Customers come mainly from the more socially deprived homes within the area.

Schools would get at least £5,000 for every child they teach and more for children form the most deprived homes.

However, children from unhappy, disrupted or deprived homes were most likely to be damaged by the experience.

The building was used initially as a residential school for children recovering from illness or living in deprived home conditions.

One in five children was likely to have behavioural problems due to a deprived home life and other factors, Professor Stone said.

'These boys came from broken, deprived homes.

But put it in a deprived home with no books around, no encouragement to learn and no real parental love or care, and it can't compensate.

All sorts of reasons were advanced, including language barriers, teachers' racism, biased curricula, deprived homes, inadequate material conditions and, most pejorative of all, lack of intellectual equipment.

So we have not only maintained free early years education for all three and four year olds... We are extending it to two year olds from the most deprived homes too.

This means that our society denies 84 percent of kids 3, 4 and 5 years old from educationally deprived homes of the basic education skills, nurturing, nutrition and health care that are almost certainly indispensable preconditions to educational success in their elementary and secondary schools, without which these kids are almost doomed to educational failure.

The suit, which was filed in Florida State Court in Clearwater, charges that GTE and its Florida subsidiaries fraudulently misrepresented the capability of the switching equipment and that GTE engaged in a cover-up that deprived Home Shopping of information crucial to its growth.

Put this together with adoption studies showing that an early move from a deprived home to an advantaged one can boost a child's I.Q. by 20 points, and the conviction expressed in "The Bell Curve" that public policy is impotent to redress I.Q. inequalities begins to betray a lack of imagination, if not will.