Tony Sewell – explaining black boys’ underachievement

Last Updated on October 26, 2026 by Karl Thompson

In 1997 Tony Sewell published Black Masculinities and Schooling: How Black Boys Survive Modern Schooling, a study of black boys in a boys’ comprehensive school.

In this study Sewell argues that a culture of hyper-masculinity, adopted by some (but not all) black boys, is one of the main factors explaining their educational underachievement. It is an interesting counterpoint to earlier studies such as those by Cecile Wright and David Gillborn, which emphasised negative teacher labelling as the main explanation for differences in achievement by ethnicity.

For an overview of the other in-school factors that explain educational achievement by ethnicity, see ethnicity and educational achievement: in-school factors. For the home and cultural factors, which is where Sewell’s argument mostly sits, see ethnicity and education: cultural factors.

Sewell’s explanation starts outside the school. A relatively high proportion of Black Caribbean boys are raised in lone-mother households, with the father absent. For Sewell, this means that many black boys lack a father figure to act as a role model and provide discipline while they are growing up, which makes them more vulnerable to peer pressure.

Some young black men are drawn into a street or gang culture which emphasises an aggressive, macho form of masculinity. In this culture violence is used as a means to gain respect, and it values materialist displays of wealth such as the latest street fashions. The culture views crime as a quick and ‘smart’ way to earn money, rather than ‘hard work’.

According to Sewell, this subculture of black masculinity provides peer support which makes up for the boys’ sense of rejection by their absent fathers. It also helps counter the sense of racism and injustice they feel from wider society.

Black Masculinities in School

Sewell suggests that hyper-masculinity comes into conflict with schools. It leads some black boys to reject the authority of teachers and senior leaders and not to take school work seriously. Schoolwork comes to be seen as effeminate and a bit of a ‘mug’s game’, in contrast to the ease with which money can be made from gang-related crime.

Sewell did not put all the blame on the boys, though. He also found that confrontations were often sparked by the way teachers handled them, and in particular by teachers’ ability to ‘shame them up’ in front of their peers. Those conflicts fed the boys’ sense that school was against them.

However, only a minority of black boys adopted hyper-masculine identities. Sewell identified four responses to schooling, and not all of them were in conflict with the school.

Four responses to schooling by black boys

Sewell’s figures are based on the boys he interviewed in one school: about 100, according to a report of the study published when the book came out. Textbooks usually give the four groups as 41%, 35%, 18% and 6%. That 1997 report gives slightly different figures (at least 40 of the 100 boys were conformists, and 16% were rebels), so treat the percentages as approximate.

Response	Roughly how many	What it involved
Conformists	The largest group: around four in ten	Accepted both the goals of school and its rules. They kept their heads down, obeyed school rules, spoke standard English in class and saw hard work as their route to success.
Innovators	The second largest group: around a third	Accepted the goals of schooling (they saw education as important) but rejected the means: formal schooling compromised their identity too much. However, they tried to stay out of trouble.
Rebels	A small minority: under one in five	Rejected both the goals and the rules of school. Some were black nationalists who believed white teachers and a Eurocentric curriculum were working against them. This is the group that adopted hyper-masculinity and were confrontational and challenging.
Retreatists	A tiny minority	Isolated individuals who kept to themselves. In one case Sewell describes, a boy wandered the corridors for weeks before a teacher intervened.

Evaluation of Sewell

Sewell has been criticised for blaming black culture for black underachievement. However, he is clear that he is only talking about a minority of boys who adopt a hyper-masculine identity, and that there is no single black culture. His own figures show the rebels were the smallest group but one.

That raises a problem for his argument, though. If the rebels are a minority, can they explain the gap for black boys as a whole? A small group failing badly can pull a group average down, but to know how much, we would need to know how many pupils from other ethnic groups were in equivalent anti-school groups, and his study, which looked at one school, can’t tell us that.

The family structure part of the argument also struggles against the statistics. In the 2011 Census, 16.6% of Black Caribbean households in England and Wales were lone parents with dependent children, compared with 6.7% of White British households. But the figure for Black African households was higher still, at 20.2%, and Black African pupils score well above Black Caribbean pupils at GCSE (see the table below). If lone parenthood were the main cause, we would expect the reverse. The cultural factors post looks at this in more detail.

Sewell himself found that teachers’ handling of the boys provoked conflict, which supports interactionist explanations as much as his own. Steve Strand’s (2012) analysis of national data found that Black Caribbean pupils were systematically under-represented in entry to the higher tiers of tests at age 14, even after controlling for prior attainment and family background, which he interpreted as a sign of teacher expectations at work. See in-school factors.

The study is also dated. It was carried out in one school in the 1990s, and it is possible that hyper-masculinity is less significant today than it was then.

Finally, the debate about ethnicity and underachievement has moved on. Black African pupils now score above the national average at GCSE, and Black pupils as a whole have improved more than White pupils since 2018/19. HOWEVER, Black Caribbean pupils, and Black Caribbean boys in particular, still score well below average, so there is still something for Sewell’s theory, and its critics, to explain.

Group (England, 2022/23)	Average Attainment 8 score (out of 90)
All pupils	46.3
Black African	48.7
White British	44.9
Black Caribbean	40.0
Mixed White and Black Caribbean	39.1
White British boys	42.8
Black Caribbean boys	36.0

Source: Ethnicity facts and figures, GCSE results (Attainment 8), 2022 to 2023 school year (published 7 November 2024). This is the latest year published for individual ethnic groups. The DfE’s 2025/26 figures, published in October 2026, give only broad groups: Black pupils’ average score was 1.7 points higher than in 2018/19, while White pupils’ was 1.2 points lower. For the full picture see ethnicity and education statistics.

Generating Genius

Sewell argues that the solution to black boys’ underachievement is to provide them with strict schooling that demands high expectations and, as far as possible, to give them the positive opportunities that middle-class students get through their social and cultural capital. Sewell argues this should make up for the disadvantages the underachieving boys face. Importantly, Sewell does not seem to accept that disadvantage is an excuse for failure.

Sewell founded the charity Generating Genius in 2004, aimed at improving the educational opportunities of disadvantaged black students, and getting them into science and engineering.

In the first cohort, 25 boys aged 12–13 spent three weeks of their summer holiday in 2006 at Imperial College London, doing hands-on science with academics there, and most returned in later years. According to Imperial College, 17 of the original 25 completed the programme, and all 17 received offers from leading universities, five of them from Oxford, Cambridge or Imperial.

The programme created a ‘science crew’ or ‘learning crew’ which used the group loyalty of a gang to motivate learning. Exposing children to universities at an early age made them think ‘university is for me!’. Generating Genius also provided the contacts that helped them get there.

Sewell argued that Generating Genius worked because it established the right ethos and high expectations. This effectively countered the disadvantages that his students faced.

Evaluations of Generating Genius

The main positive evaluation is that it seems to have worked! All 17 boys who completed the programme received offers from leading universities, which is impressive for boys who started out at schools that were struggling.

Limitations to Generating Genius

There are lots of limitations to this experiment…

It lacks representativeness: a very small sample of boys!

Lack of control of variables means we don’t actually know why the boys did so well. Was it the contacts, or did they try harder because this was a unique project and they felt ‘very special’? And the eight boys who didn’t complete it don’t appear in the success figures.

It ignores white working-class underachievement. White British pupils eligible for free school meals have some of the lowest GCSE results of any group (an average Attainment 8 score of 30.9 in 2022/23).

Does Sewell’s approach get to the root of the problem: class inequality? A summer school funded by a charity cannot compete with the advantages upper-middle-class families give their children through private schooling. And even if black boys are given fair and equal opportunities, racism in wider society may still disadvantage them compared with white boys.

Generating Genius today

The charity is still running. According to the Syncona Foundation, one of its funders, it now supports low-income students of all genders and ethnicities, with around 1,500 students joining its programmes each year, and offers university scholarships. So it is no longer only for black boys.NB the programme has been accepting girls for many years now!

The problem it set out to tackle hasn’t gone away. A 2023 report by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Diversity and inclusion in STEM, found that pupils from some backgrounds, such as Black Caribbean pupils, are clearly under-represented across STEM subjects at both GCSE and A-level.

Sewell and the 2021 race commission

Sewell was awarded a CBE in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to education, as founder of Generating Genius. In 2020 the government asked him to chair the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, whose report was published in March 2021.

The report argued that the term ‘institutional racism’ should be used only where deep-seated racism can be proven at a systemic level, and it pointed to family breakdown as one of the main reasons for poor outcomes. On education, it stressed that some ethnic minority groups, such as Black African, Indian and Bangladeshi pupils, do better than White British pupils once socio-economic background is taken into account.

The report was highly controversial. Its supporters said it rightly drew attention to class, family and geography rather than racism alone. Its critics, including a group of UN human rights experts who rejected its conclusions in April 2021, said it downplayed racism. For your exam, the point to take is that the report puts Sewell’s 1997 emphasis on family and culture into national policy debate, so the same evaluation points apply to both.

How Sewell comes up in the exam

Sewell is examined on Paper 1 (7192/1), in questions about differences in achievement between ethnic groups. Two AQA questions where he is directly useful:

• June 2017, Q01: Outline two cultural factors that may affect ethnic differences in educational achievement. [4 marks]. Anti-school peer group pressure is one of the factors AQA’s mark scheme credits, which is Sewell’s argument in a sentence.
• June 2019, Q04: Applying material from Item B and your knowledge, evaluate sociological explanations of differences in educational achievement between ethnic groups. [30 marks]. Item B contrasts home and family explanations with factors within schools, and Sewell gives you both: street culture and the family outside school, and his four responses inside it.

In an essay, use Sewell as evidence for cultural (home-based) explanations, then evaluate him with the Black African comparison and with the in-school evidence (teacher expectations, setting and tiering).

Sociology of Education Revision Bundle

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my sociology of education revision notes bundle, written by Karl Thompson, who taught A-level sociology for eighteen years and spent twelve as an AQA examiner, marking all three papers on the current specification.

Signposting

This material is primarily relevant to the sociology of education, usually taught in the first year of A-level Sociology.

Related posts on ethnicity and educational achievement:

• Ethnicity and education: cultural factors
• Ethnicity and educational achievement: in-school factors
• Heidi Safia Mirza: Young, Female and Black
• Pupil subcultures

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Sources

• Sewell, T. (1997) Black Masculinities and Schooling: How Black Boys Survive Modern Schooling. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.
• Tes (7 February 1997) ‘Who’s got the attitude problem?’ (report of Sewell’s study on publication).
• Strand, S. (2012) ‘The White British–Black Caribbean achievement gap: tests, tiers and teacher expectations’, British Educational Research Journal, 38(1), 75–101.
• Ethnicity facts and figures (2024) GCSE results (Attainment 8), 2022 to 2023 school year; Families and households (2011 Census).
• Department for Education (2026) Key stage 4 performance 2025/26 (provisional, 15 October 2026).
• Imperial College London (7 June 2013) ‘An Imperial alumnus uses his own experiences to guide boys into higher education’.
• Syncona Foundation, ‘Generating Genius’.
• House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (2023) Diversity and inclusion in STEM.
• Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (2021) The Report.