Rapid fall in number of black pupils achieving good grades

The proportion of black teenagers achieving five good GCSE passes has fallen by 8 per cent since 2000, according to an official survey of nearly 20,000 school pupils published yesterday.

The proportion of black teenagers achieving five good GCSE passes has fallen by 8 per cent since 2000, according to an official survey of nearly 20,000 school pupils published yesterday.

The Government immediately announced a new drive to boost achievement by ethnic- minority students but black leaders said the drop demonstrated ministers' failure to tackle institutional racism in schools.

The proportion of African-Caribbeans who scored at least five A* to C-grades at GCSE dropped to 36 per cent in 2002 from 39 per cent in 2000, according to the latest Youth Cohort Study – the largest survey of pupils' educational experiences in England and Wales, which received nearly 18,000 responses from young people.

The performance of white students rose from 50 to 52 per cent, marginally above the average of 51 per cent.

The fall in black teenagers' achievement made them the worst-performing ethnic group for the first time since the study first reported complete ethnic data in 1992.

Every other ethnic group – apart from Indian students who stayed at 60 per cent and those in the "other Asian" category, which includes Chinese pupils – showed an improvement over the past two years.

Lee Jasper, who advises Ken Livingstone, the London Mayor, on race issues, said the problem was that the largely white teaching profession was terrified of black teenagers. "The Government's single biggest failure in its response to the Macpherson report [into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence] has been its failure to tackle institutional racism in schools.

"These figures are testament to the failure of the Government to really tackle the now critical failure of black students' GCSE performance. Teachers' low expectations of black students have a serious impact on their performance," he said.

The problem is not new. Although black pupils start school aged five as enthusiastic and academically able as any other youngster, by 16 they are now performing worse than any other group, the education watchdog Ofsted has found. Black boys are also more than four times as likely to be excluded as white students.

Diane Abbott, a black Labour MP, has described the experience of black pupils in British schools as a "silent catastrophe" while last year Mr Livingstone warned that it had contributed to the rising tide of street crime and shootings in London.

William Atkinson, Britain's most prominent black headteacher, even described the disruption caused by some disaffected black youngsters as a new form of "black-on-black violence" that was damaging the life chances of their peers.

Faced with this prospect it is perhaps unsurprising that many black parents are now turning to black-run educational institutions after finding that their children struggled or were expelled from mainstream schools.

Pastor Derrick Wilson, the chairman of Tabernacle School, one of Britain's few black-run educational institutions, believes that schools such as his can often be the only way of helping young people who are written off by mainstream schools. "We are a unique school doing a good job against all the odds," he said. "Some of the children have come from very difficult backgrounds and circumstances and have been written off as failures. Since attending our school, the children have made notable improvements both academically and socially. Some of these students are now preparing for university."

The slump in black students' results will come as a bitter blow to the Government, which has launched high-profile initiatives to try to reverse the problem. The last drive was in April 2001 when David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education at the time, announced £1.5m funding to focus on the problem. Mr Blunkett focused on Afro-Caribbean boys as a group in particular need of extra support and urged parents of under-achieving ethnic- minority pupils to become more involved in their children's education.

Milena Buyum, vice-chairwoman of the National Assembly Against Racism, is among the black leaders who maintain that institutional racism is the real problem. White teachers often failed to understand the culture of black boys and stereotyped them as aggressive under-achievers, she said.

The Commission for Racial Equality warned yesterday that "peer pressure" had also made a substantial contribution to the decline in black achieve-ment. A spokeswoman for the commission said the actions of teachers had a considerable impact on achievement of black pupils, although it stopped short of saying schools were institutionally racist.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills said a new strategy to tackle the problem was likely to be published next month.