School Gate blog: why are state schools losing out on the best grades and what can be done?

Private schools had more pupils gain three grade As at A level last summer than all the comprehensives put together, according to data suggesting that poorer students are falling farther behind their middle-class contemporaries.

More than 10,000 privately educated students got three As last year, the standard required to win a place at top universities, compared with just under 7,500 children at comprehensive schools. This is despite independent schools educating only 7 per cent of all pupils.

The figures, obtained by the Conservatives, also show that the achievement gap between the better off and the poor is widening at A level. Since Labour came to power in 1997, the gap between the proportion of students gaining three As at comprehensives and independent schools has widened from 12.2 to 22.7 percentage points. Almost a third of private pupils get three As, compared with less than one in ten at comprehensives.

Last year 38 per cent of students achieiving straight As at A level were at fee-paying schools, compared to 28 per cent at comprehensives and 16 per cent at grammar schools.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, said that pupils were now four times more likely to get three As at an independent school than at a comprehensive school.

Despite millions of pounds of government investment directed at raising standards in comprehensives, through programmes such as the National Challenge, there was a widening gap between opportunities for better-off families and the rest, even among results for the brightest pupils, he said.

At a conference organised by the children's charity Barnardo's today, he will say that there is a widening gap between opportunities for richer families and the rest. A Tory government would aim to reverse this. “We will make it easier to set up new academies, especially in poorer areas, and make it easier for them to hire great teachers, and we will make it easier for talented people to become teachers,” he said.

Conservative plans to allow new state-funded schools to open in deprived areas, based on the Swedish system, with extra cash for children from more deprived homes, would reverse a growing social class gap, he said.

The figures show that the pattern of the education achievement gap is complex and impacts on all ability levels, not just among the less able or borderline pupils, where most government resources are directed.

Separate figures from National Strategies, the Government's programme for professional development for schools, show that of the more than 26,000 pupils who obtained three As at A level, the number on free school meals (the rule of thumb measure for poverty) was 176, representing less than 1 per cent. Nationally, the figure is about 13 per cent.

Clive Bush, of National Strategies, told a conference of head teachers organised by the Future Leaders programme last week, that British schools showed the biggest variation in performance of any school system in the world. There were wide discrepancies between types of school and within individual schools.

The figures come after concern expressed by Christine Gilbert, the Chief Inspector of Schools, that poor children had “the odds stacked against them” in education and that pupils were becoming divided along economic lines in schools.

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