Action zones often worse than schools given no extra cash

The Government's education action zone (EAZ) programme has failed to make adequate improvements in secondary schools despite extra funding of up to £1m a year for each zone, an official analysis has found.

Secondary schools in EAZs had often been outperformed by schools in equally challenging circumstances given no extra money, the Department for Education concluded. The first official audit to compare zones' exam results with a control group of similarly deprived schools found the zones did not improve as quickly in many key measures.

Professor David Hopkins, director of the Education Department's standards and effectiveness unit, praised some of the scheme's successes in primary schools but admitted at secondary level they "have yet to make a significant impact". He said: "There remains considerable work to be done at secondary level, particularly at key stage 3 [11 to 14] where some zones are improving less quickly than the national average."

Writing in the same report, David Miliband, the School Standards minister, admitted zones had had "varying" success but said the principles underpinning the programme would "remain at the very heart of the Government's raising standards agenda".

The zones, introduced in 1998, were intended to be test beds of innovation, to get business to invest in education in deprived communities. Each zone receives a £750,000 annual grant from the Education Department and is expected to raise a further £250,000 from the private sector.

They also have more freedom than other schools to set the curriculum and teachers' pay and conditions. The initiative was curtailed last year. There are currently 73 zones involving more than 1,000 schools. Each zone will be funded until the end of its five- year term when they can join alternative government programmes. The last of the zones will run until April 2005.

In GCSEs, the zones had limited success in outperforming similar schools, although they did improve faster than the national average.

The first batch of zones was beaten by the control group in terms of A* to G passes. Their greatest success was in improving the proportion of pupils getting five good GCSE passes by 4.8 percentage points, compared with 3.8 points for the control group.

The second batch of zones did less well in helping pupils to gain five good GCSEs passes. They outperformed the control group only in the improvement in pupils getting at least one A* to G pass.