The impact of student:teacher ethnic congruence on student treatment and relationships at school: an international review of evidence

There has been growing interest in and concern over the disproportionality of the ethnicity of school teachers compared to the ethnicity of the students they teach, especially in the US where much of the research is focussed. Similar issues arise in England and other developed education systems. Generally, ethnic minorities are under-represented in the teacher workforce. This 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 school processes like attendance, disciplinary referrals or teacher:student relationships. Our search located 62 reports that could contribute to causal evidence on these themes. We found very few studies that could be considered well designed to assess a causal relationship between student:teacher ethnic matching and outcomes. Most of the best studies are large-scale but only correlational. 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 for minority students. 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.