East Midlands education warning

Low standards in schools across the East Midlands region are exposing the educational fault line dividing the nation, Ofsted has said.

Sir Michael Wilshaw blamed a culture of complacency and a lack of clear accountability in the East Midlands, which has been deemed the worst performing region in the country on a range of key indicators.

The East Midlands is currently the joint lowest performing Ofsted region in terms of inspection outcomes, with almost one in three secondary schools judged less than good at their last inspection. The region also had the worst GCSE results in England in 2015, with nearly 46 per cent of pupils not achieving the benchmark five or more A* to C grades including English and maths, with an additional 73 per cent of East Midlands’ pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) failing to achieve this benchmark.

Ofsted has revealed that Leicester is the poorest performing local authority in the country for pupil outcomes at the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage – with only 51 per cent of the city’s children achieving a good level of development, compared with 66 per cent nationally.

Additionally, Northamptonshire is one of the worst-performing local authority areas in the country for the achievement of disadvantaged children at Key Stage 2, and Derby and Nottingham were among the 10 lowest ranking local authority areas nationally for GSCE examinations.

Wilshaw said: “These statistics should serve as a wake-up call. The poor quality of education in many parts of the East Midlands often passes under the radar as attention is focused on underperformance in the bigger cities of the North and West Midlands, like Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham.

“However, in many ways, the problems in this region symbolise more than anywhere else the growing educational divide between the South and the rest of England that I highlighted in my last Annual Report.”