Pupils in parts of England are likely to never have a teacher of the same ethnic background, in part because minority ethnic applicants are less likely to be accepted on to teacher training courses, research has revealed.
The north-east has the least diverse teaching workforce in the country, with students of Pakistani or black-African origin likely to never have a teacher of similar ethnicity in their classrooms.
Researchers at Durham University’s evidence centre for education also found that while London has the most diverse teaching workforce, it lags so far behind the capital’s minority ethnic pupil population that the gap is the widest in England.
Prof Stephen Gorard, the centre’s director, said the low numbers were partly the result of minority ethnic applicants to teacher training being more likely to be rejected, with a “considerable impact” for pupils.
“The evidence is quite clear that not being taught by someone who sounds and looks like them could affect pupils for things like suspensions and exclusions, the categorisations for special needs, their absence and their happiness, expectations and aspirations,” Gorard said.
Gorard called for Ofsted, which inspects teacher training courses, to start looking at the acceptance rates for initial teacher training by ethnicity and querying any “startling differences” at individual institutions.
The new research found a wide gap in acceptance rates for teacher training hopefuls based on ethnicity. Minority ethnic applicants to initial teacher training are substantially less likely to be accepted, with applicants recorded as black having the lowest acceptance rate and substantially lower than those for white applicants.
Minority ethnic groups undertaking initial teacher training have lower success rates at each stage, including a much higher rate of failing to progress from gaining qualified teaching status to getting their first teaching job.
The study did find that the number of teachers from black-Caribbean backgrounds had risen and was now proportionate to the number of pupils of black-Caribbean origin nationally.
Jabeer Butt, chief executive of the Race Equality Foundation charity, said the evidence on racial disparity in recruitment was “not surprising” but was still “deeply disappointing”.
He said despite public commitments in response to the murder of George Floyd, an African-American man who was killed in the US by a police officer in 2020 sparking international protests, “substantial change” was yet to be seen.
Butt said: “Worryingly, the lower chance of being recruited is part of a wider picture of poorer career progression for black and other ethnic minority teachers, including in securing headteacher roles.
“Government needs to act by adopting a meaningful race equality strategy, with each department asked to adopt a plan of action and report on it to parliament on an annual basis.”
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), said Durham University’s research was in line with the union’s own surveys.
“There is a serious problem of under-representation of black communities in the teaching force. Teacher training institutions will have to look hard at their recruitment procedures,” Courtney said.
“In some cases, the school environment is a place of discomfort for black teachers, and while a great number feel supported by their managers there are still too many who do not.”
The study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, used data from England’s school workforce census as well as Ucas data for teacher training applicants and evidence from international teaching and learning surveys.
In the north-east of England, 89% of teachers and 86% of pupils identified as white British. While children of black-African origin made up only 1.3% of the student population, just 0.1% of the teaching workforce in the north-east identified as black-African. Ethnic Pakistani children made up just 1.5% of pupils, with only 0.27% of teachers having the same ethnicity.
“It is clear that ethnic disproportionality is real, probably has many possible determinants, and creates damage for the education system in a number of ways,” the study concludes.
“Addressing it is not currently a hot policy issue in England, unlike the ‘underachievement’ of white working-class boys has been in recent years, for example. This needs to change.”
