CHILDREN in blazers are gathered around the interactive whiteboard and are hanging on their teacher’s words.

A polite student holds the door to the IT corridor where state-of-the-art computers are being used to help Year Nine pupils head towards early exam passes.

Can this really be England’s worst school?

According to school league tables, just 1% of pupils at Parklands High School, Speke, achieved five GCSEs at grade C or above in subjects including maths and English.

This puts it at the very bottom of the league as, for the first time this year, maths and English were included in performance statistics.

“What’s frustrating,” argues headteacher Alan Smithies, “is that last year our target, set by government and the local authority, was to get 18% of the year group through with five GCSEs at C or above – we more than doubled that. We got 32.2%.

“That represents a fantastic achievement because it was also a weak cohort.

“I can show you other schools across Liverpool who are not improving at the same rate but they are not making the headlines.

“The English and maths target was 9% but we got 1% and that was extremely disappointing.”

So what went wrong?

Mr Smithies closes his office door and frankly lays out a series of personal disasters which destroyed the health and personal lives of his maths and English teachers.

By the end of last year, he was having to take maths classes as the department of five was reduced to two. The English department fared little better – two out of five teachers were absent.

The catalogue of blows was overwhelming and even the intervention of Liverpool LEA was not enough to get pupils through these two exams.

Staff absences hit harder than they might elsewhere because the school lies in the second most deprived ward in the country, according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation, and one where children start high school significantly behind their peers. It has also got close on 50% of pupils with special educational needs.

Much has been done to reverse these factors.

Parklands gleams with plasma screens, ultra-modern classrooms and hi-tech IT labs. Next door is Parklands Adult Learning Centre which houses a plush theatre and independent design suite.

But facilities do not guarantee quality education.

The school has advanced status in study support, won after designing a programme designed to meet the needs of their pupils.

The course is validated by government, which uses the school as a case study to validate the Embedded Study Support Programme it now endorses and is attempting to roll out nationally.

The school also now has fully staffed English and maths departments. The new head of maths was taken on after a second round of interviews.

“We didn’t get the right quality in the first round,” Mr Smithies says. Now pupils such as Chris Smith, Laura Toohey and Kaleigh Ross are among 15 to have already achieved C grades in maths.

The school is already half way to meeting a target of 18% of pupils passing five GCSEs at A- C with maths and English and is confident of breaking it.

Chris says: “We’re really being pushed now and most of us want to go on to further education.”

This time next year, the school is aiming to find itself ranked in the top 25% most improved.

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