Educational underperformance has shifted from England’s inner-cities to leafy suburbs, rural and coastal areas, Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw has claimed today.

In a speech delivered at Church House, Westminster to unveil the Unseen Children report, HMCI Sir Michael outlined a series of radical recommendations to improve the educational prospects of ‘unseen’ children from low-income backgrounds.

Places where educational underachievement was particularly rife included areas of the East and South East of England, such as Kettering, Wokingham, Norwich and Newbury, which have failed to benefit from national initiatives.

Marking the twentieth anniversary of Ofsted’s first report into the attainment of the poorest children in the education system, Sir Michael vowed Ofsted would, in future, re-inspect schools previously judged outstanding which are not helping their poorest children.

Other key recommendations include developing sub-regional programmes to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children, and the concept of a ‘National Teacher Service’ to assist failing schools in remote, unfashionable or challenging areas – which Sir Michael said government should urgently consider.

‘In the last twenty or thirty years, the performance of schools in inner London, Birmingham, Greater Manchester, Liverpool and Leicester has been transformed,’ Sir Michael said. The distribution in educational underachievement has shifted.

He said new policies and approaches were needed to deal with an ‘invisible minority’ of the country’s most disadvantaged, most under-achieving children, who could now be found in areas of relative affluence such as leafy suburbs, market towns or seaside resorts.

‘Poor, unseen children can be found in mediocre schools the length and breadth of our country. They are labelled, buried in lower sets, consigned as often as not to indifferent teaching. They coast through education until – at the earliest opportunity – they sever their ties with it,’ Sir Michael added.