An investigation into African-Caribbean academic success in the United Kingdom

While, there is a history of academic under-achievement among African-Caribbeans in the United Kingdom, some African-Caribbeans progress successfully through under-graduate and on to postgraduate studies. This research investigates the factors contributing to such academic success. Fourteen African-Caribbean professionals, male and female, aged between 23 and 40 years old, who had undertaken most of their compulsory education in United Kingdom schools, were interviewed. The findings suggest two possible models of success: a Home-School Model, which describes a continuous positive interaction between the home and school where both foster academic excellence and success and a Home-Community Model which suggests that the family and community together create a 'sense of belonging' and acceptance and foster achievement and success, which compensate for low expectations and resources in the school. This suggests that academic success for a greater proportion of African-Caribbean children will become a reality when schools, the home and the community work together to develop and nurture academic achievement within a climate of excellence and high expectations

Evaluation of the primary behaviour and attendance pilot: the school improvement strand

Poor attendance and disruptive behaviour in primary schools have a negative impact on learning and teaching. For those children whose attendance is continuously disrupted or behaviour is particularly difficult there can be a substantial impact on subsequent life chances. Improving attendance and behaviour in school depends on addressing a range of inter-related issues at the whole-school level, in the classroom, and in relation to individual pupils. Evidence suggests that schools with high levels of communal organisation, adopting a whole-school approach, show more orderly behaviour. The Primary Behaviour and Attendance pilot took place from 2003-05 and involved 25 Local Authorities. The pilot had four strands, a CPD strand, a school improvement strand, a curriculum materials or SEAL strand, and a small group strand. The LAs selected to participate in the programme were those which were not eligible for other funded programmes. They were LAs with above-average levels of social deprivation, often bordering EiC areas with significant numbers of schools where behaviour was likely to be a key issue. The school improvement strand of the pilot aimed to develop and test out models of LA support where behaviour and attendance were key school improvement issues. Each LA was funded to employ a ‘teacher coach’ to work with existing services (educational psychology and behaviour support) in schools experiencing difficulty, using a systematic process of audit, action plan, and professional development that included on-the-job solution-focused coaching.The focus of the enquiryThe evaluation aimed to test out the effectiveness of the school improvement strand in relation to: • improvements in behaviour, attendance and attainment for individual children; • teacher skills and confidence; • and the promotion of effective whole school approaches to positive behaviour, attendance, and improvements in attainment.Emerging best practice, particularly for the more innovative measures, was identified as was their sustainability within schools and LAs, and transferability to other LAs.The research methods:Multi-methods were adopted to undertaken the evaluation of the school improvement strand. Interviews were undertaken with LA co-ordinators and teacher coaches. Field visits were made to 9 schools implementing the strand and interviews were undertaken with head teachers and other staff. Twenty-eight head teachers and 31 teachers completed questionnaires following the completion of the programme and data relating to pupils’ attendance and attainment were analysed

Staff perceptions of the success of an alternative curriculum: Skill Force

This paper describes staff perceptions of the implementation of an alternative curriculum, skill force, for disaffected pupils in the UK. The perceptions of skill force and school staff were compared based on data from questionnaires completed by 62 skill force and 84 school staff, and interviews with representative samples of each. While the data indicated that the programme had been successful in re-engaging the students with education, the improvement was more marked in relation to the skill force programme than the wider school context.<br/

The significance of faith for Black men's educational aspirations

It is uncontested that British African Caribbean men are minimally represented in elite UK higher education institutions. Even as data demonstrates that African Caribbean males are more likely to study further education than White males and that the proportion of UK-domiciled Black students pursuing higher education has increased since the 2003/04 academic year (ECU, 2014), the representation of Black students throughout the Russell Group remains low. Less than 3% of the entire Russell Group's student population comprised British African Caribbean students in 2011/12 and 2012/2013 (ECU, 2013, p. 203; ECU, 2014, p. 358). However, according to the 2011 Census, ‘Black’ people represent 5.5% (3.1 million) of the total UK population (ONS, 2015). For the few Black men who are successful in attaining acceptance at these exclusive universities, to what assets or capitals do these young men attribute their ability to get to and successful graduate from these institutions? Interviews with 15 Black male students who attended Russell Group universities in England and Wales were analysed and several ‘capitals’ or resources were identified as beneficial to their ability to succeed. Drawing on Bourdieu's work on cultural and social capital, this paper advances the concept of ‘faith capital’ as a unique recognised asset that six of the participants described and reflected upon as being influential on their academic trajectories. Based on findings from the ESRC-funded research Exploring the narratives of the few: British African Caribbean male graduates of elite universities in England and Wales, this paper discusses these six participants’ accounts of their higher education journeys in relation to how they identified faith as a resource that was influential to their academic success

Whiteness, conviviality and agency: the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8:26-40) and conceptuality in the imperial imagination of biblical studies

This dissertation is haunted by the vexed, yet slippery question, “why cannot the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26-40 be a Jew?” Given the multivalent registers of the question, I turn to cultural studies, especially postcolonial studies, to procure analytical tools that allow me to interrogate the conceptuality of different texts, ancient and modern, that comment on the Ethiopian eunuch’s ethnoreligious agency. In pursuit of this hermeneutic, and with the aid of scholars such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Audrey Thompson, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Charles Mills,Courtney Goto, and Richard Burton, postcolonial studies is demonstrated to yield two epistemological lenses with which readings on the Ethiopian eunuch are examined: whiteness and ‘critical conviviality’. Whiteness,characterised by a Cartesian gaze, is employed in the function of deconstructing, while ‘critical conviviality’, a new hermeneutic characterised by notions of ‘collectivist hospitality’, ‘connected histories’, ‘as if’ and ‘the carnivalesque’, encourages opening one’s conceptuality in a multidimensional way, functioning to reconstruct analyses for his agency. Upon examination of the first commentators, i.e., the early Church Fathers,the Ethiopian eunuch’s ethnoreligious agency is discovered to have shifted from an Afroasiatic Jewish one to a Graeco-Gentile one. The anti-Jewish discourse of the time as reflected by the Adversus Judaeos trope, functioned teleologically to aid and abet the Church Fathers’ biblical interpretations to achieve this particular religious-political ideal type. In more recent years, a Eurocentric, Cartesian gaze, framed by the logics of Euromodernity, has largely identified the Ethiopian eunuch along the spectrum of a Graeco-Roman Gentile to a not-quite-a-Jew. His being denied a Jewish identity appears to foreclose an exploration of a dynamic agency that could open up new opportunities and possibilities of (re-)conceptualising (nonrabbinic) Jewish history, Acts’s centrifugal plot, and the complex, conjunctural sites of Christian origins. Essentially, the imperial, racialised imagination cannot recognise him as a Jew because he is African, because he is black. In the final analysis, the dissertation asserts that ‘Black lives matter’ for Jewishness in the book of Acts and for Christian origins

Eagles who soar: how Black learners find the path to success

In a school system in which most African Caribbeans have negative experiences of schooling, there are some who attain highly in school or achieve academic success later in life. This book is about the differences in the experiences of those who did well and those who did not. The statistics confirm a general picture in which African Caribbean pupils have disproportionately high exclusion rates and statements of special educational needs. But it is not always so, and it need not be. The voices of the young people presented here are powerful and revealing. Through their own accounts of their school experiences, we see how the influence of family, friends and the community can enable them to succeed against the odds.Eagles who Soar shows through these stories how destructive patterns can be broken and how Black children can overcome the challenges they face. It will encourage and inspire the Black community and also the educationists to strive for greater success among African Caribbeans and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the education of Black children and young people