We often hear that working-class boys in education are misogynistic, aggressive and unwilling to learn. But how true is this?
In this episode, Richard Kemp speaks with Alex Blower, author of Lost Boys: How Education is Failing Young Working-Class Men, about how the education system often fails these boys.
They discuss the role of masculinity in the lives of working-class boys and men, Alex’s personal experiences with being working-class and a young carer, and why we need to stop focusing on perceived individual failures and instead turn our attention to the troubled relationship between these boys and the systems in which they reside.
Listen to the episode to get 50% off the paperback and eBook until 20 October 2025.
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Alex Blower is Research Fellow at Arts University Bournemouth.
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Lost Boys by Alex Blower is available on Policy Press for £9.99 here.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:32 – Can you tell us about your upbringing and experiences of education?
08:08 – What consequences have occurred from political leaders pointing to working-class boys themselves as the problem?
11:43 – Does this have an effect on the recent polarisation and marches?
14:02 – Did your feelings of aspiration change when you changed schools?
17:22 – Should schools be providing more diverse avenues for future progression?
20:42 – What is the working-class identity now?
24:51 – What inequalities are there and how are they perpetuated even by people with first-hand experience?
29:17 – Can you explain the caring roles that young working-class people have to take on, and how the education system is letting them down?
35:56 – What did you learn from the Being a Boy project?
39:11 – What is Boys’ Impact? And what changes do you hope to achieve from this work?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Richard Kemp: You’re listening to the Transforming Society podcast. I’m Richard Kemp, and on this episode I’m joined by Alex Blower, Research Fellow at Arts University Bournemouth and founder of Boys Impact, a network that addresses the gap in educational outcomes for boys and young men who receive free school meals.
Alex’s new book, ‘Lost Boys: How Education is Failing Young Working-Class Men’, published by Policy Press, challenges us to reconsider the ideas about the role of masculinity in the lives of working-class boys and men, those who our media and politics have so often characterised as misogynistic, aggressive, and unwilling to learn. But how true is any of this?
Having faced challenges of his own related to mental ill health and school exclusion as a young man, Alex has firsthand knowledge of the working-class experience. He understands intimately how so many boys and young men have been left behind, even targeted by the same systems that prop others up, and also how, with the right support, things can so thoroughly change.
With this new book, Alex uses research and real life case studies to provide clear recommendations for how to better support the health, wellbeing and vulnerabilities of working-class boys and men improving life for themselves and also everyone around them. Alex Blower, welcome to the Transforming Society podcast.
Alex Blower: Hi Rich, thank you for having me.
RK: Absolute pleasure. This… it’s such an important book that you’ve written here. I’m really, I’m so looking forward to to discussing this one with you. So thanks so much for coming on today. Towards the end of your book, you write that for young working-class men, decisions are predicated not on chance of success, but on limiting how badly you lose.
You say safety to the detriment of learning, acceptance, however brief, at the expense of your self-worth. What were your own experiences of this? Could you tell us about your upbringing, the struggles, and how eventually everything changed?
AB: Yeah, sure. So as a young man, I grew up in a small town adjacent to the Black Country in the West Midlands, and I experienced a lot of challenges during that time. I was a young carer to a family member who had issues with mental ill health and addiction, and, due to a significant event that happened, it resulted in me experiencing acute anxiety as a child, which meant I missed three years of primary school, well school, which kind of bridged primary school and secondary school.
During that time, my social interactions were very limited. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom. My dog Meg was my best friend. And when I got back into school, I very quickly learned that the kind of dispositions that I possessed as a young man weren’t necessarily aligned with those that would keep me happy and safe in my local secondary school, which, you know, in terms of those normative working-class, masculine expectations, if you like.
It was very much, don’t listen to teachers, don’t put your hand up in class, be cheeky, be anti-authoritarian, get into fights, do things that you’re not supposed to. And as somebody that entered that world on the peripheries because I’d missed that important transitional point of kind of forging friendships. You know when you first going to school in year seven.
Then I started deploying things that I believed would ingratiate me into this peer group, because being outside of that peer group was quite a dangerous place to be, you know? And you got bullied, you’d get ridiculed. Being low in the social hierarchy and the pecking order wasn’t a place that was particularly comfortable to be. So very quickly I started adopting these anti-authoritarian attitudes, being cheeky to teachers, getting into fights, smoking and drinking and doing a whole host of things that were potentially legally questionable and certainly not what I should be doing at the time.
That resulted in a short time later of me being excluded from that school. And moving to one that was about six miles down the road in a much, much more middle class area where the expectations surrounding how being a young man in education worked looked very different. The way that we dressed, you know, it was blazers and ties and shirts in this new school.
In my other one, it was a polo top and it was trainers as long as they were black. You know, after getting home from this new school I’d very, very quickly run from the bus to my house so no one saw me in the ridiculous outfit I had to wait for school. What that did for me was, and I didn’t realise it was what it was doing at the time, but it opened up this whole range of access to forms of cultural, social capital that were previously unavailable to me in my other school.
I could put up a hand and answer a question without risk of the consequences of that amongst my peer group. You know, you could be cool in this school for want of a better word and still be educationally engaged it appeared, which certainly wasn’t the case at my old school. I didn’t enjoy this new school.
It wasn’t a pleasurable or a pleasant experience for me, and I’d certainly say it was no better in terms of that experience, you know, than my first school. It was just different. However, what it meant was that I had the opportunity to gain that objectified cultural capital, those skills and qualifications that enabled me to eventually progress to the University of Wolverhampton.
It was then for me that I finally found that I had the chance to start developing my own identity, that I could figure out what being a successful, happy man looks like to me. I still wasn’t very good at it at that time, and it’s taken me a long, long time to get there, but it instilled this curiosity and passion about the world around me.
So after I left university, I worked in a hostel for homeless young people for a while, then eventually got into educational outreach. And it was when I was working for universities and running the data on the postcodes surrounding progression to higher education from my hometown in Burntwood, which is about 18%, and this school that I moved to in Lichfield, which is about 64%, that the injustice of that really struck me.
That, you know, through no fault of their own friends of mine with more talent in their little finger than I’ve got in their whole body, were three times less likely to progress to higher education just based on where they lived. And all of the the kind of collective memory and social histories and, you know, inter-generational dispossessions that come along with that.
It felt like what we were trying to do with our educational outreach work at the time for universities, this quest to raise aspirations was just woefully inadequate to the task at hand. So I began my doctoral research in 2016, which was really the starting point for me of really getting under the skin and building the depth of understanding surrounding what my own experiences meant, but also what the experiences and the implications of those experiences mean for young men who might hold similar experiences or be from similar backgrounds.
RK: Really hits home from what you’ve said there, but also really big time in the book as well, about the lack of opportunities that working-class people have versus middle-class people and your own personal experiences. I felt like reading this book, I was seeing the injustices through your eyes.
AB: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the, one of the key considerations in, you know, in the book, but also in wider debates and discourse surrounding young men and young working-class men in education, is we would be naive to think that socioeconomic inequality isn’t the most significant driver when it looks at these intersections of masculinity, you know, and other considerations for young working-class women, those GCSE kind of grades are only marginally higher than for young working-class men.
If you look at it for those that aren’t eligible for free school meals, that’s where those gaps, you know, those significant gaps appear. So for me, what my experiences combined with the research and practice I’ve been doing, has been able to shine a deep kind of insight into that particular intersection of experience.
RK: You talk about how in, in 2023 to 2024, just 24% of UK boys eligible for free school meals, as you say, attained a grade of 9 to 5, which in old terms is a A* to C in GCSE Maths and English. This…naturally it limited their chances of progressing to university. There was rhetoric from Tony Blair’s new labor government.
Putting this down to working-class boys suffering from a, quote, poverty of aspiration, unquote. David Cameron’s conservative leadership, they later continued this claim as well. What consequences have occurred from political leaders pointing to the boys themselves as the problem?
AB: What it serves to do is individualise an issue that is deeply connected to the systems and structures which perpetuate that issue. What it also does through that individualisation is heaps responsibility onto the shoulders of those who experience the socioeconomic inequality. So if we look at that poverty of aspiration discourse and what the solution, the answer was in terms of practice in education and in higher education outreach, it was okay, so we must raise aspiration. We must raise that hope or ambition of achieving something.
Now if we look at the dictionary definition for aspiration, then it’s a hankering, a yearning. You know, it’s this fuzzy idea that it’s something you can hope to do. Education Endowment Foundation and other very reputable researchers, think tanks, people working in policy for years have cited how little evidence there is to support the efficacy of that as a practice.
You know, there is no good evidence to suggest it has any impact, really, on raising attainment at GCSE level. But what it also serves to do, and for me this is the pernicious part, is it suggests that who these young people are and what they may hope to do in the future already is deficient. It’s not enough. It’s not reaching whatever this kind of taken for granted gold standard is surrounding the ideal trajectory into and through higher education and into work.
And I did my doctoral research and looking at kind of policy discourse surrounding the higher education participation. Then that gold standard is framed as social and geographic mobility achieved through participation at a Russell Group university. And anything else is just a varying degree of less good essentially. So, you know, if you live at home and you’re a commuter student, less good. If you are a student who studies a BTEC rather than the traditional A-levels. Less good. And so it goes on.
So we’ve got this, these two sharp edges, firstly, which is that the ambition that the policymakers have been perpetuating as this silver bullet, or this way to solve the issue. There’s no evidence of efficacy. But on the other side as well, what it is doing is actively driving these discourses surrounding deficiency that these young people somehow aren’t worth anything unless they follow this particular route, which devalues their lives, communities, experiences.
And, you know, in the book, I talk about, you know, what a parent must feel of a young person who comes home being told that any of their lived experiences or hopes and dreams that might be aligned with familial experiences aren’t legitimate.
RK: Does, what you’ve described there, does it have a direct effect on, for example, we’re recording in the summer of 2025, we’ve seen a lot of anti-immigration marches and Save Our Girls marches. Very recently there were, there have been people putting up flags in public areas, painting on the streets and on roundabouts, etc., etc.. Does any of what you said there link to what we’ve got going on right now?
AB: I believe it absolutely links to discourses that are surrounding polarisation, division, narratives which other other communities, is something that we see peddled out in political discourse across the board, you know, this individualised notion that ignores the structures and systems which perpetuate inequalities. And if we look at political events like Brexit referendum or, you know, the rise in support and popularity for political parties from Reform, often these people are talked about as individuals, which float free of their social, historic, geographic conditions, which for a lot of them have been multiple generations of entrenched inequality and pathologisation.
You know, people that have been characterised and framed as benefit scroungers or, you know, benefit cheats, having TV programs made about them like ‘Benefits street’ or ‘Shameless’, and all of that history and the implications of that historic kind of pathologisation seems to be ignored and instead in place what we get is the brain of this individual person who’s doing something that as neoliberal kind of, you know, liberal left wing people we don’t approve of.
And then within the book, I think what it attempts to do is make very explicit the link between these structural mechanisms, whether it be in education, whether it be in health, or other places, kind of within the economy and society, that pass on these issues and challenges through generations. And it’s through those relationships with those structures and systems that they are perpetuated and entrenched and passed down from father to son or grandfather to grandchild.
And yet we don’t appear to have the language within our public discourse to be able to address or talk about the issues in that way.
RK: Looking again at poverty of aspiration, when you got moved from or when you got taken out of your previous school, the more working-class school and you got moved to your new school with the access to resources to the kind of teaching you were getting and, and, and the culture that was there, you said about, for example, not being afraid to put your hand up anymore because it was actually encouraged or at least accepted.
Can you recall that there was…that your aspiration or your, yeah, your feelings of aspiration. Did they change by moving from one school to another?
AB: My hopes and dreams to be honest with you, not really. I think what it was was something that was a lot more tangible than that. It was expectations. And I remember first school I had all of the resources easily available to me. If I was interested in joining any of the trades, working in the service industry, I had friends and family members who did apprenticeships in those types of things, or who’d been through college courses and knew who you could talk to to get set up, you know, and conversations were where are you going after you finish GCSEs?
Like, what are you going to do workwise. At this new school, people’s parents were doctors, lawyers, you know, working in the civil service or local government or teachers. Conversations weren’t around where are you moving into employment after your GCSEs? Instead they were, what are you doing for A-levels? Have you had to look at kind of UCAS and how all of those things work?
Do you know which university you’re thinking of applying to? Are you staying at home or are you going to to move away? It wasn’t are you hoping to do any of this stuff? It was this stuff is laid out as the most likely trajectory for you to follow. And all of those resources were wrapped around those particular trajectories to make them very, very real, very, very tangible and an expectation. With the difference between an aspiration and an expectation as well, going back to that individualised narrative surrounding aspiration, when you consider an expectation, then it shifts the responsibility. You know, if you say, how can we create a situation where this child can expect to get those 9 to 5 GCSE Maths and English, then the onus is on the support systems and structures in place to to facilitate that, whether it be additional tutoring, whether you know anything that young person might need, if it’s how do we get this young person to aspire to those then it’s it’s all on that young person.
And I think that’s a really important delineation. And certainly with the work that I’ve been doing in education surrounding the future orientations of young men and young women, then it’s the expectations that are the key things to focus on, because without the access to those forms of capital, those social, cultural, economic resources, those aspirations are never going to be realised.
RK: I remember the moment reading that in your book and kind of having a bit of a mind blowing moment of, just like, oh, yeah, when, when there are poor grades, poor results, we should, of course, we shouldn’t be thinking, what of these kids, or what have these families, done wrong? Of course we should be thinking what support were they lacking? Why? How did the support structures that we provided fail them? That was a real a real turning moment for me reading your book.
Should the school systems be kind of providing more, like a wider realm of teaching so that because if you move to this better school and the better school said this is where everybody goes, everybody goes to the gold standard University, yet surely not everybody in that school wanted to go to university.
Some people wanted to get their BTEC and become a mechanic. So should, should schools be kind of offering more classes, more courses for that sort of study as well?
AB: Firstly, I think just to pick up on something you said there, Rich, I wouldn’t say it was a better school, I’d say it was a different school.
RK: Excuse me, excuse me there. Yes, of course. See that, that that just shows my, my ignorance that gets perpetuated. Right. So that’s, yeah. Thank you for saying that.
AB: But no, it’s absolutely to do with this societal framing and these unconscious kind of taken for granted, even the use of language, you know, and how we do it, the is is constantly positioning and repositioning kind of these young people or these systems and structures that make them very difficult to grapple. And I think when you’re talking about the types of curriculum provision that might need to be offered the way that actually in an age of technologisation, of AI growing at an exponential rate, the skills that we need to be equipping young people with that go beyond rote learning, that go beyond kind of the chalk and talk teaching that go beyond memorisation for exams.
That is a huge piece of work to be done there across the board. The battle, I think that will always take place is for the legitimacy of those qualifications. In the book, I speak about video I did for my YouTube channel whilst I was doing my PhD that got 65,000 views because it was BTEC versus A-level, and actually I was very transparent about the way that some universities, more in inverted commas, prestigious universities, treated applicants who had done BTEC qualifications because it’s not transparent.
If you look on UCAS, you look on websites, they all say they accept them, but then put into place such significant barriers with regards to application and admission that nobody, you know, would be able to undertake the level of study that would be required if they were doing a BTEC Extended diploma, for example, to meet them.
And so whilst I think curriculum change and reform is absolutely needed, we also need and this comes from policy, it comes from media and it comes from the national conversation, to give a greater parity of esteem to students who undertake those vocational qualifications and the value of them. It was one of the recent years that where during Covid, and I remember that there was a significant delay for BTEC students even getting their results on results day, and this went on for weeks and weeks and weeks.
Had it had been A-level students and A-level results day that that had happened on, then I guarantee the media coverage of that would have looked significantly different and the pressure ramped up on Ofqual or Pearson or, you know, whoever the qualifications organisations were, would have been more significant too. And it’s that that lack of that parity of esteem that, I think for students from working-class backgrounds who are disproportionately more likely to undertake these qualifications in colleges or further education that feel the cuts most sharply.
RK: Historically, working-class young people living in the industrial heartlands, they were defined by their contributions to the industrial economy and to their communities. Following Thatcher’s neoliberal overhaul and the 2008 financial crash, Brexit, plus local industry being replaced by Uber, Amazon fulfillment centers and TikTok, etc. this identity has slipped away. What is the working-class identity now?
Who decides it and what effects has this had on working-class communities?
AB: I think from a personal perspective, there’s a diversity and richness of working-class experience. If you look at, you alluded to there some of the areas that experienced significant deindustrialisation in the 19, late 1970s, 80s. It’s your Sheffields, your, if you look at the Welsh valleys, those types of areas, and then the erosion of the mechanisms to, to maintain an identity that was aligned with those levels, those types of employment created this disjuncture and this sense of, well, firstly, in terms of its material conditions, you know, a significant poverty, deprivation, lack of opportunity, but there wasn’t necessarily anything to, to, to replace that.
And I think, you know, the, the service economy sprang up and then later we talk about the gig economy. There wasn’t that clear alignment with those types of employment and something that would be inherently valuable or deemed to be valuable and legitimate as, as masculine. Those during that transition, and the historical research, Mike Ward has written a brilliant book on this, Doctor Richard Gater has actually written a book called ‘21st Century Ladz’, which is just out, which is absolutely fantastic as well.
That talks to and discusses how those changes in the community in these geographic and socio historical context have influenced that normative working-class masculinity and that set of expectations. But I think something that is incredibly important to highlight is they are not homogenous. You know, they are numerous and diverse. The experiences of young working-class men in London is going to, of course, look significantly different to young working-class men in, in Newcastle or in Weymouth.
And you can gain an understanding surrounding the certainly the commonalities in terms of the implications of socioeconomic inequality, but in terms of the intergenerational experiences from family, their interactions with community, it’s going to look very different from place to place. And I think with young working-class men in education, one of the key challenges that we’ve had for decades has been this homogenisation of the group, this stereotypical assumption that all young working-class men, while firstly, don’t aspire.
We’ve debunked that one earlier. You know, but but also that they’re aggressive, that they like competition, that they all like football. And this grouping together, has eliminated the opportunity for us to see the richness and diversity and experience of the plurality of what it means to be a young man. Actually, you know, it’s not fixed and cemented in one particular way of working-classness or working-class men.
And actually will look different from young men to young men under an umbrella of shared experience related to socio economic inequality.
RK: Hi, this is Richard Kemp from the Transforming Society podcast. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you’d like to buy a copy of Alex Blower’s book, ‘Lost Boys’, we have a 50% discount code for the paperback and e-book versions valid until the 20th of October. Just go to policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk, search for Lost Boys, select either the paperback or e-book version, and enter BOY50 at checkout. That’s BOY50 at checkout. Now back to the episode.
You spoke to many educators for the research in your book. Many, many of them also having grown up working-class themselves. But even when teachers such as Mark, a school teacher who you interview, know this experience firsthand, even they can still end up perpetuating to their students the very same inequalities that had afflicted them previously.
What inequalities are these and how does this perpetuation happen?
AB: So, there’s a whole host of inequalities, and they kind of present themselves in a range of different forms. If we look at, say Mark, for example, as a young man in the book, he talked about his experiences at school, of the fact that he was incredibly bright, but he didn’t particularly engage a lot, largely due to his the pressure to to align with masculine expectations and him being in a school where getting into fights was fairly commonplace.
And, you know, the place within that kind of masculine hierarchy, but also familial expectations surrounding what he… the most legitimate trajectory into employment for him was at that particular time. Now, for him to subvert that and to enter into higher education took a very long time. And it was in his 20s, kind of before he did that, he eventually became a teacher.
And what he noticed as a teacher was that his automatic, instinctual kind of reaction was, as a male teacher in a school, to try and build trust and rapport and relationships through engaging in those same kind of masculine practices. It’s kind of an idea of of having banter, of being one of the the students mates, almost. And it took work for Mark to critically engage with that and disrupt in his own thinking, before he was able to move past it towards something that was more effective and equitable in terms of his approach for what he was passing on to these young men in the classroom.
What Mark also spoke a lot about was the, you know, the connection for all educators to these media discourses, the messages that we receive through our TVs, our mobile phone screens, on our radios, in our books. We’re not immune to those. And we don’t actively, critically reflect and engage with them necessarily when it comes to what it means for our perceptions of young men in education.
And, you know, those those deficit kind of driven notions that might just be hidden in plain view. But we speak a lot about boy heavy classes or teachers speak a lot about boy heavy classes, you know, in school. We don’t talk about girl heavy classes. It’s only, you know, boys in education.
RK: Boy heavy classes meaning?
AB: Yeah. So it’s, if you would say a class is boy heavy, then it is a class which has more boys than girls in. So, you know, you know, the representation in the classroom is that it is a higher level of male students than female students. If the a lot at the terminology of teaching and a lot of that if that’s the case, then all of a sudden that is a boy heavy class.
And if you think about those, those connotations with the language again, and you’re thinking about, you know, this idea of heaviness being a weight, it’s going to be difficult to carry it through. That terminology is only applied to the young men. It’s, you know, we don’t have girl heavy classes. You know, is not described in that way when we’re speaking about young women necessarily in education.
And there’s a lot of research that, well we’ve been conducting it more recently with some of the work we’ve been doing through Boys Impact to do with teacher perceptions of their relationships with young men in education. But certainly if you look back to 20 years ago and there were studies by Myhill and Jones that showed how a lot of the time teachers would hold, without realising it, pretty systematically different views surrounding their perceptions of young men and young women in the class.
RK: So, so interesting how, just like the use of the term boy heavy is such a, it’s like when you were saying it kind of sounded like an innocuous term, but when you explained it by calling it a boy heavy class but not having the same for girls, then you are perpetuating the idea that, oh no, there are more boys in this class that’s a problem, or that’s something I’m going to have to deal with.
AB: Yeah, absolutely.
RK: You say that, young adult carers are 38% less likely than non carers to achieve a university degree. Those caring for 35 hours a week or more are even less likely at 86%. I was actually surprised at that number, 86% because like, caring for 35 hours a week and doing a degree, I figured that would be, you know, zero people getting degrees.
So that’s incredible that anyone could even do that. This, this, this inequality in care, you say it’s you say it’s, it almost always only affects working-class families. Can you explain the caring roles that young working-class people have to take on, including yourself as a young man, and how much the education system is letting down young carers?
AB: Yeah. So back to my own experience, so, I didn’t know at the time but I was a young carer for a parent with significant challenges related to health. Now, if we look at the health statistics and, you know, related to socioeconomic and inequality and the IMD data, then what we see is a significantly increased chance of health challenges as an adult if you are from a background in which you experienced those economic inequalities and challenges.
What that also means, within the family home, is if you are the child of a parent who experiences those challenges, then you take on those caring roles and responsibilities to support them. Now these could look very, very different depending on the nature of that.
If it is something related to mental ill health or addiction, then it might be an awful lot of psychological and emotional work, a lot of having to do things for yourself perhaps, that a parent would usually do on your behalf. Whilst if it’s a parent who might have MS or who might be going through treatment for cancer, then it could be a lot of personal care that you’d be delivering.
So again, even within that, that group, it looks very, very different from, from young person to young person. We’re in a position as a society where nationally, we don’t have the structures in place that we need to systematically identify those young people with caring responsibilities for those family members. So, much of the work that has taken place so far has been on significant underestimates, has been on guesswork.
And I drew on reports in the book from MYTIME Young Carers, they’re a national charity, and the APPG for carers and young adult carers as well, to kind of make the case. When it comes to the intersection of masculinity surrounding caring responsibility, then it becomes even more complex. You know, when we think young carer, we don’t think young man and young carer a lot of the time.
Within the book, I talk about how my role as a young carer enabled me to develop a level of emotional intelligence and maturity, ways of speaking and acting that perhaps went beyond my years at the time because I was dealing with health professionals, talking down family members who were in extreme states of emotional distress quiet early on, and having to be very empathetic and understanding of feelings within that context.
Stepping out of the door and going into school, those dispositions are the ones that place you at risk. Risk of bullying, psychological, emotional, physical injury because they’re seen as feminised and weak, or it certainly were in my context. So what I did to protect myself as this outsider going to that setting was put on this armor, and that armor was adopt the dispositions of everybody around me that made me less of a target.
Unfortunately, and I speak about this in the book, that quite often meant moving that target on to someone else and then participating in those types of activities that I was trying my hardest to protect myself from, from receiving, which had residual feelings of shame and guilt. It’s only as I’ve developed into adulthood and had time to reflect on this journey and the experiences that I’ve come to, to recognise the fact that those dispositions I developed as a male young carer, are some of the dispositions that I’m proudest of possessing now as an adult.
And I can’t help but think, what would be possible if we were able to celebrate and nurture those dispositions amongst all of those amazing young men, working-class backgrounds or not, that are undertaking those types of responsibilities in the home.
RK: You said that you didn’t, you didn’t know it at the time that you were being a young carer. Do you think that’s the case for most young carers, or at least a large portion of young carers?
AB: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you’ve got, a dad or a parent, you know, dad or mum who drinks an awful lot or has challenges with regards to their mental health, you’re not going to automatically assume or know that what you are undertaking is caring responsibility. Even if it’s something that might be more visible, it may be the case that it’s just something you’ve always done so you don’t know.
Equally, if you do realise there might be worry about other people finding out. I had to take a lot of care for my mum. I’ve got a little brother or sister. What happens if they find out, if social services find out? And what does that mean for our family unit who all love each other very, very much. So there’s issues around that, that disclosure.
But also we know that schools at the moment aren’t proactive necessarily all of the time or local authorities aren’t proactive all of the time in finding that information out, which creates these huge gaps. And these if we look at the classroom as well, it means that some of the things with regards to students, young men turning up tired because they’ve had to get up early to do everyone’s breakfast and sort out lunch, you know, they come into school, they put their head on the desk.
The teacher perception kicks in. Oh, look at him. You know, so-and-so, he’s disengaged. He’s not listening to me. And within that space, it’s very easy to draw your own assumptions and conclusions surrounding the behavior, that that young person or that young man is exhibiting, when in actual fact, he’s just absolutely shattered because he’s been undertaking all of those things.
And, you know, if there was that knowledge and that understanding in that context, what would that do for that young man’s relationship with teaching staff, their sense of belonging in education? So it’s it’s a huge it’s a significant issue which requires a lot more of a focus, I think by Ofsted and politically.
RK: In 2022, you set up the Being a Boy project with author Ashley Hickson-Lovence, wherein young working-class men use creative writing, photography and dance to explore what being a boy meant to them. What did you learn from this project? Were there any surprises about what it means to be a boy? Any aspects that sadly haven’t changed?
AB: I think what we learned from the project, so it was at the university that I work at, Arts University Bournemouth and myself and a colleague who’s in the access participation team, Kate Venables, created this pilot, which was designed to provide this platform for young men to be able to engage with the idea of masculinity in a different way.
We know that these issues were being articulated for ages, and what was really missing was those young men’s voices. So using these creative mechanisms, we wanted to provide a platform for those voices to be heard. So creative writing with Ashley Hickson-Lovence was absolutely amazing. And probably, I think one of the ones that had the biggest impact on us in terms of the setting. The biggest learning that we took away from it is because it was with young men who had been excluded from school, who were now in alternative provision, and those individuals as well, who were in mainstream education still, but maybe heading in a similar direction in terms of their relationship and engagement with school.
And what we found was if you give space, time, a sense of safety, a sense of value to these young men’s experiences they will share and they will not stop sharing and they will take that opportunity. We had young men that we were told wouldn’t write for 20 minutes, let alone all day, absolutely writing all day. And then standing up and sharing their poetry in front of each other in the room, you know, it created this real, this real magic.
They were being vulnerable, they were talking about their thoughts and feelings and emotions. And we ran qualitative research around it as well. So we used the creative artifacts that they produce as a way to engage in follow up conversations with them.
We know that young men quite often don’t necessarily have access to the tools to be able to express themselves in the way that they’d like to, and can find those one to one conversations about those things kind of difficult. What these artifacts did was provided a way into that conversation, a mechanism where they could take place. When we went back to alternative provision and spoke to a group of young men about their experiences, kind of in 1 to 1 interviews using these artifacts and said, okay, we had a great experience, but what can you take from that?
What can you apply to your day to day educational setting? And then pretty overwhelmingly they said not much because we’d get beaten up if we did that here. Which was a bit of a gut punch, I’d say shock, but not surprise. You know, we know, we know, and I knew from my doctoral research about the risks inherent in that day to day educational experience.
But that provided the spark to something which was a turning of the lens of focus towards mainstream education and the day to day educational experiences of the young men and where the opportunities lay within that to employ evidence informed, equitable approaches to better support young men and their journeys towards, hopefully, you know, GCSE qualifications.
RK: Following your involvement in Being a Boy and learning from other projects such as Taking Boys Seriously, you started Boys’ Impact. What is Boys’ Impact and what changes in society, structurally, interpersonally do you hope to achieve from this work?
AB: So Boys Impact is a movement. It’s a UK wide network of educators that are committed towards taking an evidence based approach to closing the gap in educational outcomes for young men who are eligible for free school meals. We do that through a network of regional boys impact hubs.
So these are local partnerships of educators, youth community practitioners, they’re sector organisations, representatives from the local authority that convene around the issue, bring the gifts that they possess to the table, and use the evidence that Boys’ Impact makes available through the Taking Boys Seriously research, the principles alongside our approach to program design and evaluation, to pilot new activities, to try out new things, more equitable ways of working with young men in a context that is very local and has that that flexibility to embrace the fact that it looks very different in East London than it does to Weymouth or Newcastle.
Overarching, in terms of its structure, I’d say Boys’ Impact it’s kind of a hub and spoke model. You know, Boys’ Impact is providing the capacity and the infrastructure to to pilot and change things at scale. We do those in three different ways. We work in policy, speaking with policymakers, Department for Education and any others that’ll listen to us about the changes that need to happen at policy levels to facilitate these changes and this adoption of the relational educational approach, that Taking Boys Seriously champions through its principles. Or we do it in practice so supporting educators to design and deliver and evaluate interventions at school level. But we also do it with research. So we engage with research to to deepen understanding of the issue I mentioned earlier about, Deborah Myhill and Jones’ research that was in 2004 looking at teacher perceptions of their relationships, young men in education. That was the year that Facebook was co-founded as the Facebook in Mark Zuckerberg’s bedroom.
You know, the world has changed significantly in the last 20 years, and we can’t afford for that to be the last time we’ve engaged with educators and their perception of young men in the classroom, especially given recent media and political discourses surrounding the Netflix TV show Adolescence, violence against women and girls, misogyny in schools. So it’s incredibly important that Boys’ Impact contributes towards that research and that depth of understanding as well.
And it’s our belief that we can close the gap that we see in educational outcomes for these young men by working in parallel across those three areas of research, policy and practice. Boys’ Impact is committed to taking a strength based approach to championing the richness and diversity of these experiences, of working in a way that recognises the role of structural and systematic inequality in a patriarchal society.
That means these things get perpetuated and entrenched across generations. So it’s something that is still very much at the start of its journey, but we’re growing rapidly. I’ve got a conference next week up in Manchester, and we’ve got 300 school leaders and educators coming from right across the UK to join us in Manchester for two days to engage with this issue.
We’ve got 50 workshops happening that are all actively engaged or contributed from people who have been inspired by the Boys’ Impact work, you know, and the Take it Boys Seriously principles and have used that knowledge to to instigate change in their local settings. So we convened to bring all of that together in the understanding that our collective efforts will be far greater than the sum of our parts.
RK: Thank you so much, Alex, for coming on the Transforming Society Podcast today. It’s been been wonderful talking about your book and best of luck in your conference. In a moment, I’m going to let everyone know where they can find your book. But first, could you let us know where we can find you online?
AB: Yeah, sure. So if you go onto YouTube, I’ve got a channel which is @BoysImpact, but also Doctor Alex Blower on LinkedIn as well.
RK: Perfect. ‘Lost boys: How Education is Failing Young Working-Class Men’ is published by Policy Press. You can find out more about the book by going to policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk and also transformingsociety.co.uk.