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Top 50 schools by GCSE results I Top 50 grammar schools by GCSE results I Top 50 State schools by GCSE results I Top 50 Independent Schools by GCSE I Top 50 schools with contextual value added by GCSE

Schools should stop blaming poverty for bad exam results, the Children’s Secretary said as he attacked the “excuses culture” that persists in many poor communities.

School league tables show that more than half of teenagers fail to reach the GCSE standard widely considered necessary to secure a decent job. Ed Balls suggested that he was losing patience with head teachers who blamed outside circumstances for exam failure.

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“Don’t tell me that poverty means low performance,” he said.

He criticised a failure of leadership for the persistence of a culture of excuses in some schools. “Anybody who says a high percentage of disadvantaged children in a school is a reason for poor performance, anybody who says ‘Kids from round here can’t achieve, can’t succeed in English and maths’, is badly letting down local children and communities. It’s something we don’t want to hear.

“There are 5 per cent of schools with more than 50 per cent free school meals which are achieving over 50 per cent [at GCSE].”

Mr Balls’s comments, which followed publication this week of a White Paper on social mobility aimed at reducing inequalities between rich and poor, were condemned as out of touch with reality.

Kate Green, the chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, said that she hoped everyone would have high academic aspirations for poor children, but that it was important to accept that poverty did hold children back at school.

“If a child arrives at school hungry and tired and ground down by the constant struggle to make ends meet, it limits their educational performance,” she said.

Mary Bousted, the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said that ignoring the impact of poverty on school performance was “ostrich-like”.

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “Ed Balls is entirely wrong to accuse schools of using poverty as an excuse. He does not seem to understand the challenge that awaits some children.

“If successive generations in your family have been unemployed, or if you are dealing with drugs or other social problems in your home, it can be quite hard to concentrate on your maths and geography in the way that middle-class children can,” he said.

But Mr Balls insisted that standards among the poorest pupils in schools were already being lifted by government measures and could be raised farther still.

He attributes much of the credit for this improvement to the London Challenge programme, which has lifted standards in many underperforming schools in deprived boroughs in the capital such as Tower Hamlets, Lambeth and Hackney. The programme provides extra money and advice from consultants, and improvements have been achieved faster than in the country as a whole.

The scheme is being extended nationwide as the £400 million National Challenge scheme, designed to ensure that at least 30 per cent of pupils in every school achieve five or more A* to C grades at GCSE.

The latest performance figures show that the number of schools below the threshold fell by around a third to 440 last year.

Schools lifting their latest GCSE results above the 30 per cent benchmark include Perry Beeches in Birmingham, where results rose from 21 to 51 per cent.

Liam Nolan, the head teacher, said that the improved results had nothing to do with the National Challenge programme, but were the result of hard work and pupil engagement. Children were fully involved in the running of the school and from the age of 11, they helped to select teachers, he added.

The introduction of a strict uniform policy, free tea, coffee and toast in the staff room, and a personal record book for each pupil, had helped to improve the atmosphere and discipline.

“It creates an image of a place of success,” he said.

In all, 264 schools moved above the 30 per cent benchmark, but 82 schools dropped below it. Of the schools remaining below the target, 183 saw an improvement in their GCSE results. But 25 schools saw no improvement and 132 saw their results decline.

Mr Balls aims to have all schools up to the 30 per cent benchmark by 2011 and has threatened that schools failing to reach the necessary level may be taken over by new management and turned into privately sponsored academies.

However, the latest school league tables show that 32 academies are falling below this target.

They include two of the first three academies to open in 2002 - Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough and the Business Academy in Bexley, southeast London.

Mr Balls has also threatened to get tough on underperforming academies, adding that, if necessary, the Government could insist on a change in their governance. The league tables show some of the country’s top independent schools at the bottom of the tables on 0 per cent because they have opted out of the Government’s GCSEs in favour of the tougher International GCSE. This is not accredited by the Government and therefore not included in the tables.

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