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Vice Blog

London - Young, witless and white

Poor white boys have knocked poor black boys off the bottom of school performance tables and are now the dumbest kids in the country, according to a new government report. The intellectual deprivation of working class whites has previously been hidden because their results were boosted by the performance of more well-to-do whites. Only 17 per cent of white boys entitled to free school meals (the standard measure of poverty) managed to gain good GCSE grades. This contrasts with 19 per cent of black boys, 40 per cent of Indian boys, and 70 per cent of Chinese boys…

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The report says that the problem cannot be fixed through more funding - over the past decade the education budget has increased by 50 per cent while academic standards have still stagnated. The real issue, according to the authors, lies with the council estate culture of unemployment, family breakdown, underachievement, crime, alcohol and drugs.

"The fact that poor children from Chinese and Indian backgrounds, where family structures are strong and learning is highly valued, outscore so dramatically children from homes where these values are often missing suggests that culture, not ethnicity or cash, is the key to educational achievement."

Many of these poor white kids are likely to end up in jail and the report urges the government to intervene at an earlier stage. "To prevent the growth of an uneducated and unemployable underclass of forgotten children, we have to get their parents to engage in their learning and schooling from an early age." To this end, the government are discussing issuing Foetal Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (FASBOS) in an effort to identify and correct the lives of kids who are likely to fail even before they are born.