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ISSUES: Racial & Ethnic Discrimination
Chapter 1: Racism & discrimination
Teaching profession fails to reflect multi-
cultural student population
There is a severe shortage of ethnicminority professionals at every level of education,
charity finds.
By Kate Hodge and Sarah Marsh
E
thnic minority professionals
are under-represented at every
level of education, according to
a new report from youth employment
charity Elevation Networks.
The report, which analysed research
on employment in UK state-funded
primary and secondary schools,
found that last year just 6% of state
primary school teachers and 9.9% of
qualified and unqualified teachers in
maintained secondary schools were
from black, Asian and minority ethnic
(BAME) backgrounds.
The research also analysed colleges,
universities and higher education,
where the picture was equally
disappointing: just 7% professors and
8% of senior lecturers were from BAME
backgrounds.
This compares unfavourably with the
UK population overall as a whole as
the last UK census in 2011 showed that
13% of people identified as BAME. This
percentage is even more pronounced
in schools: 30.4% of primary students
and 26.6% of secondary students in
state schools are from minority ethnic
groups, according to figures from the
Department for Education (DfE).
The research,
Race to the Top: 2
, also
highlights a long-standing lack of
diversity in senior leadership in
schools: just 3% of headteachers in
state-funded primary schools and
3.6% in maintained secondary schools
are from an ethnic minority groups.
Nicole Haynes, a headteacher at Mount
Carmel Catholic College for Girls, says
thegapat senior andmiddle leadership
level is disappointing. She puts this in
part down to the recruitment process,
saying interview panels are often not
ethnically or gender-balanced.
Mary Bousted, general secretary
of the Association of Teachers and
Lecturers, agrees: “It’s absolutely the
case that ethnic minority teachers
are unrepresented in the teaching
profession, but more so in school
leadership roles and that’s worrying
in a multicultural society because
children need to see teachers and
school leaders from BAME role models
to show the importance of education.”
A comparison of teacher workforce
research with census data suggests
there’s an over-representation of
BAME teachers in outer London and
the south-east. The West Midlands,
however, suffers the worst shortfall:
6,613 ethnic minority teachers would
be needed to ensure staff represent
their student populations.
As
well
as
affecting
student
engagement with school, the lack of
rolemodels could also deepen the staff
recruitment and retention crisis that
plagues teaching. Commenting on
the report, Christine Blower, general-
secretary of the National Union of
Teachers, said: “It is very important that
the teaching profession, alongside all
other professions, is representative of
modern British society. The prejudice
and barriers that BAME communities
face mean that many do not consider
teaching as a profession despite the
important role they could play.”
Based on current figures, the report
estimates that we would need 51,132
more primary school teachers and
14,429 more secondary teachers to
achieve proportional representation.
But these do not seem to be
forthcoming. According to 2013–14
statistics from the National College
for Teaching and Leadership, just
12% of trainee teachers were from
minority ethnic groups – a figure that
has remained fairly consistent for five
years.
Bousted
suggests
schools-based
teacher-training
has
exacerbated
the pipeline problem for recruiting
minority ethnic teachers. She said:
“Ethnic minority candidates are less
likely to get accepted into these
training programmes because of
bias. It might not be conscious but
we know that school-based training
[programmes] accept fewer BAME
teachers and one of the reasons for this
is that when universities co-ordinated
teacher training there were lots of
ways they supported applications for
ethnic minority candidates, such as
through access courses.”
The report makes a number of policy
recommendations to improve diversity
among education professionals, such
as having more work experience/
volunteering opportunities that feed
into the teacher-training programmes.
It also suggests making the curriculum
more representative to encourage
BAME students to consider teaching as
a career.
Dr Debbie Weekes-Bernard, head
of research at the Runnymede
Trust, says research supports this
recommendation. She said: “Where
minority ethnic pupils have a negative
experience of education they are
less likely to consider teaching as
a potential future career. A great
deal of work explores the very low
numbers of particularly black students
choosing history as a degree subject
[and how this] has had an impact not
just on those taking initial teacher
training courses featuring history as a
specialism but also on those going on
to study and then teach it as a subject
within universities.”
19 November 2015
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