COMMENT & ANALYSIS: Vital for schools to narrow gap.

IT IS sad to note, more than 25 years since a major government report censured Liverpool over the education it was providing for its black and other ethnic minority children, that the same problems are with us in 2006.

It is not easy to tackle problems generated by the arrival of children in our education system who do not speak English as a first language, if they speak it at all. Quite often, particularly in the case of asylum-seeking families, they may only spend a few weeks or months in the city before being moved on to another part of the country, making any kind of educational continuity almost impossible.

But that is only to tell part of the story. The latest figures point also to a significant and, disturbingly, widening discrepancy between the educational performance of British-born, English-speaking children from black and other ethnic backgrounds and their white counterparts.

Liverpool council says that it does a tremendous amount of support work for schools and pupils, including the provision of bilingual teaching assistants, extra training for teachers, diversity weeks which celebrate other cultures, and a project to promote the achievements of black youngsters.

It points to the fact that the performance of children from many minority groups, including the Chinese, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian communities, has improved over the last three years with results in several subjects better than the national average.

All of this is to be welcomed, but it is clear that, despite all these good efforts, a fundamental problem persists.

If children from some ethnic minority groups fall behind the achievements of their white contemporaries at school, it is very likely to have a significant detrimental impact on the rest of their lives. What is created is a spiral of disadvantage which becomes self-perpetuating.

Solutions may be difficult to come by, but as an enlightened society we simply have to keep trying.