PLANS to improve performances at four York secondary schools are under way.

But City of York Council's director of education and leisure, Patrick Scott, said the schools were not failing - they just had extra challenges to face.

Burnholme Community College, Canon Lee School, Lowfield School and Oaklands School were identified as low-attaining or under-performing in the schools' Raising Attainment Plan in December.

Now the schools are to take measures to improve standards at key stage three - school years seven to nine - and at GCSE.

Measures include identifying and tracking the performance of under-performing pupils in years eight and ten and providing learning tutors to address specific learning problems associated with individual pupils.

But Mr Scott, at a meeting of the Advisory Panel to the executive member for education, said it was no surprise that some schools performed better than others.

He said: "We all know there's a range of achievements in schools and we all know the reasons for that. "We know it's the starting point that children are coming from.

"It's no big news that there are some schools that don't achieve as much as others.

"If we take the schools here they perform as well as some of our much more high-achieving schools.

"That doesn't alter the fact that they need the additional resources in order to help them overcome particular challenges they face.

"One is attendance. A lot of low performance is often nothing to do with what goes on in the school, because it's hard to get the kids into the school in the first place.

"Also we should always be targeting in terms of particular performance targets, where we think we can make some real improvements - it's about focusing this money on where it's actually needed.

"There's no indication that these schools are failing to do their job well.

"This is about additional resources going into schools that are having to cope with a wide range of challenges."

Truancy levels at eight schools in the city will also be tackled with the help of a Local Public Service Agreement grant.

Measures include text messaging to parents, reward schemes and pupil mentoring. Progress and performance targets are due to be published in November.

Updated: 09:13 Saturday, May 03, 2003