Plans to close the gap for underachieving groups in Lewisham schools have been laid out.  

Black Caribbean boys and disadvantaged white pupils are disproportionately underperforming at every stage. 

In 2019, Black Caribbean pupils had the lowest achievement rate of all groups in Lewisham at the end of Key stage 2. 

The gap between white British pupils and disadvantaged white British pupils is particularly big – a 41 percentage point difference in primary school and a Progress 8 of –1.06 versus +0.09.  

Angela Scattergood, director of education, told Lewisham’s children and young people’s select committee on Tuesday (March 10) that under the new directorate the council will be looking to other schools for support and advice on good practice.  

She said: “The next phase is around transition and information sharing, that stepping stone between primary and secondary and making sure that secondary schools have the right information to be able to support children once they’ve joined secondary school. 

“We really want to seek the support of parents and community organisations to be able to get that information shared, that’s an absolute priority for us.” 

One of the authors of Boys on Track, a recent piece of research on improving support for black Caribbean and free-school meal-eligible white boys in London, will be coming to work with the council.  

Plans to train schools on unconscious bias to help curb exclusion rates for Black Caribbean pupils are also in place.  

In 2018/19 Black Caribbean boys in Lewisham made up the biggest group of exclusions. 

Sandra Roberts, Director of Lewisham Learning said she was going to meet with her counterpart in Haringey.  

“They’ve been doing a lot of successful work looking at narrowing the achievement gap for black Caribbean children. 

“We’re going there to specifically find out what they’ve been doing to see if we can ask them to help us either to plan what we’re going to do or even broker some of their people to come and work with us,” she said.  

According to a report on exclusions the “serious and long-standing issue” is on a national scale. 

“It is proposed to develop collaboration with other local authorities with a high Caribbean population to lobby the Department for Education and government for specific resourcing of initiatives to address racial disparity and injustice,” it read.  

The council plans to work with community groups for better BAME representations on governing bodies and parent/carer forums.  

According to the report all schools are aware of the disproportionality in exclusions statistics. 

“Schools are using strategies such as analysing trends, raising awareness of issues such as intersectionality with deprivation, headteacher receiving a weekly breakdown about pupils’ ethnicity in relation to action taken via the DFL, acknowledging that unconscious bias, stereotyping and institutional racism can be a factor in schools and wider society,” it read.  

Scrutiny members dubbed the plans “very welcome and very exciting”.