Heidi Safia Mirza: Young, Female and Black

Table of Contents

Last Updated on October 27, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Young, Female and Black (1992) is Heidi Safia Mirza’s study of young Black women in two south London comprehensive schools. It challenged the idea that Black pupils were bound to underachieve, and it is one of the key studies for explaining ethnic differences in educational achievement, especially the differences between Black girls and Black boys.

Mirza argued three things:

Black girls did relatively well at school. The ‘underachievement’ of Black pupils was partly a myth, because research had ignored the girls.
The girls’ success did not come from high self-esteem or ‘strong Black mothers’, and their problems did not come from low self-esteem. Those explanations, she argued, were too simple.

Racism in schools was real, but it worked mainly by limiting the girls’ opportunities, not by damaging how they saw themselves.

This study is part of the sociology of education module, examined on AQA Paper 1 (7192/1).

The research: who, where and how

Mirza’s main sample was 62 young African Caribbean women aged 15 to 19, out of 198 young men and women she surveyed in total. The fieldwork took place over about 18 months in two comprehensive schools in south London:

St Hilda’s, a mixed Catholic school, which Mirza described as having a regime of ‘academic mediocrity’
St Theresa’s, a Church of England girls’ school which had kept the ethos of the grammar school it used to be, a regime of ‘academic selectivity’

She used a mix of methods, but this is mainly a qualitative study based on observation and interviews, alongside the survey. She also followed up 72 Black school leavers by post four years later, and compared her findings with a group of young women in Trinidad.

Mirza herself said her sample was ‘not necessarily representative’, and that is worth remembering in the evaluation.

The myth of underachievement

Mirza argued that, for three decades, the debate about Black pupils’ achievement had been framed as a problem of ‘race’ and culture, and had ignored the fact that Black girls did relatively well at school. In the exam results she reports, the Black girls left school better qualified than the Black boys: only 2% of the girls left with no qualifications, compared with 20% of the boys.

This matters because many explanations of underachievement assume that Black pupils, as a group, do badly. If Black girls and Black boys from the same families and schools get very different results, then explanations based on the Black family or on ‘Black culture’ as a whole can’t be the whole story.

Rejecting the self-esteem explanation

A popular explanation at the time was that racism damaged Black pupils’ self-esteem, which then lowered their achievement. Mirza argued that this didn’t fit what she found. The girls in her study did not have low self-esteem, and they did not accept the negative labels some teachers gave them. If labelling works through damaging self-esteem, it should have damaged these girls, and it hadn’t.

She was just as critical of the opposite explanation: that Black girls succeed because they are inspired by ‘strong Black mothers’. She called this explanation ‘analytically naive’, because it romanticises Black women and turns a structural problem into a matter of personality.

She also criticised Mary Fuller’s earlier study of Black girls in a London comprehensive. Fuller had described the girls as resisting school in class while working hard for qualifications. Mirza thought this ‘culture of resistance’ reading was too ‘romantic’, and that it drew attention away from the structural racism and sexism the girls actually faced.

Racism and the schools

For Mirza, the real obstacles were in the schools, and they showed up in the way the schools were organised as much as in individual teachers.

At St Theresa’s, for example, the entry criteria favoured Church of England families, which disadvantaged many West Indian girls from Pentecostal churches, and many of those girls ended up in the lower-ability classes. Lower-ability classes got fewer academic opportunities: one lower-band class lost its French lessons because of disruptive behaviour, and homework was set less often. The non-academic courses were poorly resourced and, Mirza found, often worked as ‘containment periods’, even though the girls in them were articulate and keen to learn.

Types of teacher

Mirza found evidence of racism from some teachers, but most genuinely wanted to help the Black girls get a decent education. The problem was that their attitudes could still hold the girls back. She identified five types of teacher response to Black pupils:

Type of teacher	What they were like	Effect on the girls
Overt racists	Openly racist in what they said to and about Black pupils	The girls tried to avoid them as far as possible and rejected their negative views
The Christians	‘Colour-blind’: they claimed to treat everyone the same and didn’t see racism as a problem in the school	Racism went unchallenged because these teachers didn’t believe it existed
The crusaders	Actively anti-racist, trying to build anti-racist teaching into their lessons	Their efforts could backfire, because they were based on assumptions about Black pupils’ lives that didn’t fit these girls
Liberal chauvinists	Genuinely wanted to help Black pupils, but had low expectations of them	Their ‘help’ could be patronising and counter-productive, for example steering girls towards fewer or less demanding subjects
Black teachers	Mirza’s fifth category: the schools’ Black staff	Mirza discusses their position separately from the white teachers’ responses

The point for the exam is that you don’t need overtly racist teachers for schools to disadvantage Black pupils. Low expectations, colour-blindness and well-meant but misjudged help could do it too. The low expectations of the liberal chauvinists are similar to what Gillborn and Youdell later found in the way teachers placed pupils in sets.

How the girls responded

The girls in Mirza’s study were strongly committed to education. Looking back on the study in 2006, Mirza described them as identifying deeply with the idea of meritocracy, and driven by what she called ‘educational urgency’.

They coped with school through what she called a ‘strategic rationalisation’ of their schooling. Some sat at the back of the class and got on with their work; some pretended not to be working but did their homework. Many avoided teachers they saw as unhelpful or racist and studied on their own. And many took a longer route, staying on and going to college, which Mirza called a kind of ‘backdoor entry’ to qualifications and careers, including Access courses into social work and nursing.

These strategies kept the girls’ self-esteem and ambitions intact. HOWEVER, they came at a cost. Avoiding teachers and not asking for help meant the girls didn’t get all the support they needed, and taking the long way round meant their success took longer. So the girls weren’t held back by low self-esteem, but they were still disadvantaged by the way schools treated them.

Evaluation of Mirza

Strengths

It challenges labelling theory. The girls rejected the negative labels some teachers gave them, which shows that a self-fulfilling prophecy is not automatic. Pupils can resist labels, which also fits Fuller’s earlier findings, even though Mirza interpreted them differently.
It separates gender and ethnicity. Comparing Black girls with Black boys shows that explanations based on ‘Black culture’ or the Black family as a whole can’t explain the patterns. The same gap shows up in today’s statistics: in 2022/23, Black Caribbean girls scored almost 8 points higher than Black Caribbean boys at GCSE (Attainment 8: 43.8 against 36.0).

It shows how racism can work without overt racists. The teacher typology shows how colour-blind or well-meaning teachers can still disadvantage minority pupils, which supports the idea of institutional racism.
It uses mixed methods. Observation and interviews give depth, and the comparison groups and follow-up survey add some breadth.

Limitations

It’s a small and local sample. 62 young women in two schools in south London, and Mirza herself says the sample is not necessarily representative.

It’s dated. The research was carried out more than 30 years ago (the book was published in 1992). Schools, the curriculum and the achievement of ethnic minority groups have changed a great deal since then.
It’s mostly about African Caribbean pupils. It tells us little about other ethnic groups.
Structure and agency. You could argue that Mirza puts so much weight on structural racism that she underplays the girls’ own choices, the mirror image of her criticism of Fuller. Her own account of the girls’ strategies shows how much they were actively shaping their own routes through school.

Mirza in the exam

Mirza is examined on Paper 1 (7192/1). AQA’s mark scheme lists her among the sources for this question:

June 2021, Q03 (sat November 2021): Applying material from Item A, analyse two ways in which teaching and learning in schools may affect the educational experiences of minority ethnic groups. [10 marks]. See the worked answer.

She is also useful in the 30-mark question on ethnic differences in achievement (June 2019, Q04), in two ways: as evidence for in-school factors (the teacher types), and as an evaluation of labelling theory (the girls resisted their labels).

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 and related posts

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

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

Sources

Mirza, H. S. (1992) Young, Female and Black. London: Routledge. (Now available open access.)
Mirza, H. S. (2006) ‘Race, gender and educational desire’.
Ethnicity facts and figures (2024) GCSE results (Attainment 8), 2022 to 2023 school year.

Heidi Safia Mirza: Young Female and Black