Lost Boys: How Education Is Failing Young Working-Class Men

Since the mid-2000s, consistent commentary from politicians and media outlets in the UK have presented low educational attainment and low aspiration as defining attributes of working-class boys in education. It has often characterised them as misogynistic, aggressive and unwilling to learn. But how true is this?

Combining research, real-life case studies and the author’s experience of navigating school exclusion, this book provides clear recommendations for how to better support the health, wellbeing and vulnerabilities of working-class boys and men through both policy and practice.

Challenging us to reconsider ideas about the role of masculinity in the lives of working-class boys and men, the book asks what would change if, instead of focusing on perceived individual failures, we considered the troubled relationship between working-class boys and the social and educational systems in which they reside.

Alex Blower is Research Fellow at Arts University Bournemouth. Having faced challenges related to mental ill health and school exclusion as a young man, his motivation for writing this book is as personal as it is professional.