Village schools 'outperforming those in inner-city areas' According to figures, Britain was ranked 30th out of 57 countries in terms of results achieved by urban-based pupils but were 10th in the world based on scores in rural areas. The OECD said pupils in inner-city schools usually came from "more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds" but the trend was reversed in a handful countries, including the UK. The conclusions come despite a series of high-profile drives by successive governments to raise standards in inner-city education. Under Labour, £500m was spent over two years on its Excellence in Cities campaign to tackle underachievement in schools and millions more was invested in the London Challenge and City Challenge programmes. It has led to London becoming the best-performing region of England in terms of GCSE results. But Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said rural schools often performed better because they had a more settled pupil population. "In London and many other big cities, parents get a choice between lots of schools and word quickly gets round that school A is good and school B struggles, which often become a self-fulfilling prophecy and leads to a very socially-segregated system," he said. In a rural setting, the school gets geared towards the whole range of abilities, interests and aspirations and often does better across the board. You must also consider that many rural dwellers are fairly prosperous and - given the size of our country - can easily commute into the inner-cities to work. The study was based on the outcome of independent exams administered by the OECD in schools across the developed world. Pupils aged 15 are tested in reading, maths and science every four years as part of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The UK was positioned 25th for reading in the latest tables published in 2010. In a new analysis of the data, researchers broke scores down into urban schools - those in cities of more than 100,000 people - and less populated areas. In all, pupils in rural areas in the UK scored an average of 499.23 out of 550 in the test, while those in urban areas scored 488.46. Compared with other urban areas, the UK was ranked 30th overall. But in a table of "non-urban" performance, the UK was 10th. But the study found that this was the opposite of the trend witnessed in most other countries. "Contrary to conventional wisdom about big city schools, PISA finds that students in these schools generally perform better than those attending schools in non-urban settings," the study said. While the performance difference is related to the socio-economic status of students, it is also associated with some of the characteristics that distinguish urban schools, such as having more and better resources, greater autonomy in how they allocate those resources, and an adequate supply of teachers.