This is not an aspiration gap. It is a trust gap.
Living a happy life, having a stable job and having a roof over your head.”
That was how one year seven pupil described success to the independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes, for which I was a board member.
There is nothing small about that ambition. It is the kind of life many families want for their children: security, good work, independence and happiness.
A better education
Our Inquiry found that white working class parents are more likely than others to say they want their children to have a better education than they had themselves: 94 per cent say this, compared with 91 per cent of all parents. They are also more likely to say it is important that their child does as well as or better than them in life: 75 per cent, compared with 70 per cent of all parents.
But many white working class young people do not see university as the safest or clearest route to getting there. Only 22 per cent of white working class young people in our poll felt university was important for getting a good job, compared to 33 per cent of their white middle class peers and 37 per cent of their ethnic minority working class peers.
For some pupils, the biggest barrier was the financial risk.
Uni would be my first choice, but I’m quite scared of student loans.”
Again and again, families talked about cousins, friends and neighbours who had gone away to university, taken on debt, and come back to low-skilled or insecure employment.
One access charity worker in Grimsby told us “Look at the debt that people come out with now… How can you justify that level of debt at the end of it, if a job in your industry or sector or area of expertise doesn’t exist where you come from.” While one mother remarked that “Even young people leaving university are often now working on minimum wage in Aldi.”
Visible detriments
Debt is visible. Rent is visible. Travel is visible. The loss of earnings from three years out of work is visible. But the graduate job at the end is not always visible, especially in places where secure graduate employment feels scarce or remote.
These are not anti-education arguments. They are families doing the maths and reckoning with options. And when families have less financial room for error, uncertainty is not a minor concern, it is the whole decision.
In higher education, we can be too quick to hear “I want to stay close to home” as a lack of ambition, when often it is an expression of love, pride and belonging. I’ll never forget the teacher who encouraged me to go to university by reassuring my Mam that she wouldn’t lose me.
If the child’s clever, they can go on to university and get a really good job. I think the majority of children who do go into higher education probably get jobs outside of Hartlepool. I don’t think there’s anything for them in Hartlepool.”
That is not an uncomplicated success story. For some young people, leaving for university is liberating. For others, it looks like a one-way ticket out of the community that raised them. And for parents who want their children close, safe, happy and secure, that can feel less like opportunity and more like loss.
Aspiration and security
Family and place are not barriers to aspiration. They are sources of security; the people who pick them up, lend them money, notice when something is wrong, and make adult life feel possible. And when higher education appears to threaten those ties, while offering only a vague promise of future reward, it can look like a bad bet.
If we misdiagnose low trust as low aspiration, we design the wrong solutions. We’ve known for years that it isn’t aspiration blocking the path to higher education but ‘raising aspirations’ continues to be bandied around. Inspiration alone is not enough – it must be accompanied by practical support, meaningful relational engagement with families and more secure finances.
Trust will only be rebuilt when universities can show, clearly and locally, how higher education leads to good work, stable lives and real choices.
That starts long before UCAS. It starts in the parents’ evening where a mum asks whether debt will follow her child forever, in the college classroom where a young person wants to know whether a degree will lead to a job nearby, in the partnership with the FE college, the local employer, the bus route, the maintenance package and the course designed around real lives.
The young person who wants “a stable job and a roof over your head” is not aiming low. They are asking for something profoundly reasonable: security, dignity, belonging and a future that feels real in an environment when none of these things are a given.
Higher education does not need to persuade white working class families to want more for their children. They already do. The task now is harder, and more important: to prove that higher education can help them build the secure, dignified and meaningful futures they already want.
