Education boosts career prospects of young Caribbean, African, Indian and Chinese

Citation

(2006), "Education boosts career prospects of young Caribbean, African, Indian and Chinese", Education + Training, Vol. 48 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/et.2006.00448dab.002

Education boosts career prospects of young Caribbean, African, Indian and Chinese

Educational achievements have helped children of working-class parents in the Caribbean, African, Indian and Chinese communities to obtain managerial and professional jobs at a faster rate than their white counterparts, according to research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. But the study, based on surveys tracing children’s progress over 30 years, finds that young people from the Pakistani community are an exception. Although their parents are heavily concentrated in the working class, they show less upward mobility than children from white manual workers’ families. Bangladeshis are similarly disadvantaged, but this can be more readily explained by education and other characteristics of their backgrounds.

Lucinda Platt, a sociology lecturer at the University of Essex, analysed data from the Office for National Statistics longitudinal study on 140,000 children who grew up between the 1960s and the 1980s. Her research shows that family background and class have an important influence on later employment. Children whose parents are in the managerial or professional classes are more likely to end up in higher-status jobs, even after account is taken of differences in educational achievement. Coming from a more advantaged background also tends to reduce their chances of unemployment. An expansion in professional and managerial occupations over the past 30 years has created more “room at the top”, giving rise to an increase in upward mobility. Even so, a comparison between children whose parents were born overseas and white children of parents born in the UK shows that young people from many ethnic-minority groups are making disproportionate progress.

After controlling the data for family background differences, Caribbean, Black-African, Indian and Chinese young people are more likely to find professional or managerial jobs than their white, non-migrant counterparts. This is consistent with evidence that migrants often experience downward mobility on entering Britain and that they hold strong aspirations for their children – which may have been part of their original reason for migrating in search of a new life. Upward mobility among children from ethnic-minority groups is because of their educational achievements. This suggests that migrant parents often encourage and motivate their children to gain good qualifications.

The general picture does not apply to children of Pakistani migrants. Their class disadvantage, relative to young people from other ethnic groups, cannot be explained by differences in family background, or differences in their education. However, these factors do help to explain the class disadvantage found among children of Bangladeshi migrants.

Lucinda Platt said: “This study shows that social class and privilege have retained their importance in the past 30 years in helping young people to access the educational opportunities that help them into higher-status jobs. Britain is still a long way from being a meritocracy, where social class no longer plays a part in determining children’s chances of well-paid careers. There is good news to the extent that a disproportionate number of the young people who are upwardly mobile are the children of parents who came to this country as migrants. But their welcome progress is no cause for complacency – especially when it appears to be so much harder for young people from Pakistani or Bangladeshi families to get ahead. We need to do much more to understand why this is happening and the extent to which factors such as racial discrimination are involved.”