Earlier this week, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage declared on X that the 2010 Equality Act was to blame for the underperformance of white working-class boys in the country’s education system. But is he right?

Farage is partly correct in that he identified the impact of the unholy trinity of radical progressivism: diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI). The Equality Act itself sought to protect against discrimination along the lines of sex, race and several other characteristics, including in education and the workplace.  The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK placed race at the heart and center of national conversations over disadvantage and barriers to opportunity.

The aggressive importation of this American Leftist racial politics then resulted in the proliferation of critical race theory throughout British institutions — a conceptual framework that categorizes minorities as oppressed groups within systems dominated by white male privilege. This particularly led to a number of these institutions seeking to avoid discrimination based on race under the Equality Act. These are ideas which are hardly likely to motivate white working-class boys in some of the most left-behind parts of the country.

And so what the Equality Act did was provide easy political capital for progressive middle-class liberals, keen to show off their “compassionate” credentials, all while ignoring wholesale the impacts of regional discrimination and class divides.

Where Farage has clearly overreached, however, is citing the Equality Act as the primary reason for white working-class educational underachievement, while not mentioning other factors at play. To have a better understanding of the reasons behind this, it is worth considering the familial and cultural dynamics of ethnic minority communities.

One factor is the structure of other demographics in society. Some traditionally-minded minorities have a robust educational ethos — the belief that a strong academic record is the finest agent of social mobility and socio-economic stability. This can be seen in certain Asian communities when looking at recent Attainment 8 scores — a measure of pupil performance across eight GCSE-level qualifications — by ethnicity, it is Chinese-heritage schoolchildren leading the pack, with their Indian-origin peers not far behind. This can put these communities at a much greater advantage when it comes to education and future prospects.

These cultural dynamics are much less prevalent in many native working-class communities in Britain, where there are disproportionately higher rates of family breakdown and lone-parent households. This is an endemic problem, caused by a number of factors, and it puts children from these backgrounds at a clear disadvantage. While the ethnic minority experience is anything but uniform, a report published last March by the Centre for Social Justice highlighted that while only one in five poor white children live with married parents, this rises to nearly three in five for their non-white counterparts.

If the British political Right is serious about lifting educational outcomes among white working-class children, especially boys, then it must be honest about the factors behind underachievement. It is true that the Equality Act has been exploited to justify race-obsessed DEI initiatives, which genuinely exclude the white-British working classes. But to simply blame a piece of legislation for their falling behind in education ignores the social and cultural realities within such communities.

While there is a strong case to reform the Equality Act or replace it entirely with new legislation, doing so will not magically improve educational outcomes in white-British working-class areas. A broader economic malaise of regional and class disparity, deindustrialization, a lack of secure local employment, and multi-generational poverty needs to be addressed to provide white working-class children with more favorable conditions for them to thrive at school and beyond. Right-wing leaders like Farage should be wary of indulging in the very types of racial victimhood and identity politics they seek to condemn.

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Dr Rakib Ehsan is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange.

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