Education chief calls for worst schools to shut

The Chief Inspector of Schools today reignited the debate about failing schools by calling for the worst to be shut down.

David Bell said that more than one in four secondary schools in the most deprived areas were struggling to raise standards or to maintain any improvements.

Mr Bell was speaking on the 10th anniversary of a landmark report by Ofsted inspectors on urban education, which concluded that inner-city schools were being left behind by the "rising tide" of educational change.

Ten years on, Mr Bell said in a Fabian Society lecture, the situation was much the same despite billions of pounds of extra spending on education. His comments are the latest in a series of warnings on the limits of the Government's success in schools.

In the summer, he said that one in five of the country's 16-year-old school leavers were heading for the scrapheap, going on neither to full-time education nor to employment.

He also raised doubts about the £800million initiative to raise standards in inner-city schools. This came in the wake of an Ofsted report stating the Excellence in Cities programme had boosted morale but made little difference to academic performance.

Today's speech is based on an analysis of Ofsted inspections of 1,000 schools in deprived areas - where more than 35 per cent of pupils come from families poor enough to qualify for free school meals.

Around one in six of these schools - 138 primary schools and 32 secondaries - are in London. There is no suggestion any of them face closure.

Mr Bell said primary schools investigated in the survey - the focus of Labour's first term in office - were now mostly improving at the national rate.

However, fewer than one in three pupils at the secondary schools in the survey achieved five good GCSEs compared with a national average of about 50 per cent. Almost twice as many pupils from the schools in the survey left with no GCSEs at all.

Among the 1,000 schools in Ofsted's study, one in 10 primary schools and one in four secondaries were "struggling to make and maintain significant improvements".

"There are schools that have succeeded against the odds," Mr Bell said. But he recalled a key message from the report 10 years ago that "most schools in disadvantaged areas do not have within themselves the capacity for sustained renewal".

"That message remains a strong one," he said. "To expect that individual schools working in difficult circumstances can all ... create their own solutions unaided is a mistake."

Where failure was persistent, there was a need for "tough decisions for the greater good", he said. Poor schools should not simply be allowed to lose children until they became unsustainable. "How many children will be there receiving a poor education while those schools slowly decline?" he said.

"There is more money going into these schools through the Excellence in Cities programme, but is it enough?" The challenge governments have to face in giving those schools more money is the accusation that they are "rewarding failure", he added.