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Ethnic Underachievement In Education Essay

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The British education system acts as an agent of secondary socialisation which delivers pupils with the norms and values of society. The focus on ethnic differences in achievement has been prominent in recent years as there has been a consistency of black underachievement and black exclusions from education, which has evoked numerous explanations as to why this pattern continuously occurs.
The DFES 2006 reports that only 39% of Black pupils achieve 5+ A*-C GCSE grades which denotes that Black boys are among the lowest achievers at secondary school level compared to pupils from ethnic minority groups. The DFES additionally reports that ‘Nationally, African-Caribbean pupils are nearly three times more likely to be excluded from school as white pupils, with more than 84% of permanent exclusions being boys’ (DfES 2006). Diane Abbott, a London member of Parliament (2002) stated ‘there is a silent catastrophe happening in Britain’s schools in the way they continue to fail Black British children’ due to the increasing number of black pupils being permanently excluded from schools.
Adolph Cameron, head of the Jamaican Teachers' …show more content…

The idea of labelling has persistently been brought to attention when discussing ethnic underachievement in education, due to the effects it can/may have. According to Oxford Dictionaries, ‘labelling’ is defined as attaching a label to someone or something or assign to a category (e.g. streaming). In education, pupils are often labelled either positively or negatively by their teachers depending on their behaviour. Often when students are labelled negatively for example ‘thick’ or ‘troublesome’, it leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby pupils eventually believe the labels that teachers have attached to them. Therefore under these circumstances, if they are predicted to fail or achieve low grades, it is likely to

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