The levelling up debate seems to have somewhat been overshadowed recently by the concerns about Ofsted, and the issues with worker’s pay and conditions. However, the problem of how to increase success rates for some schools hasn’t disappeared.

As I have written before on this blog, the lack of any local ability to intervene in the absence of government funding stream for levelling up, means that improvements are often haphazard, if they even happen at all. Academy chains could shunt pupils out of their schools, and leave others to cope, and failing schools have limited support outside of opportunity Areas or other places with special funding.

For a long period of time, part of Oxford city – that city of dreaming spires – has been divided into two; the generally, affluenct and successful North and West of the city, and less well-off south and east, as the ONS data from the 2021 starkly reveals. Not so much a case of the wrong side of the tracks, but the wrong side of the river Cherwell – not, note, the river Thames.

As a result, it is perhaps not much of a surprise to find that two of the state-funded secondary schools within the city – both located in the south of the city – have places in the top 200 secondary schools by the rate of suspensions during the Spring term of 2021/22 school-year. Fortunately, neither is in the top 100 schools, and for both they are probably faring better than they were a few years ago.

This an issue that the government’s Social Mobility Commission Social Mobility Commission Quarterly Commentary: March 2023 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) might wish to explore in some detail.

Five of the 20 local authorities with the most schools in the top 200 secondary schools are authorities with selective secondary schools. One is a south coast unitary with a disproportionately large number of its non-selective schools in the list of the top 200 schools. Like Oxfordshire, it is an authority unlikely to attract extra funding for its schools under levelling-up, but there must be an issue to explore as to why so many of its schools are in this list?

A few years ago, University Technical Colleges used to feature strongly in this type of list, but closures and presumably some better understanding of transfer at fourteen has reduced their number to four, two of them being the only schools in their authority in the list.

The extent to which feeder primary schools for these 200 schools also feature in the list would be an interesting exercise to undertake. Also, it might be interesting to ask why one county has only one school in the list, whereas an adjacent unitary has three schools?

There is something of a north-south divide in the list and relatively few schools in London are in the list: an interesting turnaround from the last century, when I am sure that there would have been more of the capital’s secondary schools in the list. No doubt, the strength of some of the academy chains located in the capital has made a difference.