The London Challenge was not the biggest factor in the transformation of the capital’s schools, Damian Hinds has said.

The school improvement scheme began in 2003, when London was the region with the lowest proportion of pupils achieving the government’s GCSE benchmark. When the initiative closed in 2011, London led the country.

The initiative has been praised by politicians from all three main parties. In a 2011 speech, then education secretary Michael Gove praised headteacher Dame Sue John for “spearheading the London Challenge initiative which has so helped improve education in our capital”.

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However, the current education secretary used a speech on social mobility this morning to suggest that other factors were more important in London’s turnaround.

London Challenge impact ‘overstated’

He said: “The one that is most often cited, I am going to suggest is not likely to be the biggest factor. And the thing that is most often cited is a thing called the London Challenge.

“For those of you in this room who worked on the London Challenge, let me be clear that I am not dissing the London Challenge.

“It was a very good thing to do, and actually elements of it we have shamelessly derived for use elsewhere, for example in what we are now doing in the North East.

“The year that London started outperforming the rest of the country in GCSE was the same year that the London Challenge started.

“So, in other words, those kids had been alive for 16 years, not under the London Challenge, and, in fact, we see that the outperformance of London was also in primary school and indeed in early years, whereas the London Challenge initially was only focused on secondary.”

There has previously been controversy about the reasons for London’s rise, with academic research finding that it could be explained solely by the ethnicity of pupils, although this suggestion has, in turn, been criticised.

In his speech today, Mr Hinds raised the question of what was different about London.

He answered: “Almost everything, actually, and that’s one of the reasons why it is so difficult to ascribe exact causes to the effect that we see with these strong results. 

“Families are different; places are different; the work environment is different; what children walk past to go to school is different. Pretty much everything is different.”

He showed a slide which listed more diversity, more museums, bigger families, newer teachers, more languages, shorter distances, more tutors, bigger primaries, top firms and more universities.

He said the “city effect” does not seem to only occur in London, adding: “We find that if we look at cities, kids in our biggest cities do better than in school settings elsewhere.

“Disadvantaged children in Birmingham have a stronger performance than neighbouring boroughs like Solihull and Dudley, as well as performing above the national average.

“Among disadvantaged children, the performance in cities exceeds that in other types of area.”