: The Awkward Category
Statisticians use “white British FSM-eligible” as a proxy. On that measure, attainment is consistently the lowest among the large groups: 18% got grade 5+ in English & maths in 2023, versus 45% nationally. The 2021 Education Committee said this group had been “forgotten” by decades of muddled policy; the data has barely budged since.
What a Plan Looks Like (No Magic Wands, Just Do the Obvious Things Well)
A. Start Where the Gap Starts: Birth to Five
Fund and staff early-years speech & language systematically, not as pilot-itis.
Scale evidence-based programmes (EEF play-and-talk, Sutton Trust CECIL).
Family Hubs must be education-rich, not just signposts. Measure talk time, not brochure counts. (The “hubs” logic is sound; execution matters.)
B. Restore the Social Contract on Attendance
Zero ambiguity: parents and pupils need one message from schools, councils, and DfE. Attendance is normal; absence is exceptional. Back it with rapid pastoral outreach and SEND capacity where anxiety is real. Use the DfE’s own live attendance tools to find the fires quickly.
Target the severely absent like a safeguarding priority. The CSJ numbers justify that urgency.
C. Stop Making Reading Feel Like a Loyalty Test to Fantasy
Put high-status non-fiction back on the shelves: mechanics, nature, history, “how stuff works.” Stock comics/graphic novels without apology; the data says they keep more kids reading, including FSM pupils. Ditch the computerised reading schemes—these work for some but are soul-destroying.
Tie reading to doing: make book corners a pit-stop for projects (build the thing you just read about). The NLT’s longitudinal picture is clear: enjoyment follows relevance.
D. Make the Exams Make Sense
Hold the line on clarity and stability. Kids in precarious households can’t chase moving goalposts. Government’s own research shows the gender/structure picture is complex; don’t keep fiddling.
Fix the resits doom-loop: if you don’t hit grade 4 at 16, you’re locked into compulsory resits that too often compound failure. The EPI is right—reset the approach; blend functional maths/English, tutoring, and applied routes.
E. Restore Parity of Esteem for Vocational Routes
In communities suspicious of “uni or bust,” high-quality apprenticeships and technical colleges are oxygen. If school doesn’t feel like a bridge to work with dignity, attendance craters, and aspiration follows.
F. Ground the Whole Strategy in Place
The Social Mobility Commission’s regional cut shows huge local variance even among FSM pupils. Put funding, teacher incentives, and accountability where the need is greatest; copy what works in the best-performing schools for similar intakes.
Publishing’s Piece of the Puzzle (and What We Can Do Tomorrow)
Stop pink-washing literacy. Commission and promote real-world non-fiction for primary and KS3—hands-on, funny, visual, mechanically curious. The readers who loathe elves might love engines.
Lean into comics. Library-friendly, teacher-friendly notes + class sets. My own backlist at The Salariya Book Company shows how fast a “low bar” format becomes a high bridge.
The numbers are here.
Partner with Family Hubs and primaries. Co-create talk-first packs for parents (5-minute story prompts, local history walks, draw-what-you-see cards). The EEF/Sutton Trust guidance exists—dress it in irresistible design and humour.
Just 20% of families in the bottom third of the earnings distribution are eligible for the existing offer of 30 hours of early education and childcare for three- and four-year-olds. All parents in full-time education or training are ineligible. 70% of those who are eligible for the support are from homes in the top half of earners.
Just 1 in 5 (or 20%) of families earning less than £20,000 a year will have access to the planned expansion of funded places for one- and two-year-olds in some working families, compared to 80% of those with household incomes over £45,000.
In 2023, 1 in 5 early years staff members were unqualified (did not have a relevant GCSE/level 2 qualification), up from 1 in 7 in 2018.
Funding given to early years settings to support disadvantaged children in their cohort (the early years pupil premium) is just a quarter of the amount given in pupil premium funding to primary schools for disadvantaged pupils.
Despite an increase in the proportion of children in the early years qualifying as disadvantaged (using the same eligibility criteria as free school meals), the proportion of the Early Years National Funding Formula ringfenced for disadvantaged children has remained the same since 2017-18.
While there are now around 500 Family Hubs in England, over 1,400 Sure Start Children’s centres have closed since 2010.
The early years attainment gap had been narrowing, but pre-pandemic this trend reversed, and the gap started to widen. Measured here as the percentage of each group meeting expected early learning goals, the gap between children eligible for free school meals and their peers had decreased from 19 percentage points in 2012/13 to 17 percentage points in 2016/17, but began widening again in 2017/18, standing at just under 20 percentage points in 2022/23.
The Five Stats to Keep in Your Pocket
18%: White British FSM pupils achieving grade 5+ in English & maths at 16 (2023).
45%: National average for grade 5+ in English & maths (2022/23).
17.79% / 2.04%: Persistent/severe absence (autumn 2024/25), ~1.28m and ~148k pupils.
34.6%: Children who enjoy reading (2024), the lowest on record; 2025 remains historically low.
£14bn: Projected lifetime cost if absence stays this high.
Bottom Line
The white working-class attainment crisis isn’t about chromosomes or clichés. It’s about talk (too little, too late), time (too many days missed), texts (the wrong books for the wrong readers), and tests (a system that keeps changing the rules and then punishes the losers). Fix those four Ts, and we’ll lift the fifth: trajectory—for pupils and for the country.
Closing the White Working-Class Education Gap
Behind all of this lies the erosion of work as identity. In communities where jobs once defined people, children grew up knowing what they were aiming for. In communities where two or three generations have lived with little or no steady work, children struggle to see a reason for school at all.
To close the white working-class education gap, we need more than speeches and headlines. We need investment in early years, consistent exam systems, a wider reading diet that includes non-fiction and comics, and—crucially—visible, respected vocational pathways that restore the dignity of work. Only then will schools stop being asked to perform miracles, and only then will children from white working-class backgrounds see that their education leads somewhere worth going.
And since I began this piece among gravestones in Balgay Park, it’s only fair to end with a glance at my own. What would it say? Not weaver or shipwright, but something more in keeping with my trade:
Here lies David Salariya - A maker of books. Finally met a deadline.
About the Author
David Salariya is a creator, writer, illustrator, and publisher best known for creating children’s books that make young readers laugh while they learn—including the international bestseller You Wouldn’t Want To Be… series and the wonderfully odd A Very Peculiar History and Spectacular Visual Guides, now published by Hatch a Bonnier UK Imprint. Over four decades, he has written, designed, and commissioned hundreds of books, picking up prizes, fellowships, and the odd erasure along the way—proof that in publishing, you can lose your credit but still keep your sense of humour.
David is developing new projects that mix history, satire, and visual storytelling—and occasionally contributes his thoughts (unasked) to The Bookseller.
Find more of his work at www.davidsalariya.com.
Sources & Further Reading (Selected)
Social Mobility Commission, “Attainment at age 16” - ethnicity & FSM breakdowns; white British FSM at 18% (2023).
DfE, Pupil absence in schools, autumn 2024/25 - persistent/severe absence headline stats incl. counts.
Centre for Social Justice, School Absence Tracker (Aug 2025) - trend analysis; 147,605 severely absent; NEET/£14bn projection.
EEF, “Preparing for Literacy”—evidence-based early language guidance.
Sutton Trust, Early Years briefings & CECIL evaluations - improving early talk in practice.
Ofcom, Children & Parents: Media Use and Attitudes 2024 - screen habits ages 3–17.
NLT, Children’s Reading 2024/2025; Comics engagement 2023 - enjoyment at record low; comics/non-fiction role.
Ofqual/DfE research on assessment—gender/coursework vs exams; modular→linear reforms.
Let Books Be Books—ending gendered labelling in children’s publishing.
IFS & IfG - UK productivity stagnation context.
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