National Challenge

The Prime Minister & Schools Secretary have promised that all schools will be achieving at least 30% of students gaining 5 or more A*-C grades at GCSE including English and Maths by 2012. To ensure this happens they will launch the "National Challenge" in May and all Local Authorities will be expected to have an action plan for each school by the summer.

Nationally there are 638 schools which would fail to meet this threshold, 81 of which (approximately) are in Yorkshire & Humber region and in all but one of the 15 Local Authorities (City of York being the exception).

Part of the solution the growth of academy schools, which is being accelerated to 55 a year.

In 2007 Yorkshire Futures released a report investigating why the Yorkshire and Humber region has consistently poor GCSE result. Read summary here.