Marriage breakdown leads to poor GCSE results, warns think tank

Marriage breakdown is driving the poor GCSE results among white working class pupils, according to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ).

Writing for The Spectator, Edward Davies, Director of Policy at CSJ, broke down the statistics and laid bare the impact that family breakdown has, and its prevalence for this particular generation of young people.

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that over 100,000 marriages ended in divorce in 2023.

Impact on education

Davies, commenting on the GCSE results, said “the grim truth is that this is not, ultimately, an education issue”. He explained: “What does correlate with exam results in every ethnicity is marriage rates. The more stable your home, the better you do.”

He added: “White working class children are at the bottom of the pile in marriage rates, and so too in school. Just two in ten children in the poorest white quintile live with married parents compared to almost nine in ten of the wealthiest white quintile.”

He cited US research, replicated in the UK, which found that: “Even accounting for poverty, children who are in what researchers call a ‘fragile family’ (where parents are cohabiting or alone), are twice as likely not to graduate from high school.”

Stark figures

Davies reported that an upcoming analysis from CSJ has found that “the chances of lone parent families experiencing long term worklessness is almost one in three. In a couple family that probability falls to just one in FIFTY. Long term unemployment is essentially not a concern in married households.”

He added: “Experiencing family breakdown as a child more than doubles your chances of homelessness as an adult.”

The policy expert wrote that “Stark figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that there is no home ownership problem at all among married couples.”

He noted: “The relationship between fatherlessness and crime is already well established as the Ministry of Justice pulls its hair out over our stuffed prisons.”

Marriage solution

Davies summarised: “if you are willing to look, it’s not hard to find declining marriage at the heart of almost every domestic challenge we face”.

He concluded: “the plight of the white working class in this year’s GCSE results is our annual reminder that the UK status quo will not change unless we have some hard conversations about its causes – family stability is the fundamental cornerstone of society and in the UK it has collapsed.

The Coalition for Marriage noted how the “chronic underperformance” of white working class children has been well documented, but stated: “What has been missing is the courage to name family stability and marriage as central to any serious solution.”