Mayor praises the proportion of students who go to university

The future is bright for students from Tower Hamlets after Government figures showed an impressive proportion of the borough’s sixth-form leavers go on to university.The Department for Education released figures on Tuesday (January 27) showing the destination of Key Stage 5 students from across the country for the 2012/13 academic year.Tower Hamlets performed strongly. Its percentage of 65 per cent was eighth highest in the capital and was the second highest among inner London boroughs. (See table below)Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman said: “Congratulations to all the students on these magnificent figures. This performance shows that young people in Tower Hamlets can be confident that their first-class education in the borough will lead them to a bright future.“For an inner-city borough to be performing so strongly is testament to all the tremendous hard work from everyone involved in education in Tower Hamlets.“Our borough may be relatively poor but we are rich in high aspirations for our children.”Cllr Gulam Robbani, cabinet member for education and children’s services, said: “In the past couple of years we have done a lot of partnership work with the Russell Group and there are currently Tower Hamlets students at Oxford and Cambridge.“These developments won’t be reflected in Tuesday’s figures so we are even more enthusiastic about next year’s figures.”Tower Hamlets Council has introduced a string of initiatives to improve the educational outcomes for local children, including:

• Mayor’s Higher Education Award: introduced in 2013, it offers payments of £1,500 to help local students with the cost of university
• Globally-recognised quality schooling: in December 2013 an independent academic report concluded that Tower Hamlets had ‘some of the best urban schools in the world’
• Refurbishing or rebuilding all our secondary schools: all 18 council secondary schools have been modernised or rebuilt in the past few years at a total cost of £300million
• Partnership working with universities: Tower Hamlets Council has been actively working with top universities, including the introduction of a dedicated student recruitment fair with the Russell Group
• Partnership working with big business and community groups: the borough’s schools work closely with renowned businesses and community groups to build students’ confidence and ambitions through work experience and mentoring schemes
• Mayor’s Education Award: a scheme which awards £400 to young people to stay in education after their GCSEs
• Support for schools in developing academic writing and securing effective teaching and learning: borough officers are working with the schools in innovative ways to help young people learn and write well to achieve the highest grades
• Strong post-16 provision: three schools have opened new sixth forms in the past two years and the local college, rated Good by Ofsted, provides an extensive range of courses.