10:30-11:30 Wednesday 19 November | Cinema 1, Watershed | Part of the Festival of Economics 2025
Across the UK, working-class boys and men face some persistent barriers to educational achievement and economic opportunity. Alex Blower and Richard Gater join Bethan Staton to discuss their recent books Lost Boys and The 21st Century Ladz, which explore these challenges from the classroom to the labour market.
Alex Blower
Alex has an established reputation as a leading voice in national conversations relating to masculinity, education, inequality and access to Higher Education.Since completing his doctoral research which focused inequality and access to university for white working-class boys in the West Midlands in 2020, he has been a regular speaker at national conferences of the British Sociological Association, British Educational Research Association, Forum for Access and Continuation, and Higher Education Liaison Officers Association, delivering talks, workshops and training with practitioners across the education sector.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 published by Policy Press in the summer of 2025.
Richard Gater
Cardiff University
Richard Gater is a researcher at the Centre for Adult Social Care Research, Cardiff University, and author of The 21st Century Lads: Continuity and Changes among Marginalised Young Men from the South Wales Valleys. His research interests include masculinities, gender, education, employment, social class, and health and well-being.
Bethan Staton
Bethan Staton is a reporter for the Financial Times, covering education. She has recently written about the UK’s skills gap, the politics of intergenerational inequality, government funding for higher education, and the impact of the pandemic on schools. She also writes about economics and other areas of public policy, and before joining the FT was a reporter at Sky News, and a freelance journalist in the middle east.
