MESHGuides

A factor that is considered to have played a role in the lower attainment of Black children is an exclusionary National Curriculum which ignores the culturally diverse backgrounds of Black and other minority ethnic students.

• Senior management team leadership commitment to high achievement for Black pupils
• School monitoring attainment by ethnicity and using such monitoring to improve pupil target setting
• Improving tracking, assessment and monitoring of Black pupil achievement data
• CPD/Race equality training for teachers' encouraging high expectations and challenging teacher racism
• Enhancing staff understanding of a culturally relevant curriculum, texts and other resources

White middle class children do well owing to advantages conferred by economic, social and cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990); good family backgrounds, academic language used in school mirrored at home; home supports the school with high parental involvement including ensuring homework is completed, provision of additional tutoring to address weaknesses e.g. in maths, and cultural visits to museums, theatre, holidays abroad etc. to extend academic knowledge.

The Black Children's Programme was a New Labour government funded national initiative driven through the National Strategies programme. Originally an African-Caribbean pilot project comprising 22 schools across 5 local authorities (LAs) set up in 2005 to support and improve the attainment of African-Caribbean children in primary schools across England who (based on national Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 and 2 attainment data for African-Caribbean children) were deemed to nationally underachieve vis-a-vis White British pupils.

Black children are viewed as having low self esteem and lacking confidence to succeed, coming from single parent households – hence they lack male role models (REACH 2007) - with poor home environments and to have parents who do not help with homework or attend parents' meetings (see critiques by Maylor forthcoming, Reynolds 2009, Vincent et al., 2012)

Institutional/cultural racism - Black pupils are perceived as unlikely to achieve highly (based on refuted stereotyped 19th scientific theories of IQ which view Black people genetically/intellectually inferior);

Thorndike (1963 - see Smith, 2003:577) views 'underachievement' as 'achievement falling below [a particular standard] what would be forecast from our most informed and accurate prediction, based on a team of predictor variables'.

According to Gorard and Smith (2004) underachievement is used to refer to achievement relative to another group, whilst Gillborn and Gripps (1996:1) suggest it is a 'relatively crude term relating to differences in group averages' and educational outcomes among different ethnic groups (Gillborn and Mirza, 2000).

The term 'Black' includes people who define themselves as: African-Caribbean, Black African, Mixed White and Black Caribbean; Mixed White and Black African; Black Other.

In England conceptions of Black attainment are informed by Key Stage standard assessments tests and GCSE examinations when compared with the attainment of children from other ethnic groups. Such conceptions point to an 'ethnic' attainment gap between Black and White children (DfES 2007; DfE 2011, 2012)

Teachers have always offered rewards (whether they are prizes, points or praise) for achievement. Usually, teachers strive to ensure reward consistency, e.g. that every pupil with a correct answer should receive a point. Yet researchers have struggled to find any relationship between the rewards offered and learning achieved. In contrast, there seems a strong relationship between how the brain responds to reward and the likelihood of learning.

Drinking water is often promoted as a way to improve learning and it is true that even mild dehydration can reduce our ability to think . However, a recent adult study has shown that drinking water when not thirsty can also diminish cognitive ability . Luckily, forgetting to drink water is not usually a problem, because our brains have evolved a sophisticated system that makes us thirsty when our bodies (and brains) need more fluid.