Map of the Week: Addressing educational underachievement
Teacher: Why was your homework so appalling?
Pupil: It was my postcode, Miss.
Can it really be true that ?
No, of course not. might like to claim that "where you live will largely determine your chances of educational success", but there are a host of factors at play here and geography is not the most important of them.
Indeed, it might be regarded as a dangerous cop-out to suggest that "location, location, location" has the same affect on educational achievement as it does on house prices. If only it were that simple.
The report does reveal large regional variation in academic success, but its lists tell us more about differences in wealth and mobility, culture and aspiration than it does about the availability of high-quality schooling.
I am sure there will be people in the west Midlands scratching their heads to explain why it is that eight of the 20 constituencies with the highest percentage of people with no qualifications are in their region.
Well, one answer is that most of those areas have large Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations which include a sizeable proportion of first-generation immigrants from poor, rural areas of the sub-continent.
But there's an even more obvious explanation.
If you have a degree, you are more likely to be able to afford to live in a smarter street than someone without any GCSEs. That is why the gentrified parts of Hackney where houses go for a million are full of graduates and the neighbouring council estates are not.
It is why the more expensive western sides of towns and cities tend to have a better-educated population than the poorer eastern sides.
In a way, the map of Britain's cities revealed is an advertisement for doing your homework and trying to get to university. It is not that your postcode decides your qualifications; it is that your qualifications enable you to choose your postcode.
That said, the report is troubling. If there are sizeable parts of our cities where it is perfectly normal for people to have few if any qualifications, then ambition may be blunted. Bright youngsters grow up in an environment where joining the dole queue at 16 is par for the course. Talent is wasted.
The challenge is to inspire those children: to encourage them to aim high wherever they live.
Teacher: Your homework is much better. Well done.
Pupil: Can you help me sort out my uni application, Miss?
I'm 
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