Do Nigerian pupils outperform other Africans in the UK?

 GCSEs in Lambeth, London

• The London Borough of Lambeth has been one of the largest Black populations as a portion of the total borough for decades. Brixton is in Lambeth, for example.

• Chances are that if you're African in the UK, you have relatives who live in Lambeth! 

• And luckily for us, Lambeth Council has for many years been combining educational attainment data with information on the languages that pupils speak at home. This enables us to make some comparisons between African children from different countries. 

Main African Groups in Lambeth

• Among Black African children in 2018, there are three main linguistic groups: Somali, Yoruba (from Nigeria) and Twi-Fante (from Ghana)

• We can discount the children who spoke at home because we can't pin them to a particular country. So let's focus on the children who speak other languages at home

• Looking at the the proportion of pupils gaining 5 A to Cs including English and Maths, Yoruba-speaking children in Lambeth have usually scored the highest, with Twi-Fante and Somali pupils roughly level. 

• The overall gaps between these groups are very small, just a few percentage points. 

When it comes to Somali pupils, there’s one crucial thing that we need to keep in mind, if we’re going to fairly assess their educational outcomes.

English proficiency

• This chart ranks primary school pupils in Lambeth according to the language they speak at home, and their proficiency in English. The higher up the table, the lower the English proficiency on average. 

• We can see that with regard to the three groups we’re focusing on, only 32% of Somali pupils in Lambeth were proficient in English compared with 50% of the Yoruba and 52% of the Twi Fante speakers

• And for secondary school pupils in that same year, a higher proportion of pupils in all groups were proficient in English but there’s a still a gap with 75% of Somali pupils being proficient versus 85% of Twi-Fante and over 90% of Yoruba pupils.

• The reason this matters is because English proficiency has a strong influence on pupils’ academic performance. The more fluent a child is in English, the better they will perform at GCSE, on average

• In Lambeth in 2017, 41% of GCSE pupils that were not fluent in English gained 5 A* to C compared with 65% to 66% of pupils that were fully fluent in English 

• Putting this all together, I suspect that the small differences in GCSE attainment between children speaking Yoruba, Twi-Fante and Somali in Lambeth can probably be explained by the Somali pupils’ lower level of English proficiency

• And I would love to see a comparison of English fluent pupils only. I suspect that you'd see the differences between Somali, Yoruba and Twi Fante speakers shrink or possibly even reverse

So in Lambeth, Yoruba speaking pupils generally score highest when compared with Somali and Twi-Fante speaking pupils, but the gaps are not large, and would probably disappear if we factored-in English proficiency. 

But what about A-Levels? Is there any evidence of Nigerian excellence there?

A Levels: National

2015-16

• According to the ONS, in the academic year of 2016, pupils identified as Ghanaian and Nigerian achieved similar average points scores at A Levels Somali pupils about 10% lower but all of these would've equated to a low C or D.

• So no significant difference between the three cohorts

• But when looking at the high achieving A-Level pupils, a very interesting picture emerges

• 3% of Ghanaian students in 2016 achieving 3 As. 4% of Somali students got 3 As. And 7.6% of Nigerian at 7.6%. 

• So nearly twice as many Nigerian-identified A Level students for three As in 2016 as did Ghanaian-identified students.

• And 30% more Somali than Ghanaian students got three As.

• But more of the Nigerian and Ghanaian pupils got AAB+ than Somali pupils

• When you look at the overall percentage of African pupils getting three As in that year, the figure was 5%.

• If we redesigned and swapped the single Black African category for separate Ghanaian, Nigerian and Somali categories, it might look a lot different:

• And similar figures were released for the 2017-18 Academic year with a similar pattern

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/a_level_results_for_specific_eth?utm_campaign=alaveteli-experiments-87&utm_content=sidebar_similar_requests&utm_medium=link&utm_source=whatdotheyknow]

Concluding thoughts

• On a local level in Lambeth, at GCSE Somali speaking pupils achieve roughly similar to both Yoruba and Twi Fante speaking one

• And this gap would likely be closed once we factor in English proficiency

• And on a national level, Nigerian, Somali and Ghanaian students achieved roughly similar average scores at A Level in 2016.

• We could do with some of us coming together to really dig into the data and think deeply about how we might want official data to be gathered in future