Investigating the impact of student-teacher ethnic congruence on school attainment outcomes: an international review

In the education systems of developed economies and increasing migration trends, concern is growing over the disproportionality of the ethnicity of teachers compared to the ethnicity of the students they teach. Generally, ethnic minorities are under-represented in the teacher workforce. This is not merely an oddity. It could influence how ethnic minority students are treated in schools, and the outcomes they attain. Here we present a structured review of the worldwide prior evidence on ethnic disproportionality and student attainment and wider outcomes. Our search located 92 reports to describe and synthesise – on differential attainment, discipline, attendance, relationships, and expectations. There are few studies that are strongly designed to assess a causal relationship between student:teacher ethnic matching and outcomes. Most of the best studies are large-scale but only correlational. There has been more work in this area in the US than elsewhere, and the results from that context may not always be relevant to countries with different ethnic mixes and histories of diversity. However, there is a lot of evidence that ethnic matching is linked to better relationships between minority students and staff, higher attendance at school, and less differentiated expectations and disciplinary referrals. The situation for attainment outcomes is not so clear. Some studies suggest an advantage for ethnic minority students from having congruent teachers, but many studies also do not. The paper ends by looking at the possible implications for countries like England where is there is less existing evidence so far. One clear implication is that a system with ethnic mix and diversity of students benefits in a variety of ways from also having a more proportional diversity of teaching staff – whether students and staff are specifically matched or not.