What needs to change to bridge regional inequalities in education - Jayne Dowle

Am I worrying too much? Does it even matter, seeing as she will be off to sixth form college to study A Levels in September, with a view to going to university?

Well, yes, it does matter. Although conditional university offers are made on A level results, I do know from many reports - and my own previous experience teaching in a university - that when competition for places is tight, GCSE performance may be taken into consideration.

So yes, that grade 5 or 6 or 7 in Spanish might make all the difference in a couple of years’ time, even if Lizzie decides to study a degree subject in which she will never need to know the words for ‘please may I order a coffee?’ in Barcelona.

And as I keep reminding Lizzie, when she is applying for university she will be up against the brightest and best in the UK, and from abroad.

I realise that this makes me sound like a horrendous helicopter parent, and I promise you that I’m not. My daughter is far more organised than I ever was a student and she sorted out her entire GCSE revision programme herself; she doesn’t need my help. I’m just trying to use my experience of the world to prepare her for the reality that she will face. And this reality, as educational charity The Sutton Trust suggests, means that young people in the North of England are “going backwards” compared with their peers in the south.

This comes after the gap in A-level results last week widened across different regions. A-level entries awarded the top grades, A* and A, increased in London from 26.9 per cent in 2019 to 39 per cent this year.

But across the northeast of England they rose from 23 per cent to 30.8 per cent. This means the gap between the two areas increased from just under four percentage points to more than eight percentage points; really quite a significant shift, and not in our favour.

“The marking leniency shown in these A-level results has benefited those in London the greatest,” says Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership. “The gap between London and the southeast with all the northern regions has widened.”

It doesn’t bode well, does it? And as I wave farewell to the secondary school system for good and consider my daughter’s future, I have key areas of concern which as a parent and fervent believer in a decent education for all and raising aspirations, I need to flag up.

Polarisation, between north and south, and state and independent schools, is becoming more and more entrenched with every set of exam results.

This is extremely acute in our own region I’m afraid. We are fortunate to have a significant number of world-class independent schools in Yorkshire, but I know from talking to fee-paying parents that the experience enjoyed by their children and that of my own (my son, 20, attended the same academy as Lizzie) is literally worlds apart.

The differences, I’m afraid, reflect huge disparities in society and start to become entrenched at around the age of four, when some children go to the local primary, and others start ‘prep school’.

This rite of passage does indeed prepare them for an education which will be tailored precisely to address their strengths and weaknesses, deliver enriching extra-curricular activities and provide them with a bedrock of self-confidence that money really can buy.

Since Michael Gove departed as a courageous and reforming Secretary of State for Education in 2014, we’ve had a sorry succession of politicians in charge of schools and none of them have done anything meaningful to try and address the gulf.

Instead, they’ve handed over countless primary and secondary schools to academy chains; some of these are far more successful than others, typically the super-competitive academies in central London, which can draw their cohort from a huge pool of children, and their teaching staff from the cream of the graduate crop, attracted by excellent facilities and highly-competitive salaries.

Meanwhile, as I certainly found as a parent-governor, and with my daughter’s recent experience, non-independent schools in our kind of town – Barnsley – struggle. Struggle to attract and retain staff. Struggle to deliver education to all students. And they also struggle to be taken seriously by a government which really seems to show no interest in these issues when they are pointed out.

When we finally get our new Prime Minister after this dreadful summer-long hiatus, I hope that whoever they put in charge at Education will put the fate of millions of state school-educated children right to the very top of their to-do list.