We’ve just had another GCSE results week, and another anguished debate about why white working-class pupils fare so poorly. Edward Davies of the Centre for Social Justice points to a simple driver hiding in plain sight – family stability. “The more stable your home, the better you do.” Writing in The Spectator, he notes that “Just two in ten children in the poorest white quintile live with married parents compared to almost nine in ten of the wealthiest white quintile”. Tellingly, children from poorer non-white families, where “almost six in ten” live with married parents, do better in school than their white counterparts. These are not classroom effects. They are home effects.
Davies goes further. He argues that family breakdown touches welfare, housing and crime. He highlights home ownership to illustrate the wider stability dividend. Citing the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), he says, “there is no home ownership problem at all among married couples”. IFS analysis bears out the broad point, with married couples almost 30 percentage points more likely to own their home than cohabiting couples, who in turn are ahead of lone parents.
Context matters. Since 2021 the majority of births in England and Wales have been outside of marriage. In 2022, 51.4% of live births were registered to women outside of marriage or civil partnership. That is the social weather in which today’s pupils are growing up.
Parliament’s Education Committee has previously documented the chronic underperformance of white working-class pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and called for action. What has been missing is the courage to name family stability and marriage as central to any serious solution.
This is not a counsel of despair. Marriage remains the most proven foundation for raising children, building success and passing on hope. Stable commitments still transform trajectories. C4M will continue to make that case in public, resource those who are preparing for marriage, and champion practical policies that make forming and sustaining a family easier. From pushing for tax reform to travelling the country giving honest relationship education, C4M knows that “family stability is the fundamental cornerstone of society”. And as the article concludes, “in the UK it has collapsed”. Rebuilding it is why we exist and the opportunity of a generation.