GillbornsubtoSewell
Notes on: Gillborn, D., Bhopla, K., Crawford, C.,
demack, S., Gholami, R. Kitching, K., Kiwan, D,
Warmnington, P. Evidence for the
Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.B
irmingham: University of
Birmingham CRRE. DOI:
10.25500/epapers.bham.00003389
Dave Harris
They focused especially on research concerned with
the experiences and attainments of black British
children and young people, especially 'students of
Black Caribbean and dual heritage (mixed:
White/Black Caribbean) ethnic origin' (2)
They answered four questions provided by Sewell, with summaries
first
Question one: what are the main causes of
racial and ethnic disparities in the UK and why
Racism means unfairly discriminating against
minority ethnic groups including 'unrecognised
bias' and 'stereotyping, neglect and/or
omission''. Research shows the multiple ways in
which it is a key factor with the education system
affecting policy and practice at all levels.
However racism has never been seen as the only
relevant factor in understanding disparities.
Statistics can be useful in mapping broad trends
but there are always questions about reliability
and validity of data . Quantitative research is
shaped by assumptions theories and interests of
statisticians which can introduce unintended bias
data [same with subjective data too, of course].
The Timpson Report [cited in Sewell] shows the
problems by confusing association with causation,
and by adopting a 'garbage can' approach with too
many factors, often tenuously linked to the
problem, which lessened the 'apparent significance
of each'[even after factor analysis?]. Racism is
often seen as a residual category after other more
dominant factors, but it 'threads through and
influences these other issues', such as income,
class and poverty.
Education statistics have been widely
misunderstood, for example in presenting the white
working class [in general] as the lowest
attainment group — 'this is factually incorrect
and socially divisive' (2) [white working class
boys eligible for free school meals, FSM, is one
of the lowest attaining groups, but they are a
minority of white working class students] .
Eligibility for FSM is a crude proxy measure of
poverty which excludes most people who consider
themselves working class — 60% of adults consider
themselves working class [a notorious overestimate
of course] but only 11% of white British school
students are FSM. In every ethnic group FSM
students achieve lower average results than those
not eligible. 'White British FSM students are not
[always, they argue] the least likely to
succeed in any of the main measures of
achievement' Looking at the 87% who are not FSM,
'the lowest attaining groups are consistently
Gypsy/Roma, Black Caribbean, dual heritage and
Pakistani students', but an obsessive focus on
white British FSM students has diverted attention
from these inequities [white categories might
include gypsy/Roma?].
There are frequent deficit analyses that
stereotype black communities and divert attention
from schools. Qualitative research 'Drawing on
interviews and observations inside schools' has
long shown that black students experience more
negative teacher expectations allowing for gender
and social class and that these are
institutionalised through streaming, setting and
tiering. Colourblind school-based policies such as
zero tolerance approaches to discipline 'actually
discriminate in systematic ways' and produce more
frequent and harsher sanctions for black students.
Question two: what could be done to improve
representation retention and progression for
people of different ethnic backgrounds in public
sector workforces?
The teaching force is disproportionately white and
'underprepared for multi-ethnic classrooms'.
School leadership is often such and 'replicates
patterns of institutional rates inequity'. 'More
than 1/3 of minority teachers report having
experienced discrimination at work in the last 12
months'. Those who do reach leadership positions
report feeling unsupported and over scrutinised
and judged more harshly. Meaningful training is
urgently required. Current leadership training is
mostly silent on race and racism. Ethnic
monitoring is needed, but it is often 'an empty
gesture' (3)
Question three: how could educational
performance across different ethnic and
socio-economic status groups be improved?
OFSTED needs to treat race equality as more than
an optional extra. Trainee teachers should
undertake serious work in relation to patterns of
discrimination but there is no current formal
requirement. Equality Impact Assessments should be
used in a more serious and constructive way. More
data should be collected, not just restricted to
quantitative material, building on the Ethnicity
Facts and Figures Website, which needs to be
improved.
Question four how should the school
curriculum adopt in response to ethnic diversity?
Key facts about black history are 'inaccurately
conveyed or ignored entirely' erasing the vital
role played by minority peoples. The English
literature curriculum is 'almost entirely devoid
of ethnic diversity. The main characters in
children's books are almost 8 times more likely to
be animals than people of colour'. There is a
public appetite for greater diversity and more
teaching about racial injustice according to a
2020 survey, and for each major ethnic group.
In more detail:
On racial disparities and its causes, they cannot
adequately summarise all the research so they
focus on the research based on black British
children [bit disingenuous -- these are important
to them politically?] especially black Caribbean
dual heritage, who are often separated in official
statistics even though they are demographically
interconnected. Black Caribbean communities are
long established and have often been at the
forefront of campaigns for racial justice,
although they continue to experience persistent
and significant race inequity in education
'regardless of their social class status'
[references to Gillborn's own work]. Inequalities
are not limited to education. They are extensive
and long lasting showing there are no easy fixes,
[and so they seem to be?] structural, rooted in
the organisational skill the training of teachers
and the priorities in policies regardless of which
party is in power.
The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities must
be aware of the persistent and complex operation
of racism, actions and processes that lead to
unfair discrimination. Of course racism is not the
only factor, but it is a key factor, and one which
has been difficult to address, for example the
disappearance of the issue from policy even after
the impetus of the MacPherson report – 'many
stakeholders working the field believed that much
of the initial progress had been wiped away' (4).
Problems with statistics include ignoring children
in private schools, thereby ignoring 'a group of
disproportionately white and highly advantaged
students'. Often surveys use a small group of
children to estimate the national picture, but
that has problems in sampling and interpretation
[a particular problem with testimony too of
course!] There are unrecognised assumptions, and
the more researchers manipulate the data the more
they are likely to introduce unrecognised biases.
This is especially so with claims of finding
hidden patterns and explanations revealed only by
complex manipulations such as regression
modelling. One US report 'included a long shopping
list of issues (many with no obvious link to the
question)… What critics call 'garbage can
modelling: "simply the signal is overwhelmed by
the noise"' [rather obscure reference to an
American study -- introduced because they want to
criticise Timpson below?]. There's the problem of
overfitting a model, asking too much of the
available data, and this can have implications.
The example is 'recent discussions about the
significance of racism and discrimination as a
factor in the disproportionate impact of the covid
19 pandemic on people of minority ethnic
heritage'. The problem seems to be that many of
the factors involved were taken to be discrete
drivers of inequality without realising that they
were shaped by discrimination and unfairness
including poverty, home ownership, parental
education and pre-existing health issues. Racism
was taken to account for discrepancies after all
the other conceivable issues had been tested, but
it cross contaminates other factors. It
appears to operate as something which is
just left over but it is a more complex set of
processes 'working through each aspect of
society'.
The Timpson study on exclusion failed to mention
racism at all, although it was considered by
Sewell. It confused association with causal
mechanisms and it failed to understand how racism
works and thus downplayed the extent of race
inequity. It is agreed that we cannot infer that
one thing causes another, but did argue that it
had found what drives higher rates of exclusion.
It provided detail about its calculations but not
enough to rework them. As a result it 'has the
characteristics of '"garbage can" modelling'. The
regression analysis assumes ethnicity is only
relevant when everything else has been accounted
for, but it does not consider for example that
black students are more likely to live in
economically disadvantaged households, more likely
to be labelled as SEN, more likely to attend low
attaining schools. Overall, these calculations
'reduced the supposed level of disproportionate
exclusion experienced by black British students'
and removed it altogether for Gypsy Roma and
Traveller students [a nice point here saying that
Roma children are actually excluded from school at
five times the white rate which means, for Timpson
'they are not excluded as much as they should be
all other things considered' (5)]. Timpson
concluded that ethnicity is not a main factor and
there are more complex causes, and this 'belittles
the historical experiences of black and other
minoritized communities'. It has ignored earlier
criticisms of similar statistics and claims
superior insight.
Headlines frequently proclaim that white working
class students are the least attaining group,
which fits in with the left behind narrative
[several newspaper references are provided,and
there is good analysis in Gillborn 2010].
Since 2010 the Education Select committee has
conducted 90 enquiries, but only two were focused
on a single ethnic group, in both cases white
students. The whole focus is problematic:
First, these figures exclude most white people who
think of themselves as working class, around 60%
of British adults. Focusing on those eligible for
FSM means we are talking about 11% of white
British students in state schools [still a
significant minority though]. Overall, white
students are still least likely to be in the FSM
group, with only Chinese and Indian students less
likely. More likely to be FSM are 'Gypsy/Roma
(39%), Bangladeshi (25%), mixed: white/black
Caribbean (23%), black Caribbean (22%) and black
African (20%' ) (7). 'White British FSM students
are among the lowest attainers but they are not
the least likely to succeed', according to the
government's Ethnicity Facts and Figures website:
The measures are
those achieving the Ebacc, those achieving a
strong pass, grade 5 above in English and maths,
and the average score in relation to attainment
eight, (performance in eight GCSEs). The
findings are:
Overall, FSM students do less
well than their peers in the same ethnic group
and this is the case in each ethnic group.
Gypsy/Roma students are the lowest attaining
group for each measure regardless of FSM. For
ethnic group, the lowest among FSM
'although not always in the same order;
Gypsy/Roma, White British, black Caribbean and
dual heritage' (8). Among non-FSM students the
bottom four places are again occupied by
Gypsy/Roma, black Caribbean, dual heritage and
Pakistani students, and this time the order is
always the same and white British students do
not appear in this group at all
Focusing on white FSM kids is a misrepresentation
and it can 'inflame racial hostility'. It does not
describe the experience of 60% of white people or
identifiers as working class and can eclipse wider
questions of unequal attainments between ethnic
groups. Those who are not eligible for FSM rarely
feature in policy speeches at all and among these,
'four minority ethnic groups consistently
experience significant inequities of attainment'.
In-school factors have been neglected, despite the
Wanless Report that drew on research saying that
black students were treated differently in
schools. Often this work was greeted by attempts
to deploy 'the deficit perspective' that tried to
focus on mine outside communities instead.
Qualitative research has shown for a long time
that 'black students experience systematically
more negative teacher expectations than their
white peers of the same gender and social class
background' [lots of his own research cited here].
Question two on representation retention and
progression opportunities.
Quality of teachers and teaching skills is an
important factor, but 'despite the best of
intentions and sometimes without conscious
awareness… Why teachers tend to view black
students as more likely to cause trouble than to
excel academically'. This tendency is currently
described as '"unconscious bias"' and it can
become part of the fabric of the school and become
reinforced by processes. If so 'it is a textbook
example of institutional racism' (10). Factors
that are important include the teaching force that
is disproportionately white and underprepared for
multi-ethnic classrooms, school leadership,
unawareness of the experiences of minoritized
teachers, including '55% report being described as
"oversensitive", "paranoid" or "aggressive" when
they challenged racially unacceptable behaviour'
(11). Meaningful training for gatekeepers is
crucial, including an awareness of racism and
institutionalised barriers, reviewing of key
educational leadership programs, ethnic monitoring
and so on.
Question three on improving education performance
across different ethnic and socio-economic groups.
Attainment has risen dramatically since the late
1980s so young people are capable of succeeding.
OFSTED should drive more change, and race equality
should be a mandatory aspect of Ofsted inspections
again. Initial teacher education should include
discrimination related to race and ethnic origin
as a formal requirement. This should be meaningful
equality impact analysis, as in the aftermath of
the Stephen Lawrence enquiry, with proper scrutiny
rather than attempts to justify policy. There
should be better collection and use of data, but
not the garbage can style. We should also rethink
the categories: 'mixed' is not a useful category,
'Asian' is not useful category, 'Chinese' is
misleading — Chinese students account for 0.4% of
state school students compared with 5.7% black and
11.4% Asian, so it is misleading to list them as a
major ethnic group.
Question four on the school curriculum.
This is now a highly contested area, with wide
acknowledgement that the curriculum needs to be
updated, made more diverse and representative,
with evidence that this can have direct positive
impact on attendance and achievement. If we
remember that 'around one in three school students
identifies as of minority ethnic heritage, it must
surely be a cause for concern' [but there are
marked regional differences]. Specifically:
The official UK citizenship has an inaccurate
history section that erases minorities as people;
the English literature curriculum is almost
entirely devoid of ethnic diversity; children's
books are dominated by white characters; there is
a public appetite for greater diversity and a
demand for teaching about race and racial
equality.
[Loads of references to follow-up]
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