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 27th January showing the destination of Key Stage 5 students from across the country for the 2012/13 academic year. Tower Hamlets, with 65% going to university, was eighth highest in the capital and was the second highest among inner London boroughs.

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 funds which the Mayor has set aside to replace cuts in students support made by central government. In December 2013 an independent academic report concluded that Tower Hamlets had “some of the best urban schools in the world.”