Lost Boys: How Education Is Failing Young Working Class Men, With Author Alex Blower

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.

Since completing his doctoral research which focused inequality and access to university for white working-class boys in the West Midlands in 2020, Alex has been a regular speaker at national and international conferences, talking on issues related to inequality and the experience of young working-class men in education.

In 2023, he founded Boys’ Impact, a UK wide network of educators who are committed to taking an evidence-based approach in closing the gap in educational outcomes for young men who are eligible for Free School Meals.

His primary interests centre around how creative research methods can be mobilised as tools to understand issues related to masculinity and inequality in education. His first monograph, Lost Boys: How Education is Failing Young Working-Class Men, was released in July.