A coalition of school leaders, charities and the Northern Powerhouse Partnership have written to Conservative leadership candidates urging them to commit to fixing growing regional inequalities in education. They predicted Thursday’s results would show 24.4% of pupils in the north-east of England would achieve GSCE grade seven or above, compared with 37.8% in London. The forecast followed “stark” regional disparities revealed in last week’s A-level results, with top grades falling faster in the North East compared to the South East. The joint letter told Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss that the government’s target of raising exam standards in the worst performers by a third by 2030 will not happen unless “place-based challenges such as health and housing are also tackled ». The same moment. The letter from Northern Powerhouse, Schools North East and education charity Shine, said: “Regional attainment inequalities are getting worse, not better.” He added that the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus pandemic had exacerbated existing regional disadvantages and that failures to implement the national tutoring programme, which aims to make up for learning lost during the pandemic, had only exacerbated the problem. Only 58.8% of targeted schools in the Northeast benefited from the program compared to 96.1% of those targeted in the Southeast and 100% in the Southwest, the letter said. Labor blamed the government for failing children in deprived areas. Shadow schools minister Stephen Morgan said: “Young people who got results have worked incredibly hard, but 12 years of Conservative governments have left a legacy of uneven outcomes that are holding children and communities back.” Labor said that last year in Knowsley, a deprived area of Liverpool, less than 40% of pupils achieved a GCSE pass in English and maths, compared with more than 70% of pupils in affluent areas such as Trafford in Greater Manchester, Kingston upon Thames. in South West London and Buckinghamshire. Henri Murison, the chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership and co-signatory of the letter, said that despite the government’s rhetoric of upswing, its record in office had only increased regional differences. “The government was doing more about education inequalities in poorer areas before the rise was invented than it is now,” he said. “Poor management of the national tutoring scheme and problems with the laptop scheme have created a built-in problem across all year groups. This means we will have even worse results in the north of England than we have had in the last 10 years.” Murison accused the Department for Education (DfE) of “deliberately flattening … removing opportunity areas and replacing them with central budgets without local control and without guaranteed funding. This is a scandal for individual children and for families in these disadvantaged neighborhoods.” He said: “The reason A-levels, and we expect GCSEs, have been so disappointing across the north of England is because the most disadvantaged children in society have been failed by this government. Someone needs to be held accountable for this. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. “The incoming chancellor should just bypass the DfE completely when it comes to this problem and spend the money directly on local places. “Before the pandemic there was already a large gap at grade 7 and above between London and the North East, Yorkshire and the North West. We expect this to increase significantly in Thursday’s results.” The quality of teaching in the north was not the problem, Murison added. “In the North East of England, 10% of children in schools are on free school meals throughout secondary education. In outer London it is only about 2%. If schools in London had to teach children in the North East, they would have very different results.’ The DfE said: “We have set out a range of measures to help the standard of education across England, including targeted support both for individual pupils who are falling behind and for whole areas of the country where standards are weakest. This is alongside £5 billion to help young people recover from the impact of the pandemic, including £1.5 billion for teaching schemes. “Pupil Premium funding also increases to more than £2.6bn in 2022-23, while an extra £1bn allows us to extend the catch-up premium for the next two academic years – funding that schools can use to offer targeted academic and emotional support to disadvantaged students’.
