ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one particular minority group: black children of West Indian origin and one particular aspect of their attainments: their progress, relative to whites, over the secondary school years. Black pupils born abroad appeared to have improved their position to some extent over the period, while UK born black girls had clearly maintained similar rates of progress to whites. The only suggestion of any relative decline in performance within the black samples appeared to be for UK born black boys whose progress was slightly less marked than that of white boys. In any study of behaviour such as reading performance, there is the problem of measurement error. In an attempt to control for selection biases, we looked at differences in reading ability at 14 after allowing for measured ability at 10 in the analyses of covariance. Thus, the black children were progressively falling behind their white peers during the early years of secondary schooling.
