The award-winning rapper Professor Green, who grew up on a council estate in east London and left school without qualifications, has called for more support at an early age to help white working-class boys and their families engage with education.
Green, whose real name is Stephen Manderson, was speaking to the Guardian before the broadcast of his latest documentary, Working Class White Men, in which he explores the lives of six young white men from deprived backgrounds like his own.
One of the key issues Green investigates is educational failure among children from poor white communities – particularly boys, who get the poorest GCSE results and are the least likely to go to university. While almost 40% of young people overall now progress to higher education, the figure for white boys from the most disadvantaged backgrounds is just 10%.
Green spent six months following his subjects in different parts of the country in an attempt to understand the challenges they face, not just in education but also work, family life and the way they are regarded by the rest of society. He admitted to feeling depressed by what he found.
“People have become more and more disengaged,” he said. “People have fewer aspirations. From the areas I went to for the documentary, there seems to be a real lack of drive and belief in them being able to achieve anything, and there’s an acceptance of that.
“For middle-class families, your education is your life. For working-class families, in some instances school is just school. You are not expected to do very well. You are expected to get out and do a job and earn. People have to be encouraged from early on to engage with education and think it’s for them.”
Green expressed concerns about the deterrent effect of tuition fees and the cost of going to university, which leaves graduates today with almost £50,000 of debt.
“It’s easy to see why people don’t push their kids into it,” he said. “Why would you put yourself in that kind of debt? Putting yourself into £50,000 worth of debt – explain that to someone who does not have £1,000. It’s so off-putting.”
Last week Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, said white working-class children should be motivated to become more aspirational in school and “push themselves” in the way those from other backgrounds have done.
In an interview with the Spectator, Rayner – who left school at 16 when she became pregnant – said a focus in the education system on women and minority ethnic groups may inadvertently have had a negative impact on the amount of attention paid to white working-class boys.
Green, who was raised by his grandmother in Hackney, said university was never a possibility when he was growing up, despite him having been identified as a very bright child at an early age.
Shortly before leaving primary school, his teacher suggested he should sit an entrance exam for St Paul’s, a highly selective independent school. “But I didn’t want to. I turned my nose up at it. Even at that age I knew it was somewhere I could not belong. There’s no one like me there,” he said.
Home life was stressful. His grandmother was busy doing a variety of jobs to pay the bills and there was no room to encourage educational aspirations. “My grandmother always wanted the best for me, but I was not pushed,” said Green.
“I grew up in a household of chaos. My nan was working three jobs a day. There’s a lot of stress in these households. No one in my family had been to university.”
One of the young men Green follows in the documentary is Lewis Croney, 18, the son of a hairdresser and nail technician from Eastleigh,Hampshire, who defies the odds to secure a place at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he is now studying maths.
Croney said there was still a stigma around someone like him going to a university such as Cambridge, and he wanted to encourage others from similarly disadvantaged backgrounds to follow their dreams.
While universities say they are working to target students from poorer backgrounds, there is still resistance within some communities. “I’ve had people asking me why I’m going to Cambridge, why am I putting myself through three years or more of higher education when I could go straight into a job,” said Croney.
“People genuinely think people like me should not go to this university because it’s so prestigious. There’s too much stigma that it’s really about the rich that discourages people from applying from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
Green said Croney had succeeded because as well as talent he had “remarkable drive. He knew what he wanted from such a young age, and that’s not typical.” He also benefitted from his family’s support. “His mum kept all the stress away from him so he could focus on what he needed to do. He was allowed to concentrate.”
Green also explores the challenges Croney faced in fitting in with the world to which he aspires. Unlike many of his peers at home, he speaks with a received pronunciation and chooses to wear smart jackets rather than hoodies.
“He seemed caught between two worlds,” said Green. “He felt he almost had to disguise himself. He thought he had to look a certain way and be a certain way to fit in. That’s not how it should be and I do worry about it.”
• Working Class White Men, a two-part documentary, starts on Channel 4 on Tuesday 9 January at 10pm
