The Office for Standards in Education report is expected to highlight ground-breaking primary and secondary schools which have shown what can be achieved with the right approach.

Chief inspector Mike Tomlinson praised the schools, but added that there was still work to do. “I do not think that any of these secondaries would say they have cracked it, but they have certainly made significant strides in improving levels of performance.

“We need to understand how they do it and what the levers are to make sure we get that practice more widespread.”

He said the OFSTED report would help local authorities and policy-makers tackle the problem of ethnic-minority under-achievement.

In his annual report in February Mr Tomlinson said “disproportionate numbers of pupils of African-Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage were still being failed by the system”.

One school that inspectors have praised is St Bonaventure’s in Newham, east London. The boys’ school has a high proportion of African-Caribbean pupils who perform as well as those from other ethnic groups. Across the school three-quarters of pupils achieve five A*-C grades at GCSE.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the headteacher, said: “We put a lot of time into study support... A lot of the pupils come from unstructured and sometimes ... difficult homes so we offer study support after school until 7pm, including mentoring, teaching and leisure activities.”

Pupils are also all given individual targets and their progress is tracked carefully.

Sir Michael said that the new report highlighted an important issue. “Black youngsters, particularly boys, are not achieving to national norms. Unless we do something we are creating huge problems for the future,” he said. “This report suggests various ways forward.”