Why African Boys Are Beating Caribbean Boys In Britain

Two Black boys start school on the same morning. Same uniform, same estate, you couldn't tell them apart. By the time they're 16, one of them is twice as likely to end up at university as the other. One is African, one is Caribbean. So what happens in those 11 years?

I'm Jamaican, so this one isn't comfortable for me. But I'd rather we look at it properly than keep pretending we don't know.

The gap in numbers

• GCSEs (2022 to 2023): almost 70% of Black African pupils got a grade 4 or above in English and maths. Black Caribbean pupils were around 50%. The national average is around 65%.
• Progress 8, which measures how much ground pupils gain between primary and GCSE: African pupils score around +0.37, Caribbean pupils around -0.24. One group is gaining ground, the other is losing it.
• University: around two-thirds of Black African young people go, compared with under half of Black Caribbean young people. At Russell Group universities it's 12% against 5%, and only Gypsy and Traveller pupils are less likely than Caribbean pupils to get in.

The Education Policy Institute found African pupils overtook the white British average somewhere between 2019 and 2023, while Caribbean pupils fell further behind during Covid. The gap isn't closing. It's widening.

Why "racism" or "absent dads" can't be the whole answer

Here's the trap. Half of you will say racism, the other half will say broken homes. But ask yourself why either of those would only hit the boys.

Caribbean girls have the same skin and the same teachers. They grow up in the same homes, often as the brothers' sisters. Yet at GCSE, 57% of Caribbean girls pass English and maths against 46% of Caribbean boys, the biggest gender gap of any ethnic group in the country. It shows up by age 11 (64% against 49%) and carries on to university (around 55% against 34%). Whatever is going on, it lands on Caribbean boys hardest.

Different starting points

Caribbean migration started with Windrush in 1948. We were invited to drive the buses, staff the NHS and rebuild the country, recruited for our labour and then locked out of almost everything above it.

The big wave of African migration came later, mostly in the 80s, 90s and 2000s, and much of it was selective: students, professionals, doctors, lawyers, teachers. Academics call it "immigrant optimism", people who crossed the world for a better life and pour that ambition into their kids. Think of two football clubs. One was built by signing grafters to do the dirty work. The other only signs players who already scored 30 goals last season. Of course the second academy produces bangers. The deck was stacked before the kids were born.

Family structure matters, but it's not the whole story

On the 2011 Census, 26% of Black African households were married couples against 17% of Caribbean households, and married couples with dependent children were 20% against 9.6%. On the latest census, 51% of Caribbean families with children are headed by a lone parent, the highest of any group. Single mums are carrying the world on their backs, and I'm in awe of a lot of them. But two committed parents splitting the school runs, the homework and the discipline is not the same as one tired parent doing it alone.

That said, the researcher Tracey Reynolds points out that the census doesn't really understand Caribbean families: visiting relationships, extended networks, grandmothers and aunties raising children, and fathers who don't live in the house but are absolutely present. My parents weren't together, and I saw my dad pretty much every other week.

The school system and Caribbean boys

In 1971, Bernard Coard, from Grenada, published How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System. British schools were sending Caribbean children, disproportionately boys, to "educationally subnormal" schools after biased IQ tests. Steve McQueen dramatised it in Small Axe, and the BBC documentary Subnormal: A British Scandal tells the story too.

That history poisoned trust between Black families and schools, and you can see the modern version in the exclusion figures. Caribbean boys are around three times more likely to be permanently excluded than the average pupil, and only around 15% of excluded children ever make it back into mainstream school.

The researcher Steve Strand found that even Caribbean boys from comfortable middle-class homes scored below comparable white British boys, and pointed to teacher expectations, such as entering boys for lower-tier exam papers their results didn't justify. When I moved school, they tried to put me in the bottom set for physics. I had to argue for weeks to get out of it.

Culture and expectation

Many West African households run on hierarchy, respect for elders and a clear message from day one: you will be a doctor, a lawyer, a banker. Research found over 90% of Black African and other minority parents want their children to stay in education past 16, compared with 77% of white British parents. That is a culture of expectation, reinforced every single week.

Caribbean families value education too, and back in Jamaica school is strict. Yet something in the mix of Caribbean and British culture here isn't serving our boys.

This was never Africans versus Caribbeans

Once both groups get to university, the African advantage shrinks: the gap in good degrees compared with white students is 23 percentage points for Black African students and 19 for Black Caribbean students. In work, Black employees are the only group consistently earning less than white employees like for like, and identical CVs with African-sounding names need around 60% more applications to get the same callbacks.

After the subnormal scandal, Caribbean parents built Saturday schools and taught their own kids maths, English and Black history, and it worked. We need to rebuild that: Saturday schools, book clubs and community resources for boys the system is failing. Longer term, men my age need to lay down the habits of success for the next generation, build ourselves up financially, and do everything we can to help our children excel in the system that exists.

Black people are not a monolith. When someone points at the African numbers and says "see, it can be done", the honest answer is that it's more nuanced than that.