British Black Minority Ethnic (BME) students are nationally underachieving in comparison to their Ethnic Chinese and White peers; typically there is a 16% graduate attainment gap in the UK (Equality Challenge Unit, 2015). Previous research has suggested that the attainment gap could be explained by BME students' lack of sense of belonging; disengagement; typically commuting from their family home to University; typically have part-time employment. Peer assisted learning (PAL) has been shown to have a positive impact on addressing and resolving students' alienation and disengagement. However, a question still remains regarding whether student perceptions hold up to statistical analysis of learning performance when scrutinised in comparison to similar cohorts without PAL interventions. This paper presents the results of a statistical study for two cohorts of students on engineering courses with a disproportionately high representation of BME students. The research method undertook a statistical analysis of student records for the two cohorts to ascertain whether there are patterns of correlation between PAL, student ethnicity and student parental employment upon student academic performance and placement attainment. Student family employment background has also been shown to influence student engagement and retention on educational studies. Previous research evaluations of peer assisted learning programmes have focused on quantitative study of students' surveys and qualitative semi-structured research interviews with students on their student engagement and learning experience. Whereas this paper evaluates the intervention from a quantitative statistical analysis of the student records to evaluate the impact peer assisted learning has on a cohort's academic performance and placement attainment in comparison to different social categories (classifications). The results are compared against another cohort with a similar student profile who have not used PAL. The analysis of results of the two cohorts indicate that PAL does not significantly impact academic performance; however PAL appears to have a positive impact upon the placement attainment for BME students and students with parents in non-managerial/professional employment.