A yellowing poster in a window of Holme Wood’s library promises that school is “your route to a sparkling future”. The message would not appear to have hit home.

Statistics suggest that only one in every 33 children on this housing estate, one of the largest in West Yorkshire, hits the Government’s GCSE benchmark of five or more A-C grades, including English and Maths.

Built in the 1950s, Holme Wood sprawls across two hills on the south-eastern edge of Bradford, its mixture of semi-detached homes and small blocks of flats home to a predominantly white community.

It scores high on the various indexes of deprivation and in the early 1990s tens of millions of pounds were spent on physical and social improvements to the area.

The money cut crime, spruced up houses and introduced trees, driveways, play zones and attractive railings, but it created few jobs and did nothing for educational achievement.

Dozens of children were on the streets of Holme Wood yesterday afternoon, but only two were in school uniform and only one was carrying anything resembling a book. Far more were pushing infants in pushchairs.

In the Top Parade shopping precinct, four girls in their early teens gossiped in the Holme Wood Chicken and Kebab House while a baby was bounced from knee to knee.

Outside, an old man on a mobility scooter drove carefully around a shattered bottle of vodka. A young couple were mid-argument, the man using the wine bottle in his left hand to articulate his anger.

Two boys in hoodies yawned beside the entrance to the food store. Across the precinct, a metallic yellow “community police station”, grimy with dirt, appeared to have been converted from a shipyard freight container.

They film bare-chested, bare-knuckle fights in Holme Wood and post the footage on YouTube. Petty acts of vandalism and arson are routine. For 18 months from 2006, taxis refused to send drivers to the estate after a series of stonings from the youth of the neighbourhood. Last year, an animal charity declared it a no-go area for cats in need of re-homing.

On Monday, 13 Holme Wood, residents were arrested to mark the first day of a national Not In My Neighbourhood week.

Next to the school poster at the library was another proclaiming that “Holme Wood is one of the safest places to live in Bradford”. They do a fine line in irony around here.

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