‘Coastal not coasting’ : Educational attainment in coastal towns. What is going on elsewhere?

The distribution of educational underachievement has shifted. Twenty or thirty years ago, the problems were in schools in the big urban areas. The areas where the most disadvantaged children are being let down by the education system in today are no longer deprived inner city areas, instead the focus has shifted (according to Ofsted) to deprived coastal towns and rural, less populous regions of the country, particularly down the East and South-East of England. This presentation explores this shift and looks at examples of how coastal towns are attempting to address the problem of underachievement.