Black or Asian families ‘more ambitious’ in school choice
BLACK and Asian parents are more ambitious in their attempts to get their children into good schools, a Cambridge University study has found.
Only a minority of parents (39 per cent) chose their local school as their first option, the research showed, while white families were more likely to put their local school as their top choice, even if it was not particularly good.
Meanwhile, black or Asian children, or those who spoke English as a second language, were on average more likely to apply to schools that were further away but performed better.
Researchers from Cambridge and Bristol universities found that there was a “striking difference” between ethnicities when it came to school choice. They analysed the background characteristics of more than half a million children in England, and gave each secondary school in the country a score based on how many students achieved at least five GCSES with grades of A*-C.
Children from Asian families applied to schools that scored seven percentage points on average more than schools that their peers from white families applied to, while those from black families applied to schools that scored six percentage points more.
Prof Simon Burgess, one of the report’s authors, said: “We interpret this as being about ambition and an understanding that education and schools are a way to get on in life.
“You can’t always get into the school that you want. But Asian and black families are more likely to apply to the further away, better school, to try to get into a high-quality school. White British families are more likely to settle for the closer, more mediocre school, and are more likely to get in.”
The research, published in the Oxford Review of Education, found that 41 per cent of white British households made only one choice of school, compared to 17 per cent of Asian households and 12 per cent of Black households.
But children who spoke English as a second language had a lower chance of receiving an offer from their firstchoice school, which researchers said could be because they were picking more ambitious schools.