Extra help for poorer pupils

Hundreds of talented students from poorer backgrounds across Rochdale Borough will be given extra support to encourage them to apply to college or university.

About 130,000 disadvantaged children across England will be given “structured assistance” at secondary school, including regular mentoring, experience of higher education and extra access to information, advice and guidance.

The scheme, which is due to start in 2012 if Labour is still in power, would require schools to form links with universities while ensuring teachers are equipped to “properly identify and nurture” the talent of the brightest who may otherwise not have considered going on to further or higher education.

The assistance offered would include advice on which GCSEs, A-levels and diplomas to take, along with help in choosing a degree or other qualification.

Those with the most potential would be sought out and invited to a summer school, or to visit a university, to encourage them to apply when the time came.

Business Secretary Pat McFadden said: “This is about opening up opportunity to the broad majority in Britain, to ensure that those who have the ability also get the chance to do the kinds of professional jobs which are going to grow in number in future years.

“The measures we have announced will help raise the aspirations of young people and they demonstrate our long-term commitment to a more socially mobile society.”

A previous report by the National Audit Office found school leavers living in parts of Oldham are less likely to go to university than anywhere else in the country.

Only 5.5 per cent of youngsters in parts of the St Mary’s council ward, where almost half of households are on low incomes, made it on to higher education — one of the worst records in the country.

Just below that were teenagers living in parts of Failsworth West where 7.7 per cent of youngsters go on to higher education.

The announcement formed the Government’s response to former health secretary Alan Milburn’s report that warned elitism risked creating a forgotten middle class generation and wrecking the British economy.

Almost all of its 88 recommendations are now being acted on as Labour puts social mobility at the heart of its general election message.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown set out his aim to create “more middle class jobs than ever before” and unleashing “the biggest wave of social mobility since the Second World War”.