The Achievement of Spanish Speaking Students in Secondary Schools in England

ABSTRACT

This research aims to examine Spanish-speaking students’ attainment to improve our knowledge about students at the end of secondary school in England. The sample consisted of students who completed the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in inner London Local Authority. The findings of the analysis of GCSE results by language spoken at home suggest that, overall, students who speak Spanish language do less well than other groups, and their low attainment is a key concern for policymakers and teachers. However, while this is true overall, there were wide differences in performance when broken down into European speakers and Latin American speakers. The empirical evidence suggest that European Spanish speakers do better that Latin American Spanish speakers. A number of factors were identified in the underachievement of Spanish students, including the language barrier, poverty, and pupil mobility rate. Policy implications for data collection and further research are discussed in the final section.

KEYWORDS:

• Spanish speakers
• Latino
• language proficiency
• attainment
• GCSE
• language diversity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ https://spanishlanguagedomains.com/the-numbers-of-spanish-speakers-in-the-world-exceeds-500-million/.

² The DfE’s definition of students to be included in “White Other” is Albanian, Bosnian-Herzegovinian, Croatian, Greek/Greek Cypriot, Italian, Kosovan, Portuguese, Serbian, Turkish/Turkish Cypriot, White European, White Eastern European, and White Western European; i.e., European Spanish speakers, while “any other group” would include Spanish speakers from Latin/South/Central America.