Parental indifference and pressure from contemporaries not to take school seriously are responsible for the educational failure, which is not found in many other ethnic groups.

The issue is highlighted in research by Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, and will be published next month. He has been asked by David Cameron to produce recommendations on social policy for the party’s election manifesto.

His report says that only 17 per cent of white working-class boys have five or more A to C grades at GCSE, compared with 69 per cent of Chinese boys from equally poor backgrounds. Boys from Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, African and Caribbean backgrounds also entitled to free school meals — the standard measure of poverty — now all do better than their white counterparts.

Mr Duncan Smith says that lack of parental involvement is the prime factor behind white educational failure, not weak schools or poor teaching.

“That poor children from Chinese and Indian backgrounds, where family structures are strong and learning is highly valued, outscore so dramatically children from homes where these values are often missing suggests that culture not ethnicity or cash is the key to educational achievement,” he says in the forward to the report.

“The policymaking implications are clear. To prevent the growth of an uneducated and unemployable underclass of forgotten children, we have to get their parents to engage in their learning and schooling from an early age.”

However, he criticises a “target-driven” school system which he says concentrates on achieving success for middle-class families. Despite a 50 per cent increase in the education budget in the past decade, academic standards among the poorest pupils have scarcely risen at all.

More than 26,000 children — 5 per cent of all 16-year-olds — still leave school without a single GCSE pass at any grade.

“Social mobility is actually declining. A child from a low-income home now stands less chance of getting a well-paid job in adulthood than his counterpart did in 1970. Such children are more likely than ever to remain trapped in a cycle of poverty,” the report says.

The Conservatives are likely to try to encourage white working-class parents to take an interest in their children’s education. However, having accused the Government of nationalising childhood, with an array of parenting classes, they are likely to work through the voluntary sector, such as charities.

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