Shadowing Practice: What's holding back the 'white working class' in Grimsby? - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
C2
Shadowing Controls
0% completed (0/257 sentences)
All right.
⏸ Paused
Speed:
Repeat Count:
Wait Mode:
Sub Sync:0ms
All Sentences257 sentences
1
All right.
2
Stop going in and out the door!
3
There's such a thing as a working class culture, and it has its values, it has its things that people feel are right and wrong and all that.
4
It's just that the whole system is set up not to meet the needs of these kids, the curriculum, everything.
5
I'm just going to do a bad school, can't do it.
6
There aren't a huge amount of prospects within this area, so where are your aspirations coming from?
7
Your father was a fisherman, your grandfather was a fisherman, you followed on in their footsteps.
8
The kids need a chance.
9
Yeah, they do.
10
They need a chance.
11
There's no fishing no more.
12
There's no fishing.
13
It's nice for the memories, but there's no fishing.
14
Those memories run deep.
15
Grimsby was once the world's biggest fishing port, and there's huge pride in the legacy.
16
But as the industry declined, it's left the people and the place struggling.
17
This community is one of the most left behind in the UK, bottom 3%.
18
But it's a fantastic community.
19
It's the humour.
20
People are really down to earth.
21
They can spot a phony, a milo.
22
John Ellis has run the Shalom Youth Centre in East Marsh for 54 years, and he's worried about a growing problem.
23
The education system is totally failing a whole stream of young people.
24
This last 12 months is the first time ever we've come across young people who say they don't go anywhere.
25
They're just not engaging with any form of education.
26
So lads, why aren't you all in school today?
27
I won't go to school for like three months.
28
I went to school, got kicked out.
29
It's boring.
30
I don't like it.
31
We didn't even learn.
32
Everyone was messing about, wasn't it?
33
Like, no-one weren't.
34
I'd say there's easy 15, 20 of them that come in here that are all in the same situation, a couple of hours school in a day.
35
I suppose all this academy stuff has improved education for the top kids, for the young people we know, it's just a disaster because it's moved further away from the culture that they live in.
36
Yeah.
37
I want to get a good job.
38
And do you think you need school for that good school, Max?
39
Yeah.
40
I just can, can I?
41
Do you feel like you believe in yourself?
42
No. Not really.
43
Because I'm just going to do a bad school.
44
Can't do it.
45
Jackson's battle seems to be with the system though, not the subject.
46
Do you struggle with the work, Jax?
47
No, I'm in the top set for Mars, but then...
48
I was like you.
49
I was brought up down Rutland Street and my dad used to say to me all the time, you're just stupid.
50
Oh, people used to say that to me.
51
And I believed it for a long, long time.
52
And then when I was 38, I went to uni and got all the things that I wanted to get.
53
But I think round here, the culture round here, you are a bit like that.
54
It takes you a long time to grasp it.
55
that that's the things you need to do.
56
And you can't do anything, don't listen to the people that say you care.
57
Jackson is being brought up by his grandparents, Harold and Karen.
58
We want them to have the best, you know.
59
We never had it, so we want it better for them.
60
When I was a young boy, with Grimsby being a fish in town, whatever you did, it was like my old man would say to me,
61
get your ass out to sea.
62
Yeah, but that was in them days, and it's different now for these children.
63
The job was a job.
64
I mean, but these children don't have that anymore.
65
The kids.
66
Would you like your kids to be fishermen?
67
Yes.
68
Well, it would never happen because the vision and the disease can't focus.
69
That's exactly what I'm saying, but wouldn't you have liked that?
70
I would have, wouldn't you?
71
Yeah, so you pass it down.
72
It never happened.
73
The kids need a chance.
74
Yeah, they do.
75
They need a chance.
76
There's no fishing no more.
77
There's no fishing.
78
It's nice for the memories, but there's no fishing.
79
Hello?
80
There we are.
81
That school's boring, is it?
82
Wait till you start work.
83
Come on.
84
Come on, where are they?
85
Well, you've got a good brain.
86
Why do you want to be a builder?
87
It's the easiest job.
88
You're better than that.
89
You can do a lot more.
90
I think you should be a solicitor or an accountant.
91
That's where the pinger is.
92
At the local food bank, we meet Emily, who's volunteering while she's trying to find work.
93
I was quite lucky I was in Top Set and I enjoyed school, so they kind of encouraged us in Top Set to really try and go to university.
94
They would take us to the local university, show us what it was like.
95
I think that was really important for people like me whose parents didn't go to uni.
96
but actually I found my experience it was quite isolating being from my background because a lot of people that are quite posh and like all their parents have gone to uni and that kind of thing.
97
As I come back home because of like the cost of living and I want to be close to my parents it's not really a lot here.
98
I was kind of like told that if I went to uni I would like you know I'd get a degree and I'd be able to get a job and it would kind of
99
like answer all my questions or it's like the natural next step so I'm now 65k in debt which I'll probably never be able to pay it
100
off on the other side of the counter the barriers to success at school are more immediate I'm
101
at the food bank for a very good reason not afraid to admit it and she goes in wellies the next day I get
102
mowed at Everleigh we'll wear school shoes I can't afford any so I get the next month's payment if they're knackered and it's raining all the time as well The clothes are constantly wet, they're going to wash the same day.
103
I don't have a dryer at home, can't afford it.
104
They just want the children to sit, conform, and just face the front and be done.
105
It's an old-fashioned curriculum, what's not been changed over years, and kids are just learning different things now, aren't they?
106
I'm trying to find a job as well with the Job Centre.
107
I'm doing so many search hours a week.
108
I get the kids to school on time one day, oh, but it's still not the right coat, or it's still not the right pair of trousers, or...
109
Not, oh, congratulations, you've been on time every day this week.
110
Nothing of that.
111
None of the well done.
112
It's all just negativity and I can't stand it anymore.
113
Ten minutes up the road in Cleethorpes is St Peter's Primary School.
114
Did they eat anything today?
115
No. Miss Abbott has been in this school for over 30 years.
116
We are right at the heart of the community.
117
We know our kids, we know our parents, we know the support that they may need.
118
So we have our own food bank and school uniform clothing bank.
119
When the children come into reception, they don't come in at particularly high baselines.
120
And I think following COVID, I think it has changed the perception of people, their value in education as a way out of poverty or into employment.
121
Alright Year 6.
122
Do you all enjoy school?
123
Nope.
124
At least you're honest.
125
I enjoy parts of it.
126
Some parts are like dead fun and exciting but some parts you're just sat in a room writing for like an hour.
127
It's sometimes difficult for everyone.
128
Well yeah but that's part of learning isn't it?
129
I find things really difficult in my job.
130
We've done a lot of work on behaviour.
131
It's not about allowing behaviours just to slide, but it's about understanding them, respecting that those things have happened.
132
It hasn't ruined their day.
133
It hasn't ruined that relationship.
134
The primary schools are very much more people-centred, and then they go up to secondary school, and the whole thing is rammed into this highly academic procedure.
135
and it just destroys a lot of kids.
136
Back at the Shalom Centre, they're determined to catch and care for the ones who fall out of the system.
137
But they say that system must now change if every child is to have the same chance of success.
138
A lot of the young people who come here have absolutely got such a low self-esteem.
139
This is where the love starts.
140
It's like family, isn't it?
141
Like some of the kids here, I was the mum and dad's youth worker.
142
They know you, they trust you, and they'll come to you with anything they need help with or anything, but you need to have that relationship first to get to that stage with them.
143
They deserve so much better, all of them.
144
Right, come on, let's get home.
145
Right, love.
146
Well, why are the government focusing on this very specific group and what should they be doing about it all?
147
Well, earlier I spoke to the academic, Dr Lisa McKenzie, whose work focuses on class inequality and social justice, to Katie Carr, Director of Education at Public First, a think tank currently chairing a committee exploring this issue,
148
and from Blackpool, Alan Francis, the chair of the Social Mobility Commission and principal of Blackpool and Fylde College.
149
Dr Lisa McKenzie, you have just watched our film.
150
I just wondered what you made of it.
151
The people in that film were great.
152
You know, they were honest.
153
They were talking about their communities and not in a negative way either.
154
You know, they were talking about lots of positives about the area.
155
Very proud of their community.
156
Yeah, very proud and I think we should never forget that.
157
The government have decided to focus quite clearly on this group of children.
158
Why do you think that's important?
159
Because it's a very contested area, isn't it?
160
Who is working class?
161
What relevance is their whiteness?
162
Yes, yeah.
163
What's happened over the last, I don't know, perhaps even 20 years, is the inner city schools have upped their game.
164
And the de-industrialised communities and the coastal communities, they have been, I don't call them left behind, because that sort of suggests they've done something.
165
They were purposefully left out.
166
And, Katie Carl, what does your research show about this particular group of children and why succeeding seems to be so difficult?
167
I think there's something really interesting in the intersection between class and ethnicity here,
168
where we know that a third of white working-class pupils get a grade four or above in English and maths, which is kind of the essential qualifications that you need in order to access almost every part of education and employment compared with two-thirds of other pupils.
169
They're also three times more likely to be suspended than other children.
170
And we also see issues to do with the kind of family relationship between schools and white working-class communities.
171
Lots to talk about there, but Alan Francis, you're both the chair of the Social Mobility Commission and the chief executive of a further education college in Blackpool.
172
The big question is, why?
173
Is it ethnicity?
174
Is it place?
175
Is it de-industrialisation?
176
There's no easy answer, is there?
177
There's definitely no easy answer.
178
I'm really pleased that you're highlighting the problem.
179
But the very important part of that is the point that I think Lisa was making about de-industrialisation.
180
That occupational change in this country is a particularly geographically disparate one.
181
So we've seen London and the areas around London grow really spectacularly.
182
And we've seen areas outside of London, with exceptions like Manchester, and we're starting to see some changes in other big cities now, starting to improve, but they've been...
183
We can use the word left behind, we can use other words, but they've not had the same range of opportunities.
184
Exactly to the point that they're all important, these things, aren't they?
185
They are, they are all important.
186
But what we never do with social mobility is look at the way that middle-class people gain the system.
187
We always look at what we can do to working-class people.
188
You know, they need better education, they've got to have a better idea about education.
189
You know, there's something wrong with their culture, there's something wrong with them.
190
But the reality for the people in Grimsby and in communities like that across the country is, you know, education has to try and work for them, whether it's failing them or their...
191
Yeah, but what happens...
192
So you could, like, raise the standards at a school in Nottinghamshire, where I'm from, in Ashfield, or Mansfield, or Sunderland, or Blackpool.
193
You raise that standard, but then what?
194
Because they're coming out of school at 18.
195
To what?
196
To a post-industrial community that has been hollowed out.
197
And what does all that do to expectations, hope, aspirations among these kids and their families?
198
When we asked white working-class parents what they wanted for their children, They all said that they wanted them to be happy, but that that happiness came from localness.
199
Mostly working class people have got lots of aspiration, but it's a different aspiration to perhaps what politicians and the media think it should be.
200
Alan Francis, that idea that social mobility is something that you do to working class, that you make them almost feel ashamed of where they're from, what do you make of that?
201
We've been arguing at the Social Mobility Commission in the last three or four years when I've been there that actually we need to change the way that we think about
202
social mobility away from the kind of Dick Whittington go to an elite university get an elite job in London view which is work for some and
203
it's helped London greatly but hasn't helped the wider majority of people so we are interested in a version of social mobility that says you don't have to change
204
your class so when we talk about education we've always got a problem that education has to meet the needs of a very very wide range of people so it's got to meet the needs of
205
people who grew up in Grimsby that do want to go to elite universities but at the same time it's got to meet the needs of the young people we can
206
see in the film our solution to that is to provide more choice you know to strengthen vocational routes creating pathways into occupations which
207
allow people to build on their strengths but that doesn't mean declining standards it does mean high quality choices for everybody but there are difficult conversations that I assume we accept have to be had about parental involvement.
208
So I think there are really brilliant examples of schools doing fantastic things on parent engagement.
209
Why don't parents engage?
210
A lot of this is very rational for white working-class pupils and parents in that they do not perceive education to be relevant and to be useful to what they want to achieve in life.
211
It is definitely true that white working class parents don't always engage with education.
212
It's also true that white working class people are also stigmatised, looked down on, and these forms of prejudice around them as well.
213
There's similar arguments, though, to many black and ethnic minority students, aren't they?
214
They are, because the issue is class.
215
Can I just pick up on that point?
216
Because I think that was another thing that we heard really powerfully, was how uncomfortable people are talking about white working class, actually.
217
And that is partly because we don't have a definition that people agree on for white working class.
218
So I think that we need to surface this conversation, give people a definition to work from.
219
I want to come back to you, Alan, if you would, about what you do in education right now, because it is true,
220
for example, that some ethnic minority free school meals pupils, because that's the definition that seems to be currently the most workable one, are doing much better than their white equivalents.
221
And we need to understand why that is, don't we?
222
We do.
223
We also need to recognise that class, in some respects, is a helpful category, in other respects, creates great complexity.
224
So it's not universally the case that all working-class students do badly.
225
That's just not true.
226
But there is an issue when you start to look at who's doing well and who isn't.
227
I noticed the woman in the clip who was talking about the difficulties she has every day just getting to school on time and i'm sure
228
that's come out of other people's research these are difficult challenges but the problem is for the school is if they start
229
to make exceptions for particular families then they're going to be seen as reducing expectations or lowering expectations and
230
these are difficult trade-offs you're saying quite gently that actually should parents should schools be less gentle should there should be more boundaries more expectations
231
i don't care whether you're happy or not you're going to school is that it we also have to be very realistic i was interested also by the guy in the film who talked
232
with quite a lot of nostalgia about the jobs that have gone from grimsby but we have to be really honest those jobs are not coming back those days
233
are not coming back so the future is technology the future is higher skilled occupations i mean that's true isn't it yeah it is true as well
234
but one of the things that we we don't we haven't done is we haven't measured this because all we haven't protected people as well
235
so we've got protected characteristics for lots of groups of people but the one group of people that can be uh you
236
can be prejudiced against them without without fear is white working class people because if you white middle class people are protected by their class
237
whereas white working class people can you can you can be prejudiced against them i mean there's still discrimination even even with the law
238
against many many groups yes there is a number of groups who don't do much better than there is but socioeconomic status is not protected
239
at all throughout so so what we we don't have a good measurement of what's happening because free school meals is not a good measurement
240
um also the tick box of what ethnicity you are is not a good measurement um and then also the government have
241
taken this decision to focus on a group they call the white working class they are talking about mission coastal and mission northeast which are place-based initiatives to try and put in money, resource and target these children.
242
Will it work?
243
Is it the answer?
244
So there are vanishingly few schools that do as well for white working class pupils as other groups of pupils.
245
So I don't think we know enough about what the solutions are for this group.
246
Taking very place-focused approaches to a group that is essentially all across the country is difficult.
247
If you're growing up in Sunderland or Mansfield or Blackpool and still where you live is still being hollowed out, there's still not any opportunities.
248
What does social mobility mean?
249
It means getting on the M1 and going to London.
250
We heard from pupils across the country that they are fascinated by the idea of apprenticeships.
251
They've really bought into this earning while you learn thing.
252
But in white working-class majority areas, there are really few apprenticeships.
253
So I think there are measures that we need to put in place to sort of incentivise small and medium-sized employers in white working-class areas to offer these sorts of things.
254
Dr Lisa McKenzie, Katie Carr and Alan Francis, thanks so much for talking to us today.
255
Thank you.
256
Thank you.
257
See you.
4.9/5 on App Store & Google Play
Shadowing English
On Mobile
Learn English anytime, anywhere with the Shadowing English app. Improve your communication skills today!
Track your learning progress
AI grading and error correction
Rich video library
Context & Background
The video "What's holding back the 'white working class' in Grimsby?" explores the challenges faced by the community of Grimsby, a place historically known for its fishing industry. The speaker addresses the deep-rooted culture of the working class, emphasizing that educational and economic systems are failing young people in this area. This community has experienced a significant decline, leaving many residents feeling disillusioned about their future. The insights provided highlight the disconnect between the education system and the cultural realities of the students, pointing out the urgent need for reform and support to enable a brighter future for these young individuals.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- "I won't go to school for like three months." - This phrase indicates a student's disengagement with education, which can be helpful in discussing similar experiences.
- "It's boring. I don't like it." - A straightforward expression of boredom that is useful for sharing feelings about activities.
- "Everyone was messing about." - Use this phrase to describe a chaotic or unproductive environment, applicable in various contexts.
- "I want to get a good job." - This reflects aspirations and can be used in various discussions about future goals and ambitions.
- "I just can't do it." - A common expression of frustration that many learners can relate to when facing challenges.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To effectively use shadowing techniques to improve your English speaking practice, particularly with the content of this video, follow these steps:
- Choose a Short Segment: Start by selecting a short segment from the video transcript where the speaker expresses a clear thought or feeling. This will make it easier to follow along.
- Listen and Understand: Play the segment multiple times to familiarize yourself with the context and pronunciation. Pay attention to the intonation and emotion in the speaker’s voice.
- Pause and Repeat: After listening, pause the video and try to repeat what you've heard verbatim. Focus on mirroring the accent and rhythm, as this will help you improve your English pronunciation.
- Record Yourself: Use a recording device or app to capture your repetition. Compare your pronunciation and rhythm to the original audio to identify areas for improvement.
- Practice Regularly: Consistency is key. Dedicate time each day to shadow speech from the video—this will gradually enhance your fluency and confidence in speaking.
By utilizing these shadow speak techniques, you will not only develop better pronunciation but also gain insights into the struggles and aspirations of others, making your language learning more relevant and engaging.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
☕ Buy us a coffee
ShadowingEnglish remains 100% free thanks to your support. Server and AI costs are high — your coffee keeps us going! 🙏