Inner city education schemes get mixed results
An Ofsted report into two schemes designed to boost education in inner city schools suggests that results are patchy at best.
When Labour came to power it established the Excellence in Cities (EiC) and Education Action Zone (EAZ) schemes to try to turn around inner city schools and improve educational attainment for disadvantaged people.
Excellence in Cities provides pupils with mentors to help guide their aspirations and reduce levels of truancy. The report finds that schools covered by this programme have seen both of these issues improve faster than the national average.
The same scheme also sees extra tuition for the most able pupils and special attention to disruptive children. The report suggests that this had been implemented well, and finds that attainment levels have risen faster in schools benefiting from these methods than in the country as a whole, although it notes that a large gap remains.
But while the report is positive about Excellence in Cities, it criticised Education Action Zones for their ‘limited initial impact on school improvement’.
This scheme brings local groups together to build partnerships to improve education, but has been accused of being over ambitious by the report, and for failing to take account of local issues faced by schools.
The results have also been erratic from case to case, with two Education Actions Zones showing a fall in the number of pupils achieving five A*-C grade GCSE’s despite an upward trend across the country.
And despite the improvements bought about by the schemes where they have succeeded, there are concerns that they have often wasted money, and that the problems that remain are still immense.
The areas covered by the report still have 25% lower attainment for English than the national average, while the gap is 23% for Maths. There is also a continuing problem with attendance with more than 10% of pupils being absent each day.
