Community Life

But one east London school already takes its pupils on day-trips to a top establishment.

Every September, Year six children from Culloden Primary School in Poplar are taken to Cambridge to learn about University life and what they can get from studying.

The trips are organised by the assistant head teacher Bill Holledge who reckons a visit he made when he was a youngster had a huge influence on his life.

Air rockets

He told the BBC: “When I was seven my parents took me on a family holiday and we spent the day as tourists in Cambridge and it made a really big impression on me.

“So much so, that eleven years later I went up to Cambridge and read English before training to be a teacher.”

During the trips, the ten and 11-year-olds have a go at punting and visit some of the city’s historical landmarks before trying out more education-based projects.

Mr Holledge explained: ““It was very peaceful. The children that we work with are primarily from the Bangladeshi Community in the East End of London, it was experiences that they’ve never had before

“But other activities we did that were more transferable. We had a talk from one of the universitiy’s engineering officers and teachers and they put on an activity whereby we produced rockets that were fired with compressed air - giving the children a sense of what it meant to be an engineer.”

Lack of experience

“They said ‘so can you actually get a job and get paid to do this? Because this is really fun!”

“And I don’t think they would ever have considered potentially a career, even ten, 12, or twenty years down the line if that hadn’t had that experience.”

The National Council for Educational Excellence recommends that schools and Universities develop stronger links to make more youngsters go into higher education.

That is something that Mr Holledge agrees with.

“I think probably the biggest block is just lack of experience in the family that the children come from, in terms of having been to university,” he said.

“But I think we can create a kind of the beginnings of ideas in people’s minds very early on and the earlier you do that more powerful that idea is.”