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Uncomfortable and disturbing: Report reveals substantial disparities in career progression for ethnic minority teachers

Recruitment & Retention Aiming for headship Government policy Whole-school issues Senior leadership Middle leadership Teaching staff Workforce research Early Career Teachers Diversity & Equality
Children entering school today have a “high probability of rarely or never being taught by a teacher from an Asian, black, mixed or other ethnic minority group”.

A disturbing and uncomfortable new report shows that teachers from black, Asian, and other ethnic backgrounds are notably over-represented in applications to postgraduate initial teacher training (ITT) and yet less likely to be accepted onto courses.

Furthermore, teachers from these backgrounds are also less likely to be promoted from middle to senior leadership and are under-represented at “all stages of the teacher career pipeline”.

In fact, 86% of publicly funded schools in England have all-white senior leadership teams, 96% of headteachers are white, and 60% of schools in England have an all-white teaching staff.

The uncomfortable findings have come in new research undertaken by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), Ambition Institute, and Teach First (Worth et al, 2022).

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