25th November 2015 1:00
By Blue Tutors
New data has been released which shows that the attainment gap in GCSE results between the north and south of England is not improving. Education data firm School Dash has examined the provisional results from the latest GCSE results, and revealed that children in the south of the country are 4.7% more likely to achieve five GCSEs including English and Maths. The data comes after Ofsted has warned that there are significant geographical divides in results, with coastal schools in the north performing particularly badly. Education Secretary Nicky Morgan acknowledged that many under-performing education authorities were in the North of the country.
The data for north and south is based on a line drawn between the Severn estuary and the Wash, with 3.7 million mainstream state school pupils in the North and 4 million in the south. The gap in attainment between the two was 1.8% in 2012, 2.8% in 2013 and 4.8% in 2014. Provisional results suggest that the final data for 2015 will show an attainment gap of 4.7%. The overall trend shows that the attainment gap has been rising since 2012, a fact which Ofsted have highlighted to the government. The results also indicated that whilst deprivation is a key factor in determining results, schools in deprived areas of London buck the trend and perform very well.
School Dash has pointed out that there are telling patterns in attainment at different points in children’s school careers. They note that the attainment gap at primary school levels is much narrower standing at 1.1%. Their report suggests that it is at a secondary school level that children in the north of the country fall behind. The report highlighted that once deprivation is taken into account, primary schools in the north could be better performing than those in the south. School Dash concluded that greater understanding of what happens when children move to secondary school is needed, as that is where the gap in attainment begins to widen.