Social class affects white pupils' exam results more than those of ethnic minorities study
Poverty affects grades less among non-white children with social divide noticeable from primary school
Jessica Shepherd, education correspondent
The Guardian, Friday 3 September 2010
Study finds that white children's social class affects their school-leaving grades. Photograph: John Alex Maguire/Rex Features
A child's social class is more likely to determine how well they perform in school if they are white than if they come from an ethnic minority, researchers have discovered.
The gap between the proportion of working-class pupils and middle-class pupils who achieve five A* to C grades at GCSE is largest among white pupils, academics found.
They analysed official data showing thousands of teenagers' grades between 2003 and 2007. Some 31% of white pupils on free school meals – a key indicator of poverty – achieve five A* to Cs, compared with 63% of white pupils not eligible for free school meals, they found.
This gap between social classes – of 32 percentage points – is far higher for white pupils than for other ethnic groups.
For Bangladeshi pupils, the gap is seven percentage points, while for Chinese pupils it is just five percentage points, the researchers discovered.
The study – Ethnicity and class: GCSE performance – will be presented to the British Educational Research Association conference at Warwick University tomorrow.
It argues that one of the reasons why class determines how white pupils perform at school is that white working-class parents may have lower expectations of their children than working-class parents from other ethnic groups.
The researchers, from the Institute of Education and Queen Mary, both part of the University of London, also found that Chinese pupils from families in routine and manual jobs perform better than white pupils from managerial and professional backgrounds. They also discovered that African and Bangladeshi girls had vastly improved their GCSE grades in the last few years.
Professor Ramesh Kapadia, who led the study, said this may be linked to "cultural aspirations and expectations, as well as parental support for education. This appears to have been the case for Indian and Chinese pupils for many years," he said.
A separate study has found that a similar pattern can be identified for children in primary schools: social class is more likely to determine how well a pupil will perform if that child is white than if they are from other ethnic groups.
Researchers from the University of Warwick analysed the scores of pupils living in the south London borough of Lambeth. White children from well-off homes were the top-performing ethnic group at the age of 11, while white pupils eligible for free school meals had among the worst test results.
Professor Steve Strand, who will present the findings to the British Educational Research Association's conference today, said the effects of poverty are "much less pronounced for most minority ethnic groups".
"Those from low socio-economic backgrounds seem to be much more resilient to the impact of disadvantage than their white British peers," he said.
However, he added that well-off white children may do particularly well because their parents might be "a bit more savvy about ensuring that they go to schools with similar pupils".
"More recent immigrant groups, such as the Portuguese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities often see education as the way out of the poverty they have come from. By contrast, if you've been in a white working-class family for three generations, with high unemployment, you don't necessarily believe that education is going to change that.
"All of these factors may combine to make the effect of socio-economic status remarkably strong for white British kids."
Meanwhile, headteachers' leaders have warned secondary schools to consider axing subjects that few pupils take to cope with imminent budget cuts.
The Association of School and College Leaders told the Times Educational Supplement that A-levels in foreign languages, for example, could be scrapped. Last week, French dropped out of the top 10 most popular GCSEs for the first time. "Languages in some schools will be vulnerable," he said. "We are already worried about them and this could speed up the decline."
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