Assess sociological explanations of the relationship between ethnicity and educational performance in Britain.
Sociologists have traditionally placed strong focus on the effects of race and ethnicity on a wide range of social outcomes to conclude genuine reasons for the educational under-achievement of some pupils. Ethnicity refers to a shared culture, religion, language or geography. At GCSE level, students that received their average 5 A*-C grades showed that it was Chinese students that are the most successful, followed by Indian, White, Pakistani/Bangladeshi students and then lastly Afro-Caribbean origin students. Another factor I studied in the past was whether gender has an effect on educational achievement and to my surprise it links to this category of explanation as in every social group (expect Asian pupils) females perform better then males. However it is clear that Afro-Caribbean, Pakistani, Gypsy and Bangladeshi students are less likely to gain A-levels and then go on to attend university. Lastly there is evidence suggesting that gypsy students are by far the lowest achievers in the education system.

Cultural deprivation theory claims that the underachievement of some ethnic groups is caused by inadequate socialisation in the home. This consists of two main aspects; these are intellectual and language skills and attitudes, values and family structure. This theory claims that children from low-income black families’ lack intellectual stimulation. This means that overall they tend to fail when developing reasoning and problem-solving skills. An obvious problem when it comes to failure in schools from different ethnic children is language. A fair amount of ethnic groups speak their own personal language in the household and this could mean that when a child is put into a school (and expected to speak English) they could mean they lack the knowledge of