The Merseyside borough is at the top and bottom of every league table whose top or bottom you would be anxious to avoid. Last year it became the first British local authority to stop offering A-levels. What went wrong?

To the east of Liverpool is a local authority area known as the metropolitan borough of Knowsley. It was created in 1974 and whoever drew its boundaries had a magnificent sense of humour.

To start with, its shape: in the north, Knowsley begins at the point where the open farmland of south Lancashire gives way to Kirkby, a postwar expanse of social housing and light industry. In the south, it ends at Halewood, where an enormous Jaguar Land Rover factory whirrs and grinds around the clock, rolling out a finished vehicle every 80 seconds. The distance between the two is more than 11 miles. At its narrowest point, however, Knowsley is less than two miles wide. It is a long, thin streak of a place.

Its illogicality is not confined to its shape. Within those borders are half-a-dozen places that have no firm connection with each other, historically, geographically or socially.

Almost half the borough is countryside: partly farmland and partly the vast estate of Edward Stanley, the 19th Earl of Derby, including the grand 18th-century pile, Knowsley Hall. The remainder bundles together the old Lancashire towns of Prescot and Whiston, and several unattached areas of housing – most of it social housing – in Huyton, Kirkby and Halewood. These places were developed in the 1930s, and again in the 50s and 60s, as so-called “overspill” from the poorer neighbourhoods of Liverpool.

Today, Knowsley is at the top and the bottom of every British economic and social league table whose top or bottom you would be anxious to avoid.

It is not quite the most deprived area in the country: Middlesbrough is currently winning that race. But Knowsley is close. Around 20% of working age people are receiving some form of out-of-work benefit. Some areas of the borough suffer from the worst income deprivation in the country; more than a third of local children live in these conditions.

In some households, unemployment has become trans-generational: children are growing up in families where the parents, the grandparents and even, sometimes, the great-grandparents have not worked.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest High street in Prescot, one of the old Lancashire towns that forms part of Knowsley borough. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Ethnically, meanwhile, Knowsley is the least diverse corner of Britain. According to the census, around 97% of its population are white. In other words, it is the most white working-class place in the country. At last year’s referendum, its people revealed themselves to be very keen to leave the EU, while most of those living elsewhere in the Liverpool area voted firmly to remain. It is also the area where the greatest proportion of people – some 81% – describe themselves as Christian.

Writing in 1965, shortly after the Labour MP for Huyton, Harold Wilson, had been elected prime minister, the political journalist Anthony Howard described the area as home to thousands of Irish families from the slums of inner-city Liverpool. “The birth rate is said to be the highest outside Red China and the crime rate is one of the highest in Britain,” Howard wrote. “It has fine skyscraper flats and bright new schools; but the telephone boxes are constantly smashed, litter lies thick on the verges and there are frequent fights in the streets.”

Academy sixth-form closure to end A-level provision in UK borough Read more

Today, there is less litter and few telephone boxes. Many adjectives are applied to the tower blocks, but “fine” is rarely heard. And the bright new 60s schools? Well, Knowsley’s problems are at their most acute – and most visible – when it comes to education. Its GCSE results are the worst in the country, and have been for years. The government believes that every education authority should, at an absolute minimum, be able to secure five GCSEs at grades A* to C for 40% of its pupils. Knowsley has failed to hit that target for several years, with just 39.1% of pupils achieving that pass rate.

More than 15% of the working-age population of Knowsley have no educational qualifications, compared with a national average of 8%. And there is worse: in September, Knowsley became the first local authority in the country to cease to offer its young people A-level education. None whatsoever.

Arriving in Huyton, at the centre of the borough, many visitors are struck by just how vast some of the old council estates are; mile after mile of solidly built prewar terraces, now all managed by housing associations. The colossal pubs that once lined the main roads have mostly been knocked down, and burger bars built in their place. The greengrocers’ shops have been replaced by nail bars, and above them are solicitors’ offices, offering advice on divorce, accident claims and criminal defence.

Turn right and you pass by the Bluebell estate, where Steven Gerrard, the former England football captain, grew up. This area produces a prodigious number of top professional footballers, and despite the globalisation of the game it is not unusual, when Everton play Liverpool, to see three or four men from Huyton and Kirkby on the pitch. It also produces an unusually high number of playwrights and screenwriters specialising in comedy and social realism: Alan Bleasdale, Phil Redmond, Willy Russell.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boys playing in Pennard Avenue in Knowsley borough. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

At the end of Bluebell Lane, you find yourself facing the seven-storey office block that is the home of Knowsley metropolitan borough council. Like the borough it serves, the council is a place of extremes. Until last May there were 63 seats on Knowsley council. The Labour party held all of them. Knowsley is a one-party state. On occasion, Labour candidates have stood unopposed, meaning that all they have needed to do, in order to be elected, was vote for themselves. In last May’s election the number of seats was reduced to 45 and the Liberal Democrats won three. But there hasn’t been a Tory on Knowsley council since 1995.

Labour councillors brush aside warnings from the Electoral Reform Society that voters are being denied real choice, saying it is not their fault that local political opposition is so weak. But the three Lib Dems say that Labour’s dominance could not have been conducive to good policy-making. Nor is there close media scrutiny: the Liverpool Echo has a reporter spending half their time reporting on the borough but, since the closure many years ago of the local paper, the Prescot and Huyton Reporter, there is no media organisation focused entirely on local affairs.

This lack of effective opposition and independent scrutiny may go some way to explain one of the more bizarre episodes in Knowsley’s recent history: one that served to demoralise teachers, bewilder their pupils and drive educational attainment down still further.

In 2005, the Labour government launched a programme to invest in secondary school buildings, a venture known as Building Schools for the Future, and intended to ensure that every child would be educated within a 21st-century environment by 2020. By then, the Knowsley schools that Howard had written about were neither new nor bright. Some buildings were no longer fit for purpose; strategically placed buckets collecting dripping rainwater were not unknown.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Housing estate in Prescot. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

During the Blair-Brown years, according to some former Knowsley officials, the council would on occasion show an enthusiastic willingness to act as an experimenter for Labour policies. Building Schools for the Future was no exception. Knowsley took the programme to its utmost degree: all 11 secondary schools in the borough were flattened and seven new ones constructed at a cost of £157m. What is more, following an audit of local children’s “learning styles”, the council’s senior education officers had decided that most were “kinaesthetic learners”: rather than sitting behind desks, they needed to use their bodies and senses, and trial and error.

The new schools were built accordingly. When they opened in 2009, they were not called schools, however, but centres for learning. The kids, when they walked inside, quickly dubbed them “wacky warehouses”. The teachers – or rather progress leaders, as they had been renamed – were furious that their warnings had been ignored. Instead of classrooms and corridors there were vast open spaces known as base areas, with curtains on runners to create different zones. A child’s misbehaviour would be witnessed not by the rest of the class, but by half the school. Keeping track of pupils’ movement became a major problem, with teachers resorting to the use of walkie-talkies.

And the acoustics were dreadful. The design and technology classes were next to the science laboratories – with no wall in between – with the result that a child who was hammering a nail into a piece of wood could reach out and touch a child who was trying to learn about the structure of an atom.

One headteacher says that when she complained about the acoustics, a council official suggested she instruct her pupils to take off their shoes to keep the noise levels down. The private finance initiative company formed to build the schools even tried to prevent teachers from pinning pupils’ work to the walls.

One of the new schools, Christ the King in Huyton, was hailed as an exciting centre of learning for the future. It was consigned to history after just four years: parents simply did not wish to send their children there, and less than half its 900 places were filled.

At the other new schools, most headteachers insisted they be given classrooms and corridors. The rebuilding work took place gradually, over several summers. And all the time, the borough’s exam results remained stuck to the foot of the national league tables: thousands of Knowsley children were leaving school with few qualifications, and sometimes with none at all.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Prescot school (formerly Knowsley Park Centre for Learning, Serving Prescot, Whiston and the Wider Community). Photograph: Christopher Thomond for The Guardian

For the past three years, the executive director of children’s services at Knowsley – the person whose responsibility it is to sort out this mess – has been Paul Boyce, a former social worker and social services manager. That fact that Boyce has never taught raised eyebrows among teachers, but he is clearly a man with a plan and has the support of the council leader, Andy Moorhead.

Boyce could not be more scathing about the way in which Knowsley embraced the concept of kinaesthetic learning. “Education gurus have been in charge of education here, and I think they used that opportunity to experiment rather than to deliver,” he says. Some aspects of the centres for learning fiasco he derides as “spaceships and the internet”. Innovation, as far as Boyce is concerned, must be based upon empirical research, with outcomes that can be measured. His predecessors, he says, were “taking a punt”. They may have done so because they were becoming increasingly desperate, but the experiment failed.

Boyce is quite clear about the principal reason why GCSE results are so poor in Knowsley, and why A-level education is no longer being offered: it is because 43% of Knowsley’s children leave to be educated in Liverpool or the neighbouring boroughs to the east, St Helens and Halton, when they are 11 years old.

There are three underlying reasons for this. The first lies in the damned geography of the place; it is such a long, thin borough that very often a child’s nearest school – and certainly the nearest good school – will be outside Knowsley. The second is that many parents – particularly, but not exclusively Catholic parents – want to send their children to single-sex schools, and Knowsley has none. And the third is that Knowsley’s schools are now seen as second-rate. If you are an aspiring parent in Knowsley, the first thing you do is push your child out of the borough. Those pupils who remain are from families that are the least mobile, and often among the poorest.

There was a further sieving at the age of 16, with many of those Knowsley children who wished to take A-levels travelling to a sixth-form college outside the borough, particularly the highly regarded Carmel College in St Helens. In 2015, 52% of Knowsley’s 16-year-olds opted to study A-levels, which amounted to 981 young people. But only 29 of them were studying in the borough.

Each year, the disappearance of all these children sucks out tens of millions of pounds of government funding that would otherwise be available for Knowsley’s education budget. It was only a matter of time before sixth-form education became financially unviable.

Four of Knowsley’s six remaining secondary schools have become academies. The council has encouraged this, wanting to see them take advantage of the expertise that multi-academy trusts can offer. The remaining two are administered jointly by Knowsley and by the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Liverpool.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest More than 15% of the working-age population of Knowsley have no educational qualifications, compared with a national average of 8%. Photograph: Alamy

By last year only one of these six schools, Halewood Academy, was offering A-level education. But it estimated that it needed at least 155 sixth-formers to break even, and had only 83. In March it announced that its sixth form would need to close in order to balance its books. Parents were powerless to do little more than set up a protest page on Facebook.

At this point, I should probably declare an interest. I grew up in Huyton, attended my local primary school and, aged 11, won a place at the boys’ grammar school that then existed in the borough. Prescot grammar school had been founded in 1544 and its black-gowned masters maintained its time-honoured ways: a traditional curriculum, lots of sport, and a predilection for corporal punishment.

We knew we were receiving a good education, however, and this became even clearer once we started studying for our A-levels, when classes became places for inquiry and discourse. The rules became few and far between as we were permitted to explore new boundaries. In one of the sixth-form classrooms we had a record player and were permitted to smoke. We couldn’t light up during the lessons, but we could during the breaks, after which the masters would teach us in a fug of smoke, without batting an eyelid. It seems unthinkable today – but this was the 70s, and the teaching was very effective. I learned a great deal about politics, rather less about economics, and acquired a lifelong love of poetry.

Had A-levels not been available at Prescot, I’m not sure whether I would have taken them elsewhere. Others who went on from Prescot to enjoy illustrious and useful careers are similarly doubtful. Professor Sir Michael Brady, for example, who has held two chairs at Oxford University – in information engineering and oncology – says: “I’m not sure that I would. The idea of getting on a bus and going all the way into the centre of Liverpool every morning would have been quite a disincentive.”

Andrew Burrows QC, professor of law at Oxford, says he probably would have found a way of taking A-levels elsewhere. “But some of the boys I studied A-levels alongside would not, as travel, and the cost of travel, would have been an issue.” Burrows’ old school friends include teachers, a solicitor, a doctor and a professor of medicine.

Friends and neighbours who did not pass the 11-plus and attended one of the local secondary moderns have a different story to tell. Most left education at 16, sometimes with few qualifications, and only a handful attended further education college. Some were obliged to return to education much later in life, and a number recall their school days as dark times, best forgotten.

Prescot grammar eventually merged with the girls’ grammar school, became a comprehensive, moved location, merged again, and in time – because councillors could not agree on a shorter name – became the Knowsley Park Centre for Learning, Serving Prescot, Whiston and the Wider Community. The boys’ grammar school building was knocked down years ago and is now a housing estate. On the site of the sixth form where we listened to punk rock while puffing on Players No 6, there now stands Canterbury Close, a cul-de-sac of detached and semi-detached houses.

By the late 70s, some of the comprehensive schools in Knowsley were enjoying a brief period of great success; Ruffwood in Kirkby, for example, under the leadership of headteacher Alan Barnes, attracted visits by educationalists from across the globe, became a place where teachers queued up to work and sent entire cohorts of working-class pupils off to university.

Di McEvoy-Robinson took four A-levels at Ruffwood in 1980 and a fifth at a further education college across the road. She went to university, became a teacher, then a college principal, and is now joint owner of a national apprenticeship company with more then 4,000 apprentices in IT, accountancy and social media.

Would she have studied for A-levels if they had not been available at Ruffwood? “I’m not sure I would. You wanted to do it because you looked up to the sixth-formers, you thought they were cool, and because you had teachers who said they wanted to teach you at A-level. And you’d be at your school, with all your mates. No, I don’t think I would have taken A-levels somewhere else. And it wasn’t just a couple of kids at Ruffwood who took A-levels and then went to university. There were lots of us.”

At the heart of Boyce’s plan is the newly created Education Commission for Knowsley. This body aims to strengthen people’s engagement with education; work with other schools and teachers in the region to deliver its plan; and reorganise Knowsley’s schools so that they can take over the commission’s work. The ultimate aim will be “to make education irresistible”, Boyce says. “And that’s the hard bit, really, because that’s about changing the hearts and minds of families.”

The commission started work in September, and its chair, Christine Gilbert, a former head of Ofsted and chief executive at Tower Hamlets council in east London, says she already senses “a real optimism in the schools and among the children”. A new generation of headteachers are running the six secondary schools, and their determination to achieve change is palpable.

Boyce hopes that in the not-too-distant future, Knowsley will be able to secure government funding for a new sixth-form college, one that would be run jointly with a high-achieving education institution from outside the borough.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest At Lord Derby academy in Huyton the emphasis is on discipline – and pupils are responding. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Knowsley Park Centre for Learning, Serving Prescot, Whiston and the Wider Community became an academy in September. Headteacher Judy Walker immediately ditched the name. Today it is simply Prescot school, and the pupils arrive in new uniforms with a badge that incorporates a date, in very large numbers: 1544. The interior of the school has been remodelled. “The council asked me what I needed, and I replied: ‘Walls, and windows that open,’” says Walker. “It was bonkers.” She says she is aiming to provide an academic curriculum. “I want that grammar school ethos and high academic achievement, but without selection.”

But like other secondary schools in Knowsley, Prescot is obliged to give literacy classes for the large numbers of children who arrive, aged 11, with a reading age of nine or 10. And while Walker would like to open a sixth form and offer A-level education, she is frank that there is a need to first improve GCSE results.

At Lord Derby Academy in Huyton, headteacher Victoria Gowan and her staff keep detailed statistics on each child’s performance at each stage of their school career and in each subject. Some 60% of pupils at Lord Derby are classed as disadvantaged – meaning they are eligible for free school meals or have been looked after in local authority care – compared with a national average of 29%. The school is determined that this fact will not damage their prospects.

Gowan places strong emphasis on discipline. Pupils are expected to surrender their mobile phones at the start of each day, walk on the left in corridors and stand when giving lengthy answers to questions. She and her staff were surprised that there was so little resistance from pupils to these changes. “The feedback we get is that they like the discipline, and in particular they like the consistency.”

After visiting Lord Derby, Gilbert noted that “the children are now arriving with pens and bags, which wasn’t always happening before”. Exclusions, which had been running at 13% a year, were down to 3% in 2016, as children began to be taught in a well-staffed inclusion unit.

Lord Derby pupils are expected to look immaculate, on the premises and off, as Gowan attempts to give the community a new confidence in their school. She has also changed the curriculum; gone are the two- and three-hour lessons, during which pupils were taught several subjects by groups of teachers. “Both the pupils and the staff were relieved when we reintroduced 50-minute lessons,” she says.

Raising educational attainment in Knowsley is a matter not only of local concern, but of regional and national importance. With the attainment of white, working-class children remaining stubbornly low compared with other groups, Gilbert takes the view that if the commission can crack it in Knowsley, their methods can be used to raise standards everywhere.

Meanwhile, Sir Michael Wilshaw, the outgoing head of Ofsted, has warned that any attempts to achieve a geographic rebalancing of the British economy will be fatally undermined if children in the north of England are not better educated. In a speech in which he singled out Knowsley but also condemned Labour-controlled Rochdale, Salford and Oldham, Wilshaw warned that any attempt to create a northern powerhouse would “splutter and die” if young people lacked the skills to sustain it. He also highlighted a “significant discrepancy in performance” between schools in the north of England and the south, a concern that was also raised by the children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, in a report published last December.

In its attempt to establish what more it could be doing, Knowsley asked a London-based public policy thinktank, ResPublica, to examine its schools’ problems. ResPublica’s report, presented at a conference in the borough last June, made no mention of grammar schools.

In October, with Theresa May in Downing Street and grammar schools firmly back on the political agenda, ResPublica published a new version of its report, and says it had Knowsley’s permission to do this. There was a new preface that raised the possibility that schools in the borough could become selective, and a new recommendation: that the government should ensure that any future grammar schools target the most disadvantaged areas. The return of grammars, said the thinktank’s director Phillip Blond in the accompanying press release, is “potentially a transformative idea for areas where there are little or no middle classes”.

In Knowsley, councillors, education officials and headteachers were furious. ResPublica declined to answer a number of questions about the way its report was altered. Instead it issued a statement in which it attacked the council and threatened to sue the Guardian if it published anything that damaged its reputation.

Senior civil servants at the DfE are said to share Knowsley’s view that there is no case for a new grammar school in the borough. Publicly, however, the department is saying little, other than that it wants all young people to enjoy “the world-class education they need to fulfil their potential”.

But in Downing Street, officials seized upon ResPublica’s new-found conversion to the grammar school cause. At prime minister’s questions in late November, May hailed “the report commissioned by a Labour council in Knowsley” and quoted from Blond’s press release.

After years of academic decline, the draining away of many of the more able pupils and the self-inflicted damage of wild experimentation, Knowsley appears finally to be starting to get to grips with its education catastrophe, and may be moving in the right direction.

Is this the moment when it is to be turned into a laboratory once more; subject to trial – and no doubt errors – directed not from within, but from Whitehall, and No 10?

• This article was amended on 30 January 2017 to correct the name of Andy Moorhead, leader of Knowsley council