ABSTRACT
There was a good deal of uncertainty among the respondents in nursing and midwifery education centres about the kinds and appropriateness of ethnic monitoring data available to them. In Britain, both in popular parlance and the framing of social policy, ethnic difference is almost exclusively associated with an implicit division of the population into an ethnic 'majority' and a number of ethnic minorities. It has until recently been commonplace to assume that the labour market experience of members of minority ethnic groups has been universally one of disadvantage and exclusion. The evidence about occupational and social mobility suggests that conventional categories underplay ethnic diversity both in terms of range and the patterning of change in experience. Equally significantly, they also fail to capture in any precise way, the subtleties of individual and collective identities. There is a large literature which draws attention to different ways in which equal opportunities may be conceived.
