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Poor white pupils lag behind black peers
By Chris Cook, Education Correspondent
Published: April 25 2011 21:00 | Last updated: April 25 2011 21:00
White, British schoolchildren in the country’s poorest communities lag behind their black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi peers, a Financial Times analysis of more than three million sets of exam results reveals.
Poor, white children even achieve worse average results than deprived pupils for whom English is a second language.
The average black, British pupil from among the poorest fifth of children, identified by postcode analysis, gains the equivalent of one more GCSE pass at A*, the highest grade, than the average white child from a similar background.
The figures highlight the challenge facing the coalition, which has identified social mobility as one of its top concerns. Earlier this month, the government published a “social mobility strategy”, which stated that “tackling the opportunity deficit . . . is our guiding purpose”.
Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust and Britain’s leading educational philanthropist, said the FT results show that “if the coalition is really serious about raising social mobility, it will need to find a way to crack the problems of the English, white working-class”.
Poor, white children have fallen behind by the time they reach the age of 7, the analysis of the 2009 National Pupil Database reveals. The difference between white and non-white pupils is steady until at least the age of 11, after which it grows rapidly.
About half of the poor, white attainment gap at the age of 16 is driven by poor exam performances outside London where schools are much more likely to cater to all-white or nearly all-white pupil populations.
London schools have benefited from being the testing ground for educational reforms, such as academies, over the past decade, which has allowed the capital to offer better schooling to poor children.
Sir Peter, who ran a seven-year pilot project to open up Liverpool’s best-performing academic school to working-class children, said that low achievement by poor children is “a huge problem in the northern, working-class cities”.
In Hull, the worst-performing local authority area, a child eligible for free school meals, a widely used indicator of poverty, has a more than two-thirds chance of finishing in the bottom fifth of national exam results at the age of 16. In London, the equivalent figure is less than 30 per cent.
The Department for Education said that it was making changes to school funding rules that would help to close the “large and unacceptable” attainment differences between groups in England.
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Source:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/760d03d4-6f71 ... z1KZFp88cL
