Sir Peter Lampl was quoted by Francis Elliott in his coverage of the latest Social Mobility Commission report

Affluent cities such as Oxford and Cambridge are among the worst at helping poorer children to realise their full potential, an official report will reveal today.

The latest social mobility rankings show that better-off areas have joined former industrial towns and coastal resorts as the hardest places in England for disadvantaged children to get on.

Oxford and Cambridge were among the places identified as “cold spots”, meaning that they were among the worst-performing 20 per cent of areas, according to the cross-party Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

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Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust and of the Education Endowment Foundation, said: “The commission’s index paints a bleak picture of social mobility in some parts of the UK and confirms our own research that shows that the life chances of disadvantaged young people vary enormously according to where they live.

“As we showed last year in our mobility map it isn’t as simple as a north-south divide. As a general rule coastal areas and industrial towns have low social mobility but there are places close to each other with very different results. Drilling into this data — and looking at what the best schools in the poorest areas are doing to improve results for their most challenging pupils, and applying what they do to other schools — is vital to ensuring that opportunities are raised in low social mobility areas.”

Read his full report here

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