Out of more than 4,000 secondary schools in England, perhaps 200 can be described as "difficult". They are difficult because their pupils come largely from the underclass, and grow up in a culture of alienation and despair. They reject school and they have no hope of work.

Most city schools have some children like this and cope, but in a few the proportion is large enough to determine the school's character. In the language of inspectors, these schools fail. Yet the roots of failure lie outside the school.

The current policy on admissions, which gives parents a choice over which school their children attend, has increased the polarisation of intakes, and thus of outcomes. Some schools now take very large numbers of underclass youngsters; it is their number that makes them unmanageable. Other city schools have a very "respectable" intake, and are flourishing. Sometimes, schools in each of these two categories are located very close to each other.

The current state of our most difficult schools is dire. There are classrooms that are always on, or over, the edge of disorder. There are good teachers who are unable to persuade young people to learn, and large numbers of these talented and dedicated teachers succumb sooner or later to stress and burn-out.

'Overwhelmed'

The Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) fails to grasp the realities behind such schools' lack of achievement and describes them and their staff as failures, when they are simply overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of need amongst their pupils - and the negative ways those needs are expressed.

The government also remains wedded to the mistaken view that the better results of some schools are due largely, in a way that is never explained, to their internal excellence - rather than their more favoured intakes. It proposes to amplify the pecking order, with labels for these schools such as "specialist" and "beacons". These status symbols will go to those that hath, while "failing" schools continue to face closure or a fresh start under a new headteacher and staff, neither of which address underclass underachievement.

To increase achievement, we have to ensure a more balanced intake in all our city schools. This can only be addressed by a radical change to admissions policy, to add community benefit to parental choice as a necessary consideration.

Of course schools can make a difference, but we have to reinsert in the debate the old recognition that social factors are much more important determinants of educational success. This has never been denied, merely forgotten.

The only long-term solution for inner city education failure is radical change to economic and social policy. Only when the most deprived young people have a realistic hope of regular employment with a living wage will they be tempted to integrate into mainstream education processes, and mainstream society generally.

And only then will those struggling and vilified heroes, the teachers of the underclass, be given respite.