A charity that helps black pupils to attend top universities has said it will now shift its focus to assist “working class white young people” instead.

Generating Genius, which identifies gifted black pupils and helps them to win places at top universities to study STEM courses, will now work with disadvantaged white pupils “who have been left behind” according to its founder Tony Sewell.

News: Academy leaders back bursaries for poor white boys

Related: White, middle-class teachers ‘letting down black boys’

Social mobility: More white working-class schools are ‘inadequate’

Mr Sewell said: “Britain’s leading black-led charity will have a new focus - white working-class young people from the north and Midlands.

“We will seek diamonds from areas like Burnley, Wakefield, Dewsbury, Workington and Bolsover. They are the children now at the bottom of the pile academically.”

The news follows reports that two leading private schools - Winchester and Dulwich College - refused an offer of a £1.2 million scholarship scheme aimed at working-class white boys.

Retired professor Sir Bryan Thwaites had offered to leave the money in his will as a bequest, but both schools turned him down.

However, some heads in the state sector have expressed interest in the offer. The Times reported that in a letter to Sir Bryan, Sir Daniel Moynihan, chief executive of the Harris Federation, wrote that the scheme could make “an enormous difference”.

And Desmond Deehan, head of Townley Grammar School in Bexleyheath, South London, reportedly said that “schools that find it harder to make sufficient progress frequently have white working-class populations within them that are underachieving”.