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Poverty has a far greater influence on the performance of white British pupils at school than any other ethnic group, according to research published today.

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A 15-year-old maths prodigy is set to become the youngest undergraduate at the University of Cambridge for more than two centuries.
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There are bargains to be had for netbook shoppers on a budget, says Marc Lockley

Last week’s article regarding the Apple MacBook sparked a fiery debate about affordability and the usual battle between Apple and PCs. This week we are balancing the books, looking at a few netbooks which are a fraction of the cost of the Apple product.

Netbooks are a great alternative for the budget-conscious student who wants to do their work but not miss out on portability, affordability, sociability and surfability.

As there are a number of choices in this category, please feel free to add your own preferences or price updates below. For the sake of too much repetition the following all come with 1GB of RAM.

Less than £200

Student Computers are selling the Samsung N110 Netbook for £189 with a 250GB hard drive, Windows 7 starter pack and eight hours of battery life. They also offer an Asus Eee PC 1000H that has an 80GB hard drive and a two-year warranty for £182.13.

The Compaq Mini 110c-1010SA comes with a 160GB hard drive and a 1.6GHZ processor speed and runs on Windows XP and costs £198.99 with BT and Dabs.com. This netbook won the best budget laptop in a recent Reevoo survey of 1,000 students.

Meanwhile, the Acer Aspire One D250 AOD250-OBb netbook is best priced at £199 with Oyyy.co.uk. It comes with a 160GB hard drive and a 1.6GHz processor.

More than £200

The Acer Aspire One 533 with an Intel Atom N455 processor, 250GB hard drive and Windows 7 has eight hours battery life and costs £279.99 at Amazon and Argos, although the latter includes free Norton internet security until 28 September. However PC World are offering £50 off your old laptop/netbook thereby reducing it to £229.99.

If you are signing up to a mobile broadband deal you can get the Acer Aspire One 521 (160GB hard drive, Windows 7) for free with PC World, but the mobile deal with Vodafone will cost you £600 over two years.

Amazon are selling the new Asus 1005PE with an Intel Atom N450 1.66GHz processor and a huge 11-hour battery life and Windows 7 for £254.99.

Play.com lead the field for the Samsung N210 at £269.99, which has a battery life of up to 11 hours, Windows 7 and a 250GB hard drive with the Atom N450 processor.

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England’s first city-wide lottery system aimed at solving the problem of allocating places at over-subscribed schools failed to give poorer children equal access to top schools, academics say.
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Poverty affects grades less among non-white children with social divide noticeable from primary school

A child’s social class is more likely to determine how well they perform in school if they are white than if they come from an ethnic minority, researchers have discovered.

The gap between the proportion of working-class pupils and middle-class pupils who achieve five A* to C grades at GCSE is largest among white pupils, academics found.

They analysed official data showing thousands of teenagers’ grades between 2003 and 2007. Some 31% of white pupils on free school meals – a key indicator of poverty – achieve five A* to Cs, compared with 63% of white pupils not eligible for free school meals, they found.

This gap between social classes – of 32 percentage points – is far higher for white pupils than for other ethnic groups.

For Bangladeshi pupils, the gap is seven percentage points, while for Chinese pupils it is just five percentage points, the researchers discovered.

The study – Ethnicity and class: GCSE performance – will be presented to the British Educational Research Association conference at Warwick University tomorrow.

It argues that one of the reasons why class determines how white pupils perform at school is that white working-class parents may have lower expectations of their children than working-class parents from other ethnic groups.

The researchers, from the Institute of Education and Queen Mary, both part of the University of London, also found that Chinese pupils from families in routine and manual jobs perform better than white pupils from managerial and professional backgrounds. They also discovered that African and Bangladeshi girls had vastly improved their GCSE grades in the last few years.

Professor Ramesh Kapadia, who led the study, said this may be linked to “cultural aspirations and expectations, as well as parental support for education. This appears to have been the case for Indian and Chinese pupils for many years,” he said.

A separate study has found that a similar pattern can be identified for children in primary schools: social class is more likely to determine how well a pupil will perform if that child is white than if they are from other ethnic groups.

Researchers from the University of Warwick analysed the scores of pupils living in the south London borough of Lambeth. White children from well-off homes were the top-performing ethnic group at the age of 11, while white pupils eligible for free school meals had among the worst test results.

Professor Steve Strand, who will present the findings to the British Educational Research Association’s conference today, said the effects of poverty are “much less pronounced for most minority ethnic groups”.

“Those from low socio-economic backgrounds seem to be much more resilient to the impact of disadvantage than their white British peers,” he said.

However, he added that well-off white children may do particularly well because their parents might be “a bit more savvy about ensuring that they go to schools with similar pupils”.

“More recent immigrant groups, such as the Portuguese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities often see education as the way out of the poverty they have come from. By contrast, if you’ve been in a white working-class family for three generations, with high unemployment, you don’t necessarily believe that education is going to change that.

“All of these factors may combine to make the effect of socio-economic status remarkably strong for white British kids.”

Meanwhile, headteachers’ leaders have warned secondary schools to consider axing subjects that few pupils take to cope with imminent budget cuts.

The Association of School and College Leaders told the Times Educational Supplement that A-levels in foreign languages, for example, could be scrapped. Last week, French dropped out of the top 10 most popular GCSEs for the first time. “Languages in some schools will be vulnerable,” he said. “We are already worried about them and this could speed up the decline.”

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Middle-class families still dominate best schools despite attempts to close class gap

Middle-class families monopolise the best schools even when a lottery is used to allocate places, according to a study published today.

Lotteries have been seen by some educationists as a way of reducing deep-seated class divisions in the school system. The highest-performing schools tend to cluster in the wealthiest neighbourhoods; if places are allocated according to how near a family lives to a school – rather than by a lottery – children from the poorest areas miss out.

Lotteries are said to be used to distribute places in at least one school in up to a third of councils across England. In Brighton and Hove, all pupils have been assigned secondary school places in this way for the past two years.

But researchers have found lotteries alone fail to give poor children a higher chance of attending a top school, and marginally narrow the likelihood they will win a place at a high-performing school.

Their study analysed how far Brighton and Hove’s lottery admissions system had improved the chances of poor pupils attending top schools, and who the main winners and losers were when places were allocated randomly.

The researchers, from the Institute of Education, University of London and the University of Bristol, analysed which schools thousands of pupils attended before and after the lottery system was implemented. The study is being presented to the British Educational Research Association conference today.

Brighton and Hove council does not allocate places entirely randomly. Parents can apply to any school, but priority is given to those who live within a designated catchment area. First, a lottery is used to decide who gets a place within a catchment area. A second lottery is used for any spare places that are not filled by those within a school’s catchment area. But there are few spare places for children outside the catchment area of the best schools, so the lottery does not help the poorest, the academics found.

Pupils on free school meals – a key indicator of poverty – were “slightly” more likely to be at school with other pupils on free school meals under Brighton’s lottery system than under the previous system that allocated places to families living nearest the school to which they have applied, the academics discovered.

They also found that when places were assigned through a lottery, the brightest pupils, as well as the poorest, lost out. Pupils with high scores were less likely to attend a high-performing school than they would otherwise.

Rebecca Allen, senior lecturer in the economics of education at the Institute of Education and one of the main authors, said Brighton’s lottery system would just lead to families relocating to the catchment areas of the best schools. House prices would adjust and keep the poorest families out of these neighbourhoods.

“It seems unlikely the reforms will substantially lower social segregation across schools even in the long run,” Allen said.

“Differences in the quality of housing stock across areas of Brighton are deeply entrenched and the boundaries of the new catchment areas mean that families living in the most deprived neighbourhoods have little chance of accessing the most popular schools in the centre of the city.”

The study, on the early impact of Brighton and Hove’s school admissions reforms, will be published by the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at the University of Bristol.

Currently a pupil eligible for free school meals is 30% more likely to attend a school with exam results – well below the national average than an otherwise identical child from a better-off family.

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Jamie Wilson is the last of a dying breed – the only young man left working in a state-run nursery school in the country. Figures published yesterday by the General Teaching Council show the 23-year-old from Liverpool is the only male under 25 in England working with under-fives as a state school nursery teacher. They also highlighted the dearth of male role models for primary school pupils of any age.

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Arran Fernandez, who hit headlines in 2001 for his mathematical prowess, set to become university’s youngest student since 1773

At 15, most teenagers are struggling to get their heads around the algebra and equations of maths GCSE. Not Arran Fernandez.

Next month, he will become the youngest student at Cambridge University for 237 years – aged 15 and three months.

Arran, an only child who has been home schooled, will study maths at Cambridge, the youngest to attend the university since William Pitt the Younger was offered a place as a 14-year-old in 1773.

Arran first made headlines in 2001, aged five, when he gained the highest grade in the foundation maths paper. At the time he said he was considering becoming a lorry driver.

He has now decided he wants to be a research mathematician and find a solution to the Riemann hypothesis – the unsolved theory about the patterns of prime numbers that has baffled mathematicians for 150 years.

Fernandez will live with his father, Neil, in rented accommodation. He said he would miss his mother, Hilde, who will stay at the family home in Surrey and see her son at weekends and in university holidays.

The teenager plans to join the university’s bird watching society and develop his interest in English literature.

“I’m excited about starting the course and advancing my knowledge of maths,” he said. “It isn’t the youngest bit that is so important to me – I am more interested in going to Cambridge than comparing myself with other people who go there.”

He was not upset that he would be barred from the bar at the college that has offered him a place – Fitzwilliam College.

“I don’t feel like I’m missing out on much. Even if I was 18, I wouldn’t want to go out drinking,” he said.

His parents said they were very proud of their son, who scored an A* in maths GCSE aged seven and has just achieved top grades in maths, further maths and physics A-level.

He will join the likes of Isaac Newton, who also studied at Cambridge, and Stephen Hawking, who like Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics there. But he will also be following the path of other child prodigies, some of whom have come to regret being separated from their peer group and starting university so early.

Sufiah Yusof achieved a place at St Hilda’s College, Oxford University, in 1997, to study maths at the age of 13. But In 2001, she ran away after taking her final exam for the academic year. She was discovered working as a waitress in a Bournemouth internet cafe two weeks later, but refused to return home. She claimed her parents had made life difficult for her and lived with a foster family instead. She never finished her course.

In March 2008, a reporter for the News of the World found her advertising as a prostitute under the name Shilpa Lee. She is now said to be working as a social worker.

In 1985, Ruth Lawrence became Oxford University’s youngest-ever maths graduate at 13. She had been tutored by her father. She is now a maths professor in Israel, married with two children and has said she would not want to do the same to her son.

Paul Chirico, a senior tutor at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, said Arran had achieved the conditions of his offer to read maths. “Fitzwilliam considers all applications to the college very carefully, regardless of background. Arran was assessed as part of this well-established process and his considerable academic potential was recognised.” Children cannot live in student accommodation, because the university cannot carry out criminal record checks on all the other undergraduates.

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My great-aunt Margaret Way, who has died aged 92, taught speech and drama in Taunton, Somerset, for more than 60 years and was an integral figure in the performing arts community there.

Born in Taunton, she took a three-year course when she left school at 17, and began teaching elocution, speech and drama in 1941. One notable lesson in Exeter took place during a second world war bombing raid. After a year’s teaching, Margaret joined the ATS, the women’s army service. By the end of the war, she had become a captain, in charge of ATS permanent staff at Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire.

On her return to Taunton, she rebuilt her teaching career. She established Saturday morning drama courses for primary school children, taught for more than 40 years at St Christopher’s school, in Burnham-On-Sea, and was teaching at Queen’s College and King’s College, Taunton, until earlier this year.

As well as coaching many entrants for the annual Taunton festival, Margaret became a committee member in 1946, a patron of the festival in 1963, lifetime vice-president in 1978, and competitions secretary for speech and drama in 1979, a position she held for the next 30 years. Since 1935 she had also been a member of the Taunton Thespians, directing and acting.

Margaret was passionately committed to her work. She kept in touch with an incredible number of former pupils, and had taught three generations of several Taunton families. She was always cheerful, warm, lively and fascinating. In 2007 Margaret received the Somerset High Sheriff’s award and a Taunton Deane citizenship award. She was appointed MBE in 2009.

She is survived by her brother, Michael, her nephew and niece, Robert and Katherine, and myself.

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Three schools in Telford & Wrekin have applied to convert to academy status which will see them opt out of local authority control.
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