WORK done at a York secondary school to lift students' GCSE results is to be featured in a major new government document.

The Government's Green Paper for 14 to 19-year-olds, which is published this week, features a project which involved 24 GCSE students at Burnholme Community College.

Called YSTAMP, it aimed to make science, maths and technology more interesting and relevant to pupils by setting up visits to local businesses and organisations and ran between September 1998 and summer 2000.

It was one of 21 projects to be awarded a government grant nationally, but is the only one to feature in the Green Paper as an example of good practice in secondary education.

John Fletcher, head of careers at Burnholme, said: "To get this sort of national recognition at national level is a feather in the cap for Burnholme Community College.

"That year we had the highest level of GCSE passes at A* ever."

During the two years, pupils at Burnholme worked with organisations ranging from Nestl Research and Development and the Environment Agency to Smith & Nephew.

In August 2000, 91 per cent of the pupils involved achieved five passes at grades A* to C and more than half maintained or improved their results target.

Most of the students went on to study at York College.

The project was managed by North Yorkshire Business and Enterprise Partnership and a similar scheme was also run at Archbishop Holgate's CE School.

Mr Fletcher said the YSTAMP project had inspired the school to carry on with a similar course called Trident Gold with a small group of pupils and called for the Government to back its praise with more funding for such projects.

"If this is seen as good practice, hopefully funding can be made available so every school can do this," he said.

"With more funding we could make our scheme available to the whole year group."

janet.hewison@ycp.co.uk

Updated: 12:04 Tuesday, February 12, 2002