A BOYS' school is bucking the national trend as pupils out-perform girls in all GCSE subjects.

Head teacher of Barden High School, Burnley, George Senior, told parents at the awards evening that for the past 12 years full A-C grade passes had ranged from 16-28 per cent. This year they were 37 per cent.

In view of the national trend, it was to be expected that schools with girl pupils would do significantly better than Barden, but that was not proving the case.

The value added successes were due to pupils who wanted to do well, staff giving freely of their time during dinner breaks and after school, the strong emphasis on homework and a six-weekly cycle of monitoring progress and informing parents of concern or praise. At Barden, they were not willing to merely acknowledge that boys were under-achieving compared to girls.

Mr Senior said heads were finding that pupils entering secondary school had a lower reading age than those of 10 years ago.

What they were doing at Barden was to identify boys struggling with reading and listening to them read every day.

After outlining the multitude of school activities and successes, Mr Senior went on to attack the Government over school funding.

Fifteen out of 100 Lancashire secondary schools were in debt and that was likely to increase.

He added: "The Government is looking to rob Lancashire's finances to help Cheshire, with the result that we could face a real cut of five per cent putting half the secondary schools in Lancashire in financial difficulties.''

Mr Senior said the chief inspector of schools had said class size had no influence on learning.

He did not know of anyone who agreed, certainly not Barden teachers, Burnley teachers, Lancashire teachers, the Education Office, pupils or parents.

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