Teachers are trained for impoverished areas in Los Angeles

So says the mission statement of Center X, a teacher training project in California proposed by MPs as a model for teachers in England.

Center X is an attempt to train staff specifically for the challenges of inner-city Los Angeles schools.

It aims to provide a dedicated workforce for the toughest schools.

The project, set up by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is an attempt to "radically improve urban schooling" by training a specific group of teachers to work with "racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse children".

'Passion'

"Everybody says that 'all children can learn', but few really believe it," says the Center X project.

They recruited young men and women who really wanted to work in the most challenging schools, so they had a passion for it from the very beginning Barry Sheerman describes his visit to Center X

And it seeks to overcome the downward spiral in which educational failure "perpetuates the cycle of discrimination, poverty, and hopelessness".

The centre's work has been praised by the House of Commons Education Select Committee, which says it is an example of how teachers can be trained for inner-city schools, which often find it difficult to retain staff.

After a visit to the project, the committee's chairman, Barry Sheerman, described how Center X operated.

"They recruited young men and women who really wanted to work in the most challenging schools, so they had a passion for it from the very beginning.

"They were trained specifically to deal with that kind of environment and challenge - and they were kept together over the years, with three or four of them in each school.

"They were kept in touch across the city, with regular meetings, so they could come back to learn from each other and keep their morale high.

"All the results were very encouraging, much higher retention, much more success, and better quality teaching in the classroom."

Poverty

And even though some of these teachers received higher salaries, Mr Sheerman said that this was not necessarily the case - and that money was not the "prime motivation".

The project is aimed at providing staff who will be ready for schools where "demographic shifts" have brought "staggering increases in the numbers of children in poverty".

These are "children deprived of basic necessities, as well as the school-related advantages and experiences that children from middle-class homes routinely acquire".

Center X says that more than two-thirds of the state's school population will soon be from non-white ethnic minorities - and that the Latino-Chicano (Hispanic) population alone will account for almost half of school-age children.

And it says teachers need to be trained for classrooms with children who do not speak English and who have faced different forms of deprivation.

"Many face multiple barriers to their educational development - barriers that arise from their growing up in the physically, medically, and emotionally hazardous conditions that increasingly prevail in our inner cities."