A study recently published and peer-reviewed in Routledge Open Research, found that pupils in parts of England are likely to never have a teacher of a similar ethnicity. The research article which explored ‘The disproportionality of ethnic minority teachers in England: trends, patterns, and problems’, was authored by the research team at Durham University Evidence Centre for Education (Stephen Gorard, Wenqing Chen, Yiyi Tan, Beng Huat See, Carolina Gazmuri, Antonina Tereshchenko, Feyisa Demie, Nadia Siddiqui) and uses existing aggregated official publicly available datasets to describe the patterns and trends in the proportion of ethnic minority teachers compared to ethnic minority pupils in England 2015-2021. Data comes from the Department for Education (DfE), the University and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and development (OECD/TALIS), and the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The paper’s key findings were featured in an exclusive article in The Guardian on August 29th. The Durham team found that there are proportionately more White British teachers than in the student intakes to schools. This disproportion (where there are more White British teachers among teachers than there are White British pupils among pupils) is worse for promoted school leaders like deputies and headteachers than it is for classroom teachers. In London, due to the exceptional number of ethnic minority students, the disproportion (or mismatch) is worse than anywhere else in the country. Areas with the fewest ethnic minority pupils (and teachers), like the North East of England, have the most proportionate workforce (in this limited sense).
To learn more about the impact of research published on F1000’s open research publishing partner Platforms browse F1000’s News page: www.f1000.com/news