PUPILS from poor families who live in rural and affluent parts of the North-East and North Yorkshire are falling behind their counterparts in deprived and urban areas after being overlooked by schools, researchers have concluded.

The Reading England's Future report, by the Read On Get On coalition of charities, parents, teachers and businesses, also found deprived pupils in the region are more likely to be able read well than those in every other part of the country, except London and the North West.

The group launched a campaign earlier this year to enable all children to read, understand and discuss stories, such as Harry Potter, by the age of 11.

The study compared children eligible for free lunches reading ability at age 11 across the country’s 533 parliamentary constituencies, and found that relatively wealthy areas such as Sedgefield, Richmond, Thirsk and Malton and Harrogate and Knaresborough fared poorly.

It found there was a close relationship between poor children’s early language development and how well they are reading at 11.

Researchers found the North East had a high proportion of areas in the bottom quarter for poor children’s language development at age five, but do much better in reading at age 11.

A third of wholly rural constituencies received relatively poor scores.

The report concluded while reading standards improved nationally by an average of 13 per cent over the last decade, standards had declined for poor pupils in some 35 constituencies, including William Hague's Richmond constituency and David Cameron’s Witney constituency, in Oxfordshire.

North Yorkshire County Council's cabinet member for education, Councillor Arthur Barker, said he would examine why poor children's reading standards had fallen in the Richmond constituency.

He said: "We are working with schools to close the attainment gap between children of less well-off backgrounds and others and have established initiatives to see which methods are most effective."

Russell Hobby, of the National Association of Head Teachers, said there had been a lack of investment in rural schools and those with small proportions of poor pupils.

“It’s easy for schools to lose track of them in the data when they have a large number of affluent children doing particularly well."

Education leaders said the Coalition’s £1,300 payment for poor primary school pupils had been more effective in schools with large proportions of children from low income families.

The only other areas in North Yorkshire and the North East to have seen a fall in reading ability were Hexham and Berwick-upon-Tweed.