What A-Level subjects are most popular among different Ethnic groups?

Habari gani good people? I hope all is well in your world. Today, I’m sharing my latest video which looked at what subjects A-Level students of different ethnic backgrounds tended to study. There are some very clear patterns which reflect other ethnic trends in areas like income, wealth and health.

The data came from a study on the excellent FTT Education Lab website called Which are the most popular Key Stage 5 subjects by ethnicity? It’s a very user-friendly page where you can slice and dice the data in various ways.

In the academic year 2022, South Asian and Chinese students were the most likely to go into further education, while Black Caribbean, Mixed White-Caribbean and White British were the least likely. This closely parallels differences in attainment at GCSE. The likelihood of going into further education was closely correlated to the level of attainment at GCSE:

Then when we look closely at the top ten most popular A-Levels in each ethnic group, we find that the same trends are evident. Black Caribbean, Mixed White-Black Caribbean and White British students were the most likely to choose Arts and Social Sciences. At the other end, South Asian and especially Chinese students were the most heavily into S.T.E.M. subjects. For example, look at the proportion of students in each ethnic group that were studying Mathematics:

Meanwhile, in some Social Science subjects such as Sociology, the pattern is almost the exact reverse:

In the video, I give my overall thoughts about this data so do watch it. But for now. I wanted to share some data concerning GCSEs that I didn’t cover in the video.

Ethnic differences in subject choice at GCSE

A report by STEM Learning called Science Education in England: Gender, Disadvantage and Ethnicity covers the 2019 academic year. It shows the proportion of school pupils in the White British, Chinese and Black Caribbean ethnic groups which studied individual science subjects as opposed to the combined sciences. The report states that “GCSEs in the separate sciences are often viewed as an aspiration for high achieving students.” The following three charts show the overall proportion of Chinese, White British and Black Caribbean pupils who did separate sciences:

Chinese GCSE pupils were much more likely than both White British and Black Caribbean pupils to do separate sciences. And among those that did take the separate sciences, Chinese pupils were by far the most likely to get high grades.

Thanks a lot for your eyes and ears, and I’ll see you next time.
Ely