Key Findings:

• Widening Gap: Between 2019 and 2023, attainment among long-term disadvantaged children—those eligible for FSM for four years—declined, while attainment for those never on FSM improved. The attainment gap has grown from 1.30 grades in 2019 to 1.56 grades in 2023, representing the difference between a ‘4’ (standard pass) and a ‘5’ (strong pass).
• Ethnic Disparities: The disadvantage gap remains three times larger for White Irish, White British, and White pupils compared to Gypsy/Roma, Chinese, and Bangladeshi groups in both 2019 and 2023.

A coalition including NPP, SHINE, Tutor Trust and the Centre for Young Lives is urging the government to reform the Pupil Premium to address this growing inequality. Specifically, they propose:

• Increasing the primary Pupil Premium from £1,455 to £1,693 per pupil.
• Increasing the secondary Pupil Premium from £1,035 to £1,218 per pupil.
• Introducing a long-term disadvantage top-up of £308 for primary pupils and £255 for secondary pupils.
• Extending Pupil Premium support to 16-19-year-old students in further education, at a cost of approximately £290 million annually.

Henri Murison, Chief Executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said:

“As a coalition of the leading northern focused organisations we want a better deal for all the poorest children, locked in persistent poverty, not only here but across England.”

“The Education Policy Institute has brought forward a number of options for reform including for pupil premium to be restored it to its previous real terms value with a top up for persistently poor children, which alongside support for those in colleges and sixth forms is a billion pound package. The falling numbers of children on primary school rolls means we have the chance to make this choice – to ringfence these available funds for those who need them most from early years to the end of compulsory education.”

“We must act now with financial commitment in the Comprehensive Spending Review to give us a chance to meaningfully close the disadvantage gap over the coming ten years.”

Fiona Spellman, CEO of SHINE (Support and Help IN Education), said:

“It is deeply concerning to see that the attainment gap between persistently disadvantaged pupils and their peers is continuing to grow. This report should be a call to action for the government to ensure schools serving the most disadvantaged pupils get the resources and backing they need.”

Read and download the full report here:

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The Treasury pays a heavy price for the Northern economy’s continued underperformance. Our analysis of ONS data has found that the North’s productivity is roughly 40% lower than that of London and the South East, with Northerners earning £8,400 less a year on average.

Our key asks for the Spring Budget 2024 include:

1. Increasing funding for long-term disadvantaged pupils by £1,000 per pupil.

2. Bolstering local government financing through a revaluation of all domestic properties in England in the immediate term and council tax reform in the long-term.
   
3. Extending and deepening devolution, extending a single funding settlement to new Level 4 mayoralties. Metro mayors must also become more fiscally autonomous, with full business rates retention and the ability to introduce a tourism tax.
   
4. Reforming our rigid fiscal rules to support long-term infrastructure investment.

Read our full submission below.

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Business and education leaders are calling for urgent reform and investment for vocational education, amid reports of chronic skills shortages in the economy.

A Level, T Level and BTEC students will receive their final results this Thursday. However, there are serious concerns about whether further education is able to meet industry need without far-reaching change.  

T Levels were introduced in 2020 to provide a vocational qualification with the same prestige as an A Level but rollout has been far from straightforward.

The programme was recently given a red rating by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, meaning “there are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable.”

Courses have suffered from high dropout rates according to a recent report from Ofsted, with many students feeling “misled and ill-informed about their content and structure.”

One problem has been with the work experience element. Although businesses have welcomed a greater focus on vocational education, there has been a lack of industrial placements for digital, construction, and health and science courses.

Some employers have even stopped the placement halfway through, leaving students unable to complete the course.

Skills Minister Rob Halfon told the Education and Skills Select Committee last December that he “would rather be straight with the Committee than try to say that everything is all wonderful.”

^{Skills Minister Robert Halfon}

There are also concerns over the future of BTEC courses.

Currently, students who do not meet the tough admission criteria to access T Levels are able to choose BTECs instead. However, BTEC courses which overlap with T Levels will lose their funding in 2025, leaving many young people without a further education pathway.

A recent cross-party group of Lords including former education secretary David Blunkett have called these plans “disastrous”, saying they would have a damaging impact on social mobility, economic growth and public services.

Henri Murison, Chief Executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, and Darren Hankey, Principal of Hartlepool College, explain why changes are needed…

It is worrying that vocational education is often seen as the poor relation of academic studies. Investment in people is just as important as physical infrastructure and whenever we speak to businesses about the problems they face, we often get the same response: skills, or a lack thereof.

Making sure a young person in Bradford can get to a good job in Leeds or Manchester is only half the battle – they need also to have the necessary training and experience to secure that work in the first place.

This is where T Levels come in.

Many business and education leaders agree that these new qualifications could be part of the solution to tackling widespread skills shortages, particularly here in the North of England.

Unfortunately, they are suffering from what the Ofsted chief inspector has described as “teething issues”: high dropout rates, huge pressures on colleges and problems with industrial placements.

Addressing these challenges will require a joint effort from government and business.

A good first step would be for the Department for Education to cede control to those better placed to deliver, like powerful policy and delivery boards.

Alongside this, devolving more of the skills system to local leaders who are better able to join the dots with local industry need could be a gamechanger. Government has made a good start with this in Greater Manchester and the West Midlands but we need to go further and faster in other parts of the country.

We also need to see funding maintained for BTECs past 2025 as these courses remain a vital skills pathway for young people who do not meet the strict entry criteria for T Levels.

Vocational education in all its forms needs serious reform and investment. It cannot be an afterthought.

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The attainment gap between north and south is growing both at GCSE and A-Level, with education and business leaders warning this is having a lasting impact on our economy and our ability to bring opportunity to young people from all backgrounds.

This week, our Chief Executive Henri Murison, CEO of northern education charity SHINE Fiona Spellman and Director of Schools North East Chris Zarraga wrote a joint letter to prospective leadership candidates Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss to urge them to take action on the issue.

The proportion of GCSE results at Grade 7 or above in the North East and Yorkshire and Humber was 22.4%. In London it was 32.6%.

GCSE Results: % of results at Grade 7 or above

At A-Level, the gap between the North East and South East (the highest performing region in 2019 and 2022) has widened from 5.3% to 8.7%. The region saw the smallest number of students achieving A* and A grades in the country, with a total of 30.8% achieving those grades, compared with 39.5% in the South East.

A-Level Results: % of results at A and above

A ‘triple whammy’

This is not all that surprising when we consider the triple whammy of factors that will have had an impact on this attainment gap – existing long-term disadvantage, learning loss during COVID and DfE failures in catch up and the National Tutoring Programme – all of which affect the North of England disproportionately.

Research shows that the intersection between long-term deprivation and certain ethnic groups, including White and Black Caribbean, is the strongest predictor of low attainment. Analysis from the Northern Powerhouse Partnership and FFT Education Datalab last year found that 10.1% of pupils in the North East were found to fall into these high-impact groups – double the national average. The North West was found to have the second highest proportion of these children, with 7.3%, followed by Yorkshire and the Humber with 6%. In contrast, just 2.8 per cent of pupils in Outer London were found to be long-term disadvantaged and also in the high impact group.

We also know that the impact of deep-seated disadvantage on education has been exacerbated by the disproportionate learning loss felt during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research from FFT Education Datalab highlighted that pupils in the North East missed 15.3% of lessons in academic year 2020/21 and the autumn term 2021/22, compared with 11.6% of lessons lost in London and 11.9% in the South East. Many children, especially those from less well-off backgrounds, were unable to learn at home effectively without the necessary equipment.

There have also been more recent failures in the education recovery initiative, such as the poor delivery of the National Tutoring Programme (NTP). In March 2021, the NTP had only reached 58.8% of target schools in the North East, compared with 100% in the South West and 96.1% in the South East.

Bridging the gap

Locally-led solutions have been proven to be most effective way of tackling education challenges. Education policy has taken a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach too often. The education investment areas introduced earlier this year will be run by diktat from Whitehall with no genuine local control – the crucial ingredient which made the Opportunity Area policy so successful in places like Blackpool and Bradford.

The government’s Levelling Up White Paper has set a target of increasing the percentage of children from the worst-performing areas meeting the expected standard in reading, writing and maths by over a third by 2030. This won’t happen unless we simultaneously address place-based challenges such as health and housing.

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In 2016, Secretary of State for Education Justine Greening introduced a new initiative to increase social mobility in some of the UK’s most disadvantaged communities through targeting national and local resources.

The Department for Education (DfE) identified twelve ‘Opportunity Areas’ most in need of support using a range of indicators, primarily based on education: Blackpool, Derby, North Yorkshire Coast, Norwich, Oldham, West Somerset, Bradford, Doncaster, Fenland and East Cambridgeshire, Hastings, Ipswich, and Stoke.

A total of £72m was initially allocated to the programme, meaning that following initial scoping work, just under £6m was made available to be spent locally in each of the twelve areas. A further £18m was allocated to extend the programme to the end of August 2021 – around £1.5m more for each OA. The first payments went out to the areas in October 2017.

We want to see the scope of OAs widened to include issues such as health and housing, creating ‘Smart’ Opportunity Areas.

There is already clear evidence to show that education outcomes are significantly impacted by factors beyond the school gate. This means that school interventions alone will never be enough to tackle the long-standing education disadvantage gap.

“Opportunity Areas work because they recognised the fact that different communities already faced different challenges on education, even before the Covid-19 schools shutdown which we know has affected our least privileged children the worst.

“The challenges for schools in Rotherham, where I grew up, aren’t the same as for schools in Halifax, or for schools in Leeds or Selby. A Whitehall one-size-fits-all approach can only ever get us so far on raising education outcomes. In the end, we also need a more bespoke approach for individual communities.” – Justine Greening

Have Opportunity Areas worked?

There are already strong signs of initial progress. The programme was introduced in the academic year 2017/18, so the earliest signs of impact would be in the data for the academic 2018/19 academic years.

• Early years outcomes for disadvantaged pupils have improved in 9 of the 12 OAs. The greatest changes in FSM children achieving a Good Level of Development, between the baseline of 2017 and 2019, was in places where the OAs prioritised the early years, including Derby (+10ppts) and Oldham (+5ppts).
  
• Phonics results for all pupils have increased in 10 of the 12 OAs. In Scarborough (North Yorkshire Coast), the improvement in pupils meeting the expected standard in phonics, between 2016 and 2019, was +4ppts.
  
• In 10 of the 12 OAs, Key Stage 2 combined attainment data for all pupils has increased by more than the national rate between 2016 and 2019. Between 2016 and 2019, on average the OAs saw a 11.8ppts rise in maths outcomes at KS2, which was 2.9 ppts higher than the increase in England overall.

Blackpool

Another way to assess progress is to compare the OAs to non-OA districts which are otherwise similar.

• In Oldham, the proportion of all children achieving a good level of development – a key early years metric – rose 4 percentage points in the academic year to 2018/19 to 68.1%. Over the same period, neighbouring Rochdale saw a slight decrease of -0.2 percentage points to 66.2%.
  
• At Key Stage 1 in 2018/19, Blackpool recorded a 1.5 percentage point increase to reach 82.2% of children achieving the expected standard in phonics. In contrast, North East Lincolnshire, a coastal area which is similar in some respects, saw a decrease of -0.6 percentage points to 81.7%.
  
• In Bradford, the proportion of pupils who achieved the expected level in reading, writing and maths at Key Stage 2 rose 2.1 percentage points to 62.7% in 2018-19, which was twice the increase seen in Birmingham over the same period – a rise of 1 percentage point to 62.3%.

How place impacts on education

Our analysis of government data found that the area a child grows up in mattered as much as individual family circumstances when it came to determining how far they fell behind at school during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Primary school children on free school meals living in more affluent areas experienced a similar degree of learning loss in maths (1.1 months on average) as those from better off families living in more deprived areas (1.2 months on average).

Unsurprisingly, the impact fell hardest on children from less well-off backgrounds living in deprived areas who lost around 1.5 months of learning on average. Children from wealthier backgrounds living in more affluent areas lost just 0.5 months in comparison.

This reiterates the case for a place-based approach to improving education and social mobility outcomes.

Right to Succeed ‘Cradle to Career’

The third sector is leading the way in developing place-based initiatives to improve social mobility and education outcomes. Collective impact charity Right to Succeed’s multimillion pound Cradle to Career initiative in North Birkenhead is an ambitious 20-year plan to boost literacy skills, create opportunities and support families in one of the most deprived areas of the country.

North Birkenhead

In Birkenhead as a whole, there are only 0.62 jobs for every person aged between 16 and 65 – the third lowest of 162 areas nationally. Research found that male residents in the Bidston and St James ward have a ‘healthy life expectancy’ of around 52 years – 11 fewer than the national average of 63.

Cradle to Career hopes to transform future prospects for young people growing up in North Birkenhead by joining forces with community leaders, police, churches, charities and schools and is backed by over £2m from Steve Morgan.

Recommendations

As the sole responsibility of the Department for Education, Opportunity Areas are limited in their scope, meaning initiatives such as catch-up tutoring and Pupil Premium will only go so far in raising educational standards.

• We must widen the scope of OAs to create ‘Smart Opportunity Areas’ which can address the root causes of disadvantage in poorer areas. Bringing together local services would improve education standards and promote further social mobility.
  
• To properly tackle disadvantage, especially in post Covid-19 recovery, the number of Opportunity Areas should increase to ensure coverage of all disadvantaged areas across the North of England.
  
  
• The geography of the increased number of Opportunity Areas should then be reduced, based on locally defined communities and typically with starting sizes of one or two Local Authority wards.
  
  
• We need more local leadership, more local involvement, and a broader focus with much more interagency work across the local public and community sectors, integrating with wider devolution powers and devolved budgets from housing to health.
  
  
• There could be a clearer and more cohesive methodology to underpin and plan the work within Opportunity Areas. Programmes may benefit from a more rigorous examination of international best practice, which emphasise the need for certain conditions to be met in order for funds to be spent effectively.

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There were more worrying signs of a growing North-South divide in education today, as A-Level students across the country received their results.

The North East saw a fall of -0.4% in the proportion of students achieving a Grade C or above – while no other region saw any fall in this category. 

The North East also saw the smallest increase in the proportion of students achieving a grade A.

Frank Norris, special adviser on education and schools to the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: “Today’s results have confirmed our fears that the pandemic has had a highly disproportionate impact across the Northern regions.

“All of this suggests there is real urgency in agreeing and acting upon an education recovery plan that supports students in the future. This cannot wait any longer.”

Our research earlier this year found that 10.1 per cent of secondary school pupils in North East were from long-term disadvantaged high impact groups – double the national average and the highest proportion in the country.

Sarah Mulholland, Head of Policy at the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said “Pupils in the North East have had to deal with a triple-whammy of challenges to their learning over the past 18 months.

“Long-term disadvantage was already a huge problem in schools here before the pandemic, and the disproportionate disruption to learning of education coupled with the lack of access to remote learning has exacerbated the existing education divide.”

Photograph: Justin Tallis/PA Photograph: Justin Tallis/PA

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The former Children’s Commissioner for England Anne Longfield is joining the board of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership (NPP) to help drive forward our education and skills agenda.  

Longfield, who served as Children’s Commissioner for England from March 2015 to February 2021, has decades of experience campaigning for vulnerable young people, helping to shape national policy towards improving the life chances of children across the country. 

In her final speech as Commissioner in February 2021, she warned that the government’s promise to ‘level up’ will be “just a slogan unless it focuses on children”. 

Longfield lives in Yorkshire and in 2018 she led a report into the North-South divide in education, Growing Up North, which found that children from disadvantaged backgrounds faced an education gap that starts before schools and widens throughout their school career.  

Her appointment will help to support NPP’s ongoing work on the disproportionate impact of the education disadvantage gap in the North of England, which has been exacerbated by school closures and the digital divide during the past year.  

Working alongside experts including former CEO of Co-op Academies Trust Frank Norris MBE, as well as organisations such as northern education charity SHINE, our research examines the factors that affect education progress and attainment.  

We have made calls for reform to Pupil Premium funding to ensure it reaches the most disadvantaged, as well as an expansion of the Opportunity Areas programme across the North. We have also supported locally-led initiatives such as Sheffield Hallam’s GROW Mentoring programme in South Yorkshire.  

Our ‘Educating the North’ report, published in 2018, found that pupils in the North make a third of a grade less progress overall at sixteen and almost half a grade less in mathematics on average compared with London.  

Subsequent analysis, including in our ‘Long-Term Disadvantage in Secondary Schools In England’ report published earlier this year, has found that the problem of disadvantage was a growing problem even before COVID-19.  

Anne Longfield said: “The education disadvantage gap is nothing new but there’s a growing pile of evidence that COVID-19 has had a catastrophic impact in widening this divide – and that impact has disproportionately fallen on children in the North of England.  

“It’s time for Whitehall to recognise that education is a critical economic priority. This isn’t just about repairing some of the damage of the past year but tackling those entrenched problems that had an effect on learning and attainment even before the pandemic.  

“Committing the £15billion in funding requested by Sir Kevan Collins would be a start – otherwise we risk failing an entire generation of children and undermining the UK’s future economic potential.” 

Lord Jim O’Neill, vice-chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: “Coming out of the pandemic, we need to double down on our efforts to raise education standards among children across the North and I have no doubt that Anne’s expertise will be invaluable in this space. 

“Education is one – perhaps even the most important – piece of the productivity puzzle. Rebalancing the UK economy cannot and will not happen without removing the barriers for our children and young people entering more productive, higher paid careers. 

“That means addressing the issues faced long-term disadvantaged children both in the classroom and beyond the school gate.” 

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The shadow minister for schools has warned that the government’s “tunnel vision” in education is failing to help children in deprived areas, who face a rising tide of socio-economic issues that impact on their schooling.

Wes Streeting MP said that while Opportunity Areas (a Department for Education programme designed to raise social mobility) had “some fantastic people involved in them”, their current focus was too narrow.

He added that a ‘recovery’ in education would not take place without addressing issues faced by disadvantaged children beyond the school gate.

In a speech to Northern education leaders today {Thursday 11 March} he is expected to say, “For all the talk of levelling up, there is still a postcode lottery in England today.”

“We are seeing more children experiencing deeper disadvantage and poorer life chances, disproportionately concentrated in the North of England.

“This isn’t levelling up. It’s levelling down the prospects for kids across the North and the communities they’re growing up in.”

“Place matters.

“Opportunity Areas are the Government’s answer to this challenge and, while there are some fantastic people involved in them, they’re simply not up to the scale of the challenge.

“Their focus and funding is too short-term and there are far more than 12 areas in need.

“But, fundamentally, the Government isn’t thinking ambitiously enough, or long-term enough, about how the fortunes of towns and communities are tied into educational outcomes and vice versa.”

His comments come in light of findings from NPP which revealed that children in disadvantaged communities were facing a “barrage of interdependent place-based problems.”

Analysing secondary schools with high proportions of long-term disadvantaged pupils, our report measured criteria that make up the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), including:

• Health deprivation & disability
• Education, skills & training
• Crime
• Employment
• Income

NPP concluded that addressing the root causes of disadvantage in poorer areas through bringing together local services, as those like Sir Howard Bernstein outlined the case for in Greater Manchester in devolution, if rolled out across the North to improve education standards and promote further social mobility.

In 2016 the Department for Education (DfE) identified twelve ‘Opportunity Areas’ most in need of support using a range of indicators, primarily based on education.

The aim was to increase social mobility in some of the UK’s most disadvantaged communities through focusing national and local resources.

As the sole responsibility of the Department for Education, Opportunity Areas are limited in their scope, the NPP argues, and initiatives such as catch-up tutoring and Pupil Premium will only go so far in raising educational standards.

Wes Streeting MP sad: “The government’s tunnel vision approach to education – which often ignores the wider contextual factors at play – risks failing children in some of the country’s most disadvantaged communities.

“Children in these areas are fighting a battle on multiple fronts: poor health, high crime, a lack of good quality jobs for when they leave school.

“Many young people are trapped in a vicious cycle where their opportunities are limited simply because of where they were born.”

Sarah Mulholland, head of policy at the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: “We need to recognise that school interventions alone will not solve the underlying issues at the root of the education disadvantage gap.

“Children are facing a barrage of interdependent place-based problems, all of which impact on education and so from housing to health must be included when intervening.

“A one-size-fits-all approach simply won’t work. The clear regional disparities we see in the data mean that we need tailored, Metro Mayor driven approach for a new wave and transformed existing Opportunity Areas to be truly effective.

“Deciding area-based funding should be based on evidence – not on politics.”

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Northern pupils are still facing the biggest disruption to learning this year, the Northern Powerhouse Partnership (NPP) has warned, in light of new data from the Department of Education showing secondary school attendance well below 80% in many areas of England.

The NPP is backing calls from the Children’s Commissioner for England Anne Longfield, who says mass testing in schools should be rolled out in areas of greatest educational disruption first and attendance should be factored into exams 2021 for children most affected by learning loss. 

While pupil attendance in the rest of the country is now beginning to drop in line with levels in the North, Northern pupils – who have faced significant disruption since September – are still the most at risk of falling behind. 

School attendance figures for 23 March to 10 December have been published by the Department for Education. This is the first breakdown at a regional and local authority level since October.

In some areas of the North, including Oldham and Newcastle, secondary school attendance has consistently remained below 80% for most of this academic year. In most areas of London, attendance has only fallen to this level in the last two or three weeks.

Five out of the ten local authorities with the highest levels of missed classroom learning since September are in the North.

There is also a clear link between disruption and deprived areas, with local authorities that have high proportions of Free School Meals pupils seeing more days of lost learning.

As the graph below shows, though attendance in areas of London are now beginning to fall, places such as Oldham and Newcastle have been battling low attendance rates since September.

In the most recent five-week period, secondary schools in Hull have reported an average attendance rate of just 63%, though last week this had increased to 74% from a low of just 56% in the middle of November.

Source: Department for Education, Attendance in education and early years settings during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

There are also concerns from the Northern Powerhouse Partnership that the greater numbers of disadvantaged children in the North are less likely to have access to the digital devices and broadband connections necessary to learn remotely, meaning that the learning loss they have experienced is likely to be greater. 

Sarah Mulholland, Head of Policy at the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said:

“While it’s clear school attendance across the whole of the UK is now beginning to drop in line with the North, it’s worth remembering that Northern pupils have already lost weeks and weeks of learning.  There are GCSE students in Oldham who have had just six weeks of face-to-face teaching this academic year.

“The Children’s Commissioner is completely right to call for mass testing to be rolled out in areas of greatest educational disruption first and for attendance to be factored into exams 2021 for children who have been most affected by learning loss.

“As the data does not give a breakdown for specific year groups, we’re still not able to see the full impact on pupils in Year 11 and Year 13 due to sit exams in just a few months’ time. It is pupils like these who stand to lose the most from missing school.

“The government faces three critical challenges if we’re to avoid a repeat of last summer’s results chaos – targeting catch-up provision at those who need it most, closing the digital divide and factoring in differential levels of attendance in pupil assessment.”

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Top-up school funding must be targeted at the children who need it most, says the chair of the Education Select Committee, as new analysis finds that the number of children eligible for Free School Meals will rise by 288,000 next year.

Rob Halfon MP is backing calls from the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, who published the research, to ensure that schools with high proportions of long-term disadvantaged pupils – who have been hardest hit by lockdown – receive ‘top-up’ funding.

They argue a fairer mechanism is needed to channel the additional Pupil Premium funding the Department for Education will receive from the Treasury next year for the growing number of disadvantaged children, which has skyrocketed as a result of surging Universal Credit claimant rates.

While this would not require the Chancellor to commit any more funds, it would provide a ‘top up’ to schools with the highest levels of disadvantage going into the crisis.

Last week, the Northern Powerhouse Partnership published its second annual Fairer Schools Index (FSI), an adjusted measure for the current DfE league tables.

It takes into account major factors in pupil background including ethnicity, gender, whether English is their first language and whether or not a pupil is on Free School Meals.

The report shows that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds performed, on average, worse and that white, working-class children were among the lowest performing.

The report supports evidence seen by the Education Select Committee, as part of its inquiry into the reasons behind white working-class children falling behind.

When schools reopened in September, a large proportion of these children – predominantly in the North – have had yet more schooling interrupted as COVID cases rose.

Attendance figures from the Department for Education from October show some parts of the North had attendance rates for secondary school as low as 61%, whereas others in England were near to the usual national figure of 95%.

Rob Halfon said: “The worrying correlation between many ‘left-behind towns’, which already had below-average education attainment levels, and low attendance figures means there may be an entire generation of children who see their futures wiped out through ‘lost learning’.

“These areas have been trapped in a worrying cycle of decline for years: a lack of opportunities means many pupils simply do not see the point in trying. These disparities mean there is now a gaping divide between disadvantaged children and their more well-off counterparts.

“While this is not a new problem, we’re concerned that longstanding issues have been exacerbated by the pandemic as far too many disadvantaged children were able to do next to too little schoolwork in lockdown.”

Two-thirds of the secondary schools that would receive the highest level of targeted support if it was based on long-term disadvantage are in the North of England but there are also high concentrations in the Midlands, through to pockets in counties from Essex to Cornwall.

Lord Jim O’Neill, vice-chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: “With no access to a laptop, the internet or even just a quiet place to work, it was inevitable that these children dropped further and further behind their wealthier peers. That is why the catch-up premium, which we – alongside Rob and many other education experts – campaigned for, is so crucial.

“Education is often forgotten when we talk about levelling up. It’s a mistake. There is nothing as important in true levelling up.

“If we want to drive up productivity, close regional divides like that between North-South and build back better, we can’t afford to let the potential of thousands of children go to waste.”

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