HM Government

Raising standards and narrowing gaps

The Government’s approach has always been to deliver both excellence and equity: investing in raising school standards for all, but at the same time targeting appropriate resources on areas and schools which need extra help. This is why our academies programme has focused significant new resources in areas where standards have been too low. These new schools are delivering better results than their predecessors, and yet serve a substantially more disadvantaged intake than the average.

Our National Challenge programme is directing £400 million of new resources to support secondary schools with the lowest GCSE results, so that in all schools at least 30% of the pupils achieve more than five good GCSEs, including English and mathematics by 2011. Through the City Challenges programme we have extended to all schools in the Black Country and Greater Manchester the lessons learned in London, which have in recent years raised attainment in the capital by double the rate for the rest of the country. We have trained more than 200 National Leaders of Education and 400 Local Leaders of Education to provide additional leadership and support to schools in difficulty. Finally our Coasting Schools strategy will target schools which appear to be achieving acceptable exam results, but where pupils are not making the progress they should.

If we are to deliver a truly fair and excellent system, we must go further in tackling the longstanding attainment gaps which exist between children from different backgrounds. The attainment gap by poverty is substantial, and it opens up very early. It is strongly evident by the age of five (which is why in chapter 3 we focus on the early years). It narrows only slightly in primary school, and widens again after age 11. For example, the chances of a child eligible for free school meals - roughly the poorest 15% by family income - getting good school qualifications by age 16 are less than one-third of those for better- off classmates. Recent trends are encouraging (for example the gap for 11-year-olds has narrowed by 3 percentage points since 2003), but it remains too large. The gaps for pupils having special needs and disabilities are also too large, and to address this we will begin a new project in 2009, backed by £31 million of funding, to demonstrate best practice in improving outcomes for such pupils and help schools rethink their approach towards and expectations of them.