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Yorkshire and the Humber is one of the nine regions of England. It covers most of the historic county of Yorkshire, along with the part of northern Lincolnshire that was, from 1974 to 1996, within the former shire county of Humberside.
It is one of the two regions (along with the North West) that were expected to have a referendum about the establishment of an elected regional assembly. The North East region of England rejected having an elected regional assembly in a referendum. The then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott subsequently announced that he would not move orders for other referendums before the relevant provisions expired in June, 2005. The Yorkshire and Humberside Assembly quango is in Wakefield.
The highest point of the region is Whernside, in the Yorkshire Dales, at 737 metres. The largest freshwater lake is Hornsea Mere in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
Education
Schools are mostly comprehensive, with some grammar schools in North Yorkshire, Calderdale and Kirklees. The schools in Hull perform the worst in the UK at GCSE. Also at GCSE, schools in Barnsley, Bradford, Doncaster and North-East Lincolnshire have low-achieving results with Barnsley the worst of these. All four of these areas coincidentally have an above-average teenage pregnancy problem. For the metropolitan areas, Calderdale and Wakefield perform the best, although slightly under the UK average. North Yorkshire performs the best at GCSE in the region, and with the East Riding of Yorkshire and York have results above the UK average. At A-level Hull, North Lincolnshire, Kirklees and North Yorkshire perform quite well with Kirklees being the best by a large margin, and with Wakefield have results above the UK average. The excellent Kirklees result is due to Greenhead College in Huddersfield.
The districts of South Yorkshire perform the least in the area at A level, and all of these districts achieve similar results, much lower than those in the former districts of Humberside. Hull and northern Lincolnshire have a wide socio-economic diversity - many under-achieving pupils at 16 but with high performers at A-level. Such areas are suited to selective education. Effectively in these two areas, selection is taking place - at 16. |
