ABSTRACT
Research investigating the educational experience of young black people persistently fails to integrate satisfactorily into its findings the differential achievement of black girls. This chapter examines that the failure to recognise appropriately this differential educational performance has implications for research on issues of race and education. Gender differences in attainment among West Indians, previously recorded in the 1960s and now known to exist, were swept aside during this era in the political undercurrents that determined the nature of the debate on race and education. Young black women are subject to a very different type of stereotypical image than black men. The concept of the strong role model of the West Indian mother appears to have become an established part of ‘commonsense’ mythology concerning the black female. The Eggleston Report, entitled Education for Some, is an investigation into the vocational and educational experiences of young people from various ethnic minority groups.
