Tag Archives: ethnic minorities

Ethnic minority trainee teachers: still huge regional differences in trainee numbers

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1n the autumn of 1997, Baroness Estelle Morris, at that time a junior minister in the DfE, in the new Labour government of Tony Blair, opened a conference about recruiting more ethnic minority students to become a teacher. The conference was organised by the then Teacher Training Agency. That conference was held in East London, and was followed by two more in Leeds and Birmingham.

Fast forward to the ITT census produced by the DfE today, and ask the question: how successful has the campaign to recruit certain ethnic groups into teaching been since that first conference nearly 30 years ago? Initial teacher training: trainee number census 2025 to 2026 – GOV.UK

Looking at the group that has found most difficultly in becoming a teacher over the years – Black African/Black Caribbean – there still seem to be big challenges looking at today’s data. Whether these are because students from this ethnic grouping aren’t attracted to parts of the country where there are few of their compatriots or whether there are other reasons cannot be determined just from the numbers.

However, over 500 courses have no candidates recorded from this group in the data published in Table 12 today. Just over 900 courses have between one and four candidates from the ethnic group. A further 83 courses have the number suppressed as being too low, as it might allow an individual to be identified.

A quick review of courses with the highest percentage (over 50% of each course code) shows that 24 are courses run by providers in London; just three are from outside London, and for three the name does not provide a clue to the location.

Looking at the courses with more than 100 candidates from the Black ethnic group: four are located in London – two each from UCL and Teach First – and the fifth is a national SCITT.  

As might be expected, the University of East London, and several other London post 1992 universities, feature in the list of providers with between 25% and 50% of course numbers from the Black group, each with several courses in this percentage range. Most other pre-1992 universities and other post-1992 universities and the SCITTs in London have many of their courses in the 15%-25% group of providers. Few, if any, London providers feature in the list with zero percentage from the black group.

While it is good that courses in London do seem to be attracting applications from the Black ethnic group, there are still many courses in large parts of the country where that seems not to be the case. Does this matter? Would a ‘token’ representative on a single course in an institution be anything more than a token. Should we encourage such students to be trailblazers r should we accept that outside of the conurbations and a few university towns, graduates from the black ethnic group are still relatively rare.

I went to school in the 1960s with one of the few Black pupils in the school. He went on to become a teacher when Black teachers were even thinner on the ground than now, even in London.

So, there has been some progress, but not enough.

Slow progress on ethnic minority headteacher numbers

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Earlier today someone viewed my post from 2021 ‘We need more black headteachers in our schools’ | John Howson so I thought that I would review the data from last November’s Workforce Census to see how the position has changed since then.

My 2021 blog post included White minority groups as well as other ethnic groups, when creating the totals, and ignored the issue of uncollected data, whether because of refusal or the necessary field not being completed in the census to allow for ethnic recognition. This post just considers the five key groupings (Other Ethnic Group, Mixed, Asian/Asian British, Black/Black British and White).

Looking back over the whole period of the School Workforce Survey, from between 2011-12 to 2023-24, the percentage of headteachers recorded as White fell by 2.3% from 20,608 to 19,355 during this time period. During the same period, there were just under a thousand more headteachers across the other four groups.

Across the 15 years data has been Workforce Census data has been collected, the four ethnic groups have increased their headship numbers by an average of 64 additional headteacher per year. The Asian/Asian British group did best, averaging just under 30 additional headteacher per year. The Black/Black British group increased their number of headships by little more than 16 per year on average.

Taking the sex of the respondents into account meant that there were 48 more Black/Black British women heads over the period and 31 more Black/Black British male as headteachers.

Asian/Asian British women increased their numbers from 150 to 298, and Asian/Asian British men, from 56 to 112.

The Other Ethnic Groupa plus the Mixed Group increased by 124 women headteachers and 41 men as headteachers.

How accurate these figures are, of course depends upon how many minority heads either refused to disclose their ethnicity or the information wasn’t collected by the time of the census – presumably because a box was left empty.

Over the time period the number refusing to disclose ethnicity increased from 103 to 235: not a large increase. However, more concerning is the increase from 494 in the first census to 1,911 in the 2023/24 census from those described as ‘information not yet obtained’. Does this group contain a significant number of headteachers from ethic minorities? We just don’t know.

The good news is that all teachers and school leaders from the four minority groups have seen a 10%+ increase in their teacher numbers across all grades over the period between 2011/12 and 2023/24. This during a period where the school population has fluctuated, and by January 2025 was significantly smaller than it was a few years ago.

More classroom teachers will mean more headteachers if these individuals can be persuaded to stay in teaching. Sadly, there is a risk that won’t be the case. The lack of coordinated local governance of schooling across much of England makes the risk of departure greater than if local plans for retention across all groups of teachers were put in place. This is another governance issue the present system has created. Who cases about local policies for retaining teachers?

Ethnic minority groups still excluded from teaching

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Yesterday, the NfER published a report about ethnic minorities and the teaching profession; from entry to leadership. Ethnic disparities in entry to teacher training, teacher retention and progression to leadership – NFER sponsored by Mission 44.

This is an issue that has concerned me for the past 30 years since I first wrote an article for the then NUT (now NEU) in their magazine abut the future of the teaching profession. The article asked whether or not the teaching profession was destined to be ‘young, white and female’. A decade later, I produced two reports for those in government responsible for teacher recruitment about, firstly, all minority groups in 2008, and then specifically ethnic minority groups in 2011. The latter report concluded the following:

‘Of three hundred graduate would-be teachers; 100 each from the Asian, Black and White groupings used in this study:

 24 of the white group, 14 of the Asian group and just nine of the Black group are likely to fulfil their aspiration of teaching in a state funded school classroom.

Even in the sciences, where shortages have been the greatest out of three hundred would-be science teachers there would be only some 34 White teachers, 17 Asian teachers and 11 Black teachers.’ (Howson, 2011 author’s copy)

The NfER report has concluded over a decade later that:

‘There are significant ethnic disparities in postgraduate ITT rejection rates among UK-domiciled applicants that are not explained by differences in applicant and application characteristics. The persistence of ethnic disparities that are not explained by the applicant characteristics that we can observe in the available data suggests that discrimination by ethnic background is likely to play a role, although we cannot definitively rule out other factors (such as differences in qualification levels or work experience).’

In the 2008 report I helped produce, we also concluded that it was sometimes challenging to identify rationales for outcomes about ITT recruitment.  Take an example of a course with 20 places and 100 applicants; 60 women and 40 men. Assuming all are graduates with the same class of UK degree – unlikely, but there can be too many variables to make easy judgements possible – how do you allocate places. One possibility is on a first come, first served basis. So, if men apply later than women, as is often the case for new graduates, they may find all the places allocated by the time that they apply.

A fair distribution might be 12 women and 8 men offered places, based upon all applications. Now add another category, ethnicity. Where do you place that, ahead of gender? Again, what of the timing of applications. Should there be a cut-off date for ITT applications whereby all applications received by that date are assessed together, rather than on a first come, first served basis, as at present?

A further complication is around differential rates of application. Historically applications from those identifying as black African males were mostly received by a small number of courses. Even if those courses only took those applicants, there would still be an issue at the macro level, and no other groups would have access to those courses.

In 2008, we also discovered larger courses were generally better at recruiting diverse cohorts from a larger pool of applicants. Does a move to a more school-based ITT system make recruitment of minorities more or less likely?

This is an important issue for society, and one that I hope this latest report helps stimulate discussion around whether changes are needed in ITT.