Chinese and Indian students are excelling, and now black Africans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are doing better than poor, white pupils
At the start of the 1990s, London was an educational basket case. Rock-bottom standards were typified by east London’s Hackney Downs School, dubbed “the worst in the country”, where local parents, desperate to avoid appalling underachievement, sent their children to schools miles away.
Secondaries in the borough, along with others in Islington, Tower Hamlets, Lambeth and Southwark, recorded some of the worst GCSE results in England.
But something remarkable has happened in the capital. A system that had seemed stuck in habitual failure has been transformed into an outstanding success story. Recent A-level results confirm that, not only is London at the top of the regional league table, it is leaving the rest of England floundering in its wake.
