NEARLY £3 million will be spent this year to improve social mobility among young people in one part of Somerset.

West Somerset has the lowest social mobility of any local authority area in the UK, coming in at 324th out of 324 bodies in both 2016 and 2017.

To remedy this, the district was selected by the Department for Education (DfE) as one of 12 “opportunity areas”, making it eligible for a share of £72M to improve young people’s outcomes and the standard of their schooling.

A total of £2.9M will be spent by Somerset County Council in the area this year, following on from a DfE grant of £700,000 in the previous 12 months.

A report on the progress of projects in the opportunity area, and how this year’s funding would be used, was presented to the council’s children and families scrutiny committee, which met in Taunton on Friday morning (May 18).

The opportunity area programme runs until March 2020 and has four main priorities:

Ensuring every child has a great start in life: work is being done to improve access to children’s services as well as improvements to home schooling and better support for people working in education. A total of £866,752 will be invested in this over the course of the programme

Educational excellence in the classroom: a total of £920,086 will be invested into improving results from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 4, including the amount of people reaching the government’s accepted standards in reading, writing and maths

Providing a solid transition to adulthood: every child in West Somerset should be able to have “the best possible education outcomes” in how they develop after the age of 16, whether in access to further education, undertaking further training or entering the world or work. Over the course of the progress £822,000 will be spent to achieve this.

Skills for employment and business: the DfE will spend £784,000 to ensure that every young person in West Somerset can have “excellent experiences of work” and can enhance their skills to get the jobs they want

Julia Ridge, the council’s head of vulnerable learners, said that progress was being made, with the number of children having a “good level of development” at nursery stage rising from 50 per cent in 2015 to 65 per cent in 2017.

She said in her report: “All 16 West Somerset nursery providers are ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’.

“The target for 2020 is that 70 per cent of all pupils reach a good level of development.”

Councillor Eileen Tipper stressed the importance of early intervention, stating that more needed to be done to support mothers and thereby ensure children had the best possible start in life.

She said: “What will the project be doing about antenatal support? By the time the children are two years old, it is too late.”

Ms Ridge went on to say that all West Somerset Schools bar one were rated ‘good’ and ‘outstanding’, and that recent GCSE results were above the average for both Somerset and the wider country.

The one remaining school in question – Danesfield School in Williton – is currently rated ‘requires improvement’, but was said to be “making good progress under new leadership.”

By 2020/21, the council hopes that all young people who leave West Somerset College will either go into further education, employment or training.

The figure currently stands at 95.1 per cent – higher than it was in 2015 (92.6 per cent) but still just below the average for Somerset (95.5 per cent).

Ms Ridge added that more work was needed to ensure that young people in West Somerset could access “the outside world” through extracurricular activities, whether other parts of Somerset, different parts of the UK or another country.

She said: “This is particularly a problem for low income families whose children are eligible for free school meals, or families who may not fall into this category but would be classed as ‘just about managing’.

“This is compounded by the rurality of living in West Somerset, which means that it is harder to access a new environment due to distance and poor transport links.”

The precise funding allocation for 2019/20 has not been confirmed by the DfE.