Call for more male black students

Mr Lammy said school performance largely determines university prospects

There are still too few black students studying for a degree in England, the new universities minister has said.

David Lammy said the proportion of university students who are black Caribbean males had remained unchanged at about 1% for the last three years.

Not everybody had an equal chance, even though a black man may be voted in as US president in a few days' time, he told an Oxford University conference.

More work needed to be done to change the situation, he said.

Mr Lammy was the first black Briton to study for a masters in law at Harvard and went on to join Parliament as MP for Tottenham.

But black boys do exemplify the scale of the challenge faced by those of us who want everyone to have the chances in life they need David Lammy Universities minister

But people like him were the exception rather than the rule, he said.

"So we mustn't let the fact that some black people make it lead us to become complacent.

"Because let's be honest about it, we're not yet living in a society where everyone has an equal chance."

He said racism was not the problem, and it was not just an issue concerning ethnic minority children. It was equally true of white boys and girls from less well-off families, he said.

"But black boys do exemplify the scale of the challenge faced by those of us who want everyone to have the chances in life they need to make the best of themselves."

There were still nowhere near enough black boys getting a chance at university, he said.

This was despite the fact that both African and Afro-Caribbean families had a strong "culture of aspiration" and "self-improvement".

'Equal chance'

A way needed to be found to tap into and harness this, he said.

Young people's performance at school largely determined their prospects for admission to very selective institutions, he said.

But this was now improving for black Caribbean pupils, with nearly half achieving five GCSEs in 2007.

He acknowledged how much work was going on in selective institutions in trying to attract under-represented groups into higher education.

At Oxford, the number of black and mixed parentage entrants rose by a fifth between 2006 and 2008, he said.

But he warned that there needed to be more work on "getting an equal chance for all young people".