The Academy Expansion Programme And The Newly Implemented Free School Essay

The Academy Expansion Programme And The Newly Implemented Free School Programme - Essay Example This report declares that school in British cities that experience overt poverty and social deprivation are likely to register significant lower examination success rates compared to schools in wealthy areas. Various government institutions and other related non-government often gather statistical data regarding nature schools in different cities. The kind of data gathered often include pupil teacher ratios, exclusions, number of pupils eligible for free school meals, unauthorized absenteeism and average class size and the figures normally vary in different social contexts. For instance, data from British inner city school often record a high percentage of the number of pupils eligible for free school meals. This essay makes a conclusion that schools in inner city areas have been found to be one of the most challenging areas for teachers. A number of reasons have been indentified to explain why schools in British inner cities are challenging and records below average examination pass rate. According to the Chief Inspector for Schools David Bell issues for inner city schools revolves around high pupils’ turnover, lack of adequate investment, difficulty in recruiting staff and low confidence from the immediate community. For instance, majority of teachers work in inner cities for limited period and then leave for less difficult working environments. There is no doubt that the trend of poor academic performance recorded year after year in disadvantaged areas particularly inner city areas has been a major policy issue in England for policy makers. For instance by the late 1990 at least 500 schools in both British and Wales inner cities were considered failing schools owing to their in ability to meet acceptable nation academic performance. Data gathered in 2001 indicated that paltry a fifth of pupils in disadvantaged areas on average could achieve five GCSE passes at grades A*-C compared with 50% nationally. In fact schools are currently being forced to turn into academies as in the cases of Downhills Primary in Tottenham, north London, and in the London borough of Haringey (Harrison, 2012). Poor performance is a long established patter in inner city schools taking into consideration that poverty presents a barrier to children education because they are caught up in a major interplay between learning and dealing with the tough social and economic problems. There is a strong link between education attainment and poverty in the sense that a more socially disadvantaged the community served by a school the higher the probability of the school appearing to be underperformer. Another major problem with inner city schools is the fact they perform poorly in inspections b y OFSTED (Lupton, R 2004: 1). An OFSTED inspection, which is often carried out at least once every four years on all school and those with unsatisfactory performance are described as having â€Å"a serious weakness†. Such schools with unsatisfactory performance are often put into a special measure to assess if they are â€Å"failing or are likely to fail in providing pupils with acceptable standards of education.† Despite strong evidence, demonstrate that broader social policies will contribute significantly in reducing the attainment gap between the pupils in inner cities and high-end