Country's inequalities jeopardising the future of our young people - The Yorkshire Post says

Yet those young people’s futures are being jeopardised by the gross inequalities of the north-south divide, which continues to entrench institutional unfairness in the education system by failing to acknowledge or support the high numbers of disadvantaged children in our region.

This is completely unacceptable. Today’s second annual Fairer Schools Index produced by the Northern Powerhouse Partnership lays bare the extent of the injustices in the school league tables system.

It simply cannot be right that the tables take no account of pupils’ backgrounds when assessing schools’ performances, which is resulting in skewed statistics that present unfair comparisons between poor areas in the north and much more affluent communities in the south.

And as the report points out, the need to address this by giving our disadvantaged young people much better support has only been made more pressing by the Covid-19 crisis, which has put families under even greater financial pressure.

At a time when the Government has been forced to bow to footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign to provide holiday meals to children who might otherwise go hungry, the Prime Minister should take heed of educational inequalities and act to end them.

It is impossible to give credence to Boris Johnson’s oft-repeated pledges that he will level up the economy to eliminate the north-south divide if such disgraceful discrepancies in the education system are allowed to remain.

Nor can disadvantaged children be left to struggle in the face of overwhelming odds that pose a risk to their futures.

The partnership’s call for the Government’s spending review to prioritise funding towards poorer young people is timely and should be accepted. Mr Johnson must act without delay.

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