I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on this issue.
There are 22,000 children at senior schools in the London Borough of Redbridge.
The ethnic makeup of these children is:
White British 21.6%
Indian 15.9%
Pakistani 14.7%
Other Asian 8.5%
African 8.2%
Bangladeshi 8.1%
Other White 6.2%
Caribbean 4.5%
Other Mixed 2.1%
Mixed White/Caribbean 2.0%
Other Black 1.6%
Other 1.6%
Mixed White/Asian 1.5%
Unclassified 1.3%
Mixed White/African 0.7%
Chinese 0.6%
Irish 0.5%
Gypsy/Roma 0.1%
Irish Traveller 0
This is not replicated across the borough.
The borough for instance has 3 Catholic schools.
These are
Trinity, Woodford Green (mixed), which is approx 75% white, 4% Asian
Palmer, Seven Kings (Ilford) (mixed), approx 25% white, 30% Asian
Ilford Ursuline High, Ilford (girls), approx 21% white, 36% Asian
There is also a Jewish school, King Solomon which is around 80% white.
The obvious observation is that demographic changes have changed Ilford from an almost entirely white area a few decades ago to an area with a minority white population now, and hence demand for Catholic education has evaporated, and obviously a substantial proportion of the intake is not Catholic.
In leafy Woodford Green however, there is obviously still a substantial white Catholic population.
Performance-wise ALL of the borough's schools perform creditably: www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/education/school_tables/secondary/12/html/eng_maths_317.stm?compare=
The schools ranked by number of white British children are:
Trinity: 63%
King Solomon: 62%
Woodbridge High: 44%
Wanstead High: 35%
Caterham High: 34%
Forest Academy: 27%
Oaks Park High: 21%
The schools in reverse order of pass rate are:
Caterham
Forest Academy
King Solomon
Wanstead High
Oaks Park
In other words the whitest schools perform worst.
You might assume that being a speaker of English as a second language would be a handicap, but in fact Loxford School, where 45% of children are of Pakistani and Bangladeshi background (both groups have lower than average GCSE pass rates), and fully 78% of children are ESL speakers, children made much better progress than at all of the whitest schools except Trinity. FSM figures for Loxford are also high, with a 6-year FSM eligiblity of 51%, which is by a distance the highest in the borough.
The borough has two 'super-selective' grammar schools. Woodford County High is the girls school, and like Trinity (63% white British) and Woodbridge High (44% white British) is in Woodford (actually Trinity and Woodford County High are both in the relatively posher Woodford Green, whereas Woodbridge is in Woodford).
So you would expect somewhere 40-60% white British, but nope. Just 6%.
In fact the school has 24% Indian, 16% Pakistani, 8% Bangladeshi, and 31% Other Asian, all dwarfing the numbers of White British.
The boys grammar school is a couple of miles down the road in Barkingside has similar stats, 4% white British, 28% Indian, 19% Pakistani, 11% Bangladeshi, 26% Asian.
The girls school has 69% EFL speakers, and the boys 38%.
The absence of white children at the grammar schools is so stark that you have to wonder whether white parents are avoiding it. It seems unlikely that there is a cultural opposition to selection among white British parents, since selective schools in areas with negligible ethnic minority populations are invariably heavily subscribed by white parents.
According to performance statistics, while Indian children are more likely to reach high NC Levels and achieve good GCSE pass rates than white British children, white British children do better than Bangladeshi and Pakistani children, yet even though there are a similar number of white British compared to the total of Pakistani and Bangladeshi children, the latter are 7 times more numerous at the boys' grammar and four times more numerous at the girls' grammar.
I can only assume that white parents do not want to go to a school that is predominantly Asian. But why? And how did it get this way?
This photo from 1975 shows a school that appears to have been 95%+ white:
www.friendsreunited.co.uk/class-1-5-1975/Memory/528f0c8c-4c1b-43e7-9937-9833c2fa868e
And why more generally do white British children in Redbridge perform so poorly, worse than non-English speaking children living in poverty?
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Schools and their ethnic makeup
46 replies
KateShrub · 09/03/2013 18:08
OP posts:
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