Study shows Newham students ‘have much to be proud of”

Pupils in Newham “have much to be proud of” according to a new report which shows that state school pupils in the borough are overachieving.

The study “London schooling: lessons from the capital”, conducted by thinktank CentreForum, measures academic success against income background, ethnicity, language and gender.

It found that London pupils from poor backgrounds outperform their counterparts in the rest of the country, singling out Newham as a particularly successful borough.

According to a report of the study in the Evening Standard, St Angela’s Usuline School in Forest Gate gained a 41 per cent improvement rate, the second highest in London, which is calculated by comparing pupils’ predicted grades at age five with GCSE results at 16.

Report author Gill Wyness said: “Newham and Tower Hamlets are doing particularly well. Despite the challenges of educating some of the poorest kids in the country, shcools in these two boroughs are achieving outstanding results.

“There seems to be a positive London effect.”

The research uses Newham as an example of pupils excelling despite their circumstances, stating: “Newham has an above-average proportion of poor pupils compared to the rest of London (as well as differences in

many other explanatory factors).

“Once this is taken into account, we can see that Newham over-performs compared to how it should, and in fact it moves up to 12th in the rankings once this is accounted for.”

Researchers, who based their findings on the Government’s National Pupil Database, suggested that good teaching and the influence of highly-motivated Chinese and Asian parents were contributing factors to the schools’ success.