Mrs Ward, a former primary school teacher from Doncaster, said that six in ten children who were classed as poor lived in families where someone worked.

BBC: Pupils suffer 'shocking' poverty

Both Aubrey and Tom Ward missed this lesson in school.

FORBES: Tom Ward Of SandRidge Energy: Another CEO That's Got To Go

Adam Ward graduated from both Salem High School and Virginia Tech.

CNN: Honoring the journalists killed on live TV

Martin Ward, deputy general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said school and college leaders knew that exams in all subjects were not equal.

BBC: RELATED BBC SITES

Before the meeting, Obama toured the Martin Luther King charter school -- the first charter school to reopen in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, the hardest-hit portion of the city.

CNN: On New Orleans visit, Obama tells critics, 'I'm just getting started'

Third Rail Projects recently moved its wildly imaginative multimedia theatre-dance piece from a single-level hospital to a creaky three-story school building, now dressed to be a mental ward in Wonderland.

NEWYORKER: Then She Fell

"We knew when we started at a failing school, we were trying to change lives, " said Ms Ward.

BBC: NEWS | UK | Education | Hands up for Saturday school

Robichaux, now 45 and a longtime Louisiana educator, had become the principal of KIPP Phillips Preparatory, a new public charter school that had opened for summer school in July 2005 in New Orleans' poverty-stricken Seventh Ward.

FORBES: Katrina's Surprise

Family members said Thursday that the violence in Mr. Ward's neighborhood affected him from an early age, when he had to walk six blocks to his elementary school.

WSJ: Chicago Shooting Highlights a Common Path