Just over 50 years ago the SS Windrush brought the first of what were to be thousands of black people from the Caribbean recruited to work in Britain after the Second World War. They, like black settlers who had arrived before 1948, hoped for a prosperous future for themselves and enhanced educational opportunities for their children. It would be reasonable to expect those hopes to have been realised by now and to assume that the majority of Black Caribbean children in England’s schools would be sharing the higher educational standards attained by the most successful pupils in our schools. This is not the case. By 1981 reports such as the Rampton Report: West Indian Children in Our Schools (Department for Education and Science, 1981) identified serious concerns about the extent to which schools were meeting the needs of Black Caribbean pupils. The concerns persist. Obtaining accurate data has been difficult over the years. Although many schools have had equal opportunities policies in place for a number of years, few have had systems for analysing the performance of pupils by ethnicity. The picture for many local education authorities (LEAs) is similar. The evidence that has been available from individual LEAs has tended to show that the relative performance of Black Caribbean pupils begins high, starts to decline in Key Stage 2, tails off badly in Key Stage 3 and is below that of most other ethnic groups at Key Stage 4. Such evidence reinforced the findings of detailed studies of schools and LEAs in OFSTED’s report, Raising the Attainment of Minority Ethnic Pupils: School and LEA Responses (OFSTED, 1999). A follow-up to that report, Managing Support for the Attainment of Pupils from Minority Ethnic Groups, was published by OFSTED in 2001.
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