Ethnicity, Gender & Race
Although social class is the strongest predictor of educational achievement, it intersects in complex ways with other factors such as gender and ethnicity. For example, certain groups of middle-class minority ethnic students continue to underachieve in relation to their white middle-class counterparts, and although middle-class boys still outperform working-class girls at literacy, girls outperform boys at literacy within each social group (Francis and Skelton, 2005). Researchers have also noted that eligibility for free school meals is associated particularly strongly with low levels of attainment for white British pupils, more so than for other ethnic groups (Cassen and Kingdon, 2007). This demonstrates the continued need to look at social class in an analysis of educational attainment, whilst maintaining an awareness of how social class intersects with gender and ethnicity to reproduce inequalities in educational attainment.