Educational inequalities 'shocking'

3:20am Thursday 16th October 2008

Inequalities in educational achievement between different areas - and different neighbourhoods in the same town - are "shocking", the Conservatives said.

New data for GCSE results at neighbourhood level showed that in one area of Bradford just 3% of children achieved the target of five GCSEs including English and Maths at grade A*-C in 2007, compared to 100% in one part of Richmond-on-Thames in south London.

Shadow schools secretary Michael Gove said the figures showed that children born in deprived neighbourhoods have far less opportunity to succeed than those brought up in affluent areas.

But schools minister Jim Knight accused the Tories of "playing with statistics", pointing out that the data related to areas containing only a few dozen GCSE students each, meaning that the picture can be skewed by a handful of results.

The figures produced by the Office for National Statistics break down England into 6,780 Middle Layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs), which have an average population of around 7,000 and are usually home to anything between 20 and 160 GCSE-age teenagers.

The poorest-performing MSOA in the country last year was the Holme Wood area of Bradford, where just 3.3% of the 123 students reached the GCSE target. Within the same local authority, 86.3% of youngsters in the MSOA covering the village of Addingham achieved the target. Other low scores were recorded in part of Worksop, Nottinghamshire, (7.2%), the Water Eaton district of Milton Keynes (7.6%), Marfleet in Hull (8.2%) and Blackbird Leys in Oxford (8.7%).

But in the Kew Gardens area of Richmond, 100% of the 20 GCSE pupils got five good results, as did 90.7% in the Widney Manor area of Solihull in the West Midlands and 89.6% in part of Harpenden, Hertfordshire.

Mr Gove said: "The scale of inequality is truly shocking. It is a scandal that there are pockets of the country where just a tiny minority of children achieve the basic level of qualifications aged 16.

"These figures show yet again that children born in deprived areas get nothing like the opportunities of those born elsewhere. It is vital that we reverse this block on aspiration. That is why our first priority in schools will be to tackle the gap in performance between rich and poor."

Mr Knight said: "Michael Gove should get over his infatuation with the Swedish model or finally come clean on the true cost of his Swedish schools experiment and explain how the Tories would pay for it."

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