Targeting needs

last updated:September 2010

How might you target the needs of minority ethnic pupils more appropriately?

Research evidence

Effective schools make practical use of data and monitoring. Schools, have for example:

• used ethnic monitoring by group to highlight specific high achieving groups to raise attainment further, or low achievers to identify where support was needed
• monitored pupil performance in the pupils’ home languages and added these to the database of whole school records
• compared predicted and actual grades in national tests to help identify weakness in written work among bilingual pupils who otherwise showed fluency in their work
• monitored their Special Educational Needs register to check whether one ethnic group occurred disproportionately in it.

Your evidence

You might like to analyse data your school collects, such as national test results by ethnicity. You could look for any discrepancies in results, such as differences between different subjects. For example, you might find that Pakistani students seem to be falling behind the main school population in science. Within this group, you might also notice the gap is bigger for boys than girls or vice versa. Then you could explore with the students reasons for why they may be achieving lower in one subject than the other through interviews. You could also ask them what they think would help them to achieve higher.

Next steps

You might like to work with your colleagues on developing a range of teaching and learning materials for specific classes based on the pupils’ comments, such as writing frames or a dictionary of key terms. You could then evaluate the impact of these materials in end of module tests and/or by interviewing the pupils again to find out their views of how the new materials helped. You might also ask the teachers to share their observations of any differences they noticed amongst the pupils from using the new materials.