For many years there has been a widespread view, perhaps especially from commentators in the South of England, that schools in the North are somehow failing their students.

In 2016, former Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw said that children in the North “have less of a chance of educational success than children South of the Wash”, because so many more schools are rated “inadequate” by the watchdog.

In 2017, a report by George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse Partnership think tank said that schools in the North needed “urgent attention”. While in 2020, The Times reported that thousands of students were “let down by schools in the North of England”.

Exams results this year also noted the divide between North and South students for both GCSEs and A levels.

So entrenched is this view that the Confederation of British Industry has even suggested not investing in infrastructure in the North until the schools improve - perhaps contributing to recent decisions not to extend the new HS2 railway north to Leeds.

Perpetuating a myth

Yet, none of these concerns or suggested remedies are justified as the schooled-to-fail myth is just not true.

The best evidence, which compares like with like, suggests that schools in the North produce comparable outcomes to schools in the South, for equivalent students.

To uncover this, our research looked at 14 school cohorts and followed them over 11 years at school, using their 8 million records in the National Pupil Database.

Once student background (and prior attainment, where available) is factored in, there is no difference in attainment between schools in the North and the South.

What is different is that schools in the North are less clustered by poverty than elsewhere in England. This means that the poorest students are more evenly spread between schools than elsewhere. This is actually a good thing.

It spreads the load of teaching disadvantaged students more equally and provides a mix of peers for the most disadvantaged. It also lowers the attainment gap between poor and other students, making the system fairer as school outcomes become less dependent on students’ family background.

However, what schools in the North do face is a much higher level of long-term disadvantage, related to lower average attainment per student.

On average, and only on average, poorer students have lower average attainment at school, and more of these poorer studens live in the north.

Long-term fixes

This is not something schools can solve in the short term. Instead, they need more practical support, rather than the kind of criticism that is so common.

Put another way, these schools would have to be much better, and better resourced, than schools in the South just to achieve parity in terms of exam outcomes.

None of this is intended to be an argument for complacency, and so this article also suggests several ways in which the educational situation can be improved further. And most of these suggestions are relevant to schools elsewhere.

Because of the link between the clustering by poverty and the attainment gap, steps should be taken to reduce clustering further.

This would involve fewer distinct types of school, reduced use of distance or catchment criteria when allocated places at popular schools, and recalibration of the pupil premium funding to take account of the length of disadvantage experienced by each student.

The number of ethnic-minority students and teachers in the North is relatively small, but the number of each is roughly in proportion.

But this does mean that ethnic-minority students will hardly ever encounter a teacher (let alone a school leader) who looks like them. This can only be changed in the short term by new practices, and better preparation for teachers to deal with diverse classrooms.

Focused funding

The North has coastal areas and other remote places, many of which have high levels of disadvantage. Schools in these areas can find it hard to recruit and retain teachers (of shortage subjects and ethnic-minority origin). This needs to be addressed, but the way forward is not yet clear on how to do this.

Obviously, de-clustering poor students in schools, as above, will help by reducing the problem of recruiting to heavily disadvantaged schools.

Attendance, where there are problems, can also be improved according to the existing evidence.

However, the main improvement will come from better use of pupil premium and other funding by teachers focussing on the most promising evidence-based approaches to reducing the poverty attainment gap.

This would involve getting better at identifying robust bodies of research, and ignoring those being pushed by developers with a vested interest.

Professor Stephen Gorard is director of the Durham University Evidence Centre for Education.

Professor Gorard will be speaking at the Schools North East Summit at St James’ Park, Newcastle on 19 October 2023. Tes is the official media partner for the event. For more details or to book your ticket visit the Summit homepage