Children in one of the country's poorest neighbourhoods have chalked up an astounding improvement in exam scores.

The change in the deprived area around Manchester Road, Bradford, follows the setting up of the Trident regeneration scheme which is pumping £50 million of Government cash into the area over ten years. Last summer, children living in the regeneration zone had better GCSE results than the Bradford average.

This followed years when local children trailed their Bradford peers. In 1997, 28 per cent of Bradford teenagers left school with at least five good GCSEs. In the Trident area, it was half that - 12.3 per cent. But last summer it was 38 per cent compared with 37 per cent for Bradford as a whole.

The news has been hailed as a breakthrough and proof that the link between poverty and low educational attainment can be broken.

Delighted leaders of the Trident scheme discovered the improvements by analysing data on exam entrants and their postcodes.

They noticed encouraging improvements in tests for seven-, 11- and 14-year-olds, but the most dramatic improvement has been at GSCE where Trident area youngsters have now overtaken the Bradford average. Youngsters from the adjoining neighbourhoods covered by the regeneration scheme, Park Lane, Marshfields and West Bowling, go to eight different primaries and seven different secondaries, a mixture of high-performing and lower-performing schools.

Trident has paid for new homework clubs to be set up in community centres in the area to give youngsters extra help after school. And they have also funded learning mentors to work in schools attended by young people from the Trident area.

Trident programme manager Chas Stansfield said: "It might have just been a particularly brilliant year group, but when you look at the results for other key stages there's real progress.

"It has taken a lot of hard work to get the statistics. This is the first time we have got two properly comparable periods of time."

John Player, head at Grange Technology College, Great Horton, which takes some students from the Trident areas, said: "What this shows is given the right resources and appropriate motivation you can be successful - it's possible to break the link between poverty and low attainment."

One of the popular homework clubs is run from the Light of the World church in Gaythorne Road, West Bowling.

The centre's Anne Nelson said: "They are not pushed to do it - they really enjoy it, that's why they keep coming back."