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

Abstract

Concern is growing internationally 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 the outcomes for ethnic minority students. Here we present a structured review of the worldwide prior evidence on ethnic disproportionality and student attainment. Our search located 31 reports to describe and synthesise. There are few studies designed to assess a causal relationship between student:teacher ethnic matching and outcomes. Most of the best studies are large-scale but only correlational, mostly from the US than elsewhere, and the context may not always be relevant to countries with different ethnic mixes and histories of diversity. Overall, there is no clear relationship between ethnic congruence and differential attainment. Some studies suggest an advantage for ethnic minority students from having ethnically matched teachers, but most studies also do not. Overall, our study suggests that a system with an ethnic diversity of students could benefit in a variety of ways from also having a more proportional diversity of teaching staff – whether students and their teachers are specifically matched or not.