CHILDREN at a North-East school are among the first in the country to benefit from a technique to help under-achievers.

The move follows the discovery by researchers at Durham University that poor memory rather than low intelligence may be to blame for under achievement at school.

Academics surveyed more than 3,000 children for the study and have now developed the world's first classroom tool to measure pupils' memory capacity.

The team discovered that one in ten children suffer from poor working memory, which is thought to be genetically inherited, seriously affecting their learning. Working memory is the ability to hold information in your head and manipulate it mentally - for example in adding up two numbers spoken by someone without being able to use a pen and paper or a calculator.

Children use it for a variety of tasks, such as following teachers' instructions or remembering sentences they have been asked to write down.

A checklist and computer programme has been developed that allows teachers to assess children's memory capacity from as early as four years old.

Lakes Primary School, in Redcar, east Cleveland, is one of 35 schools across the UK piloting the programme.

Headteacher Chris Evans said: "We are already beginning to see children in a different light knowing more about the difficulties faced by those with impaired working memory.

"We realise that they are not daydreamers, inattentive or underachieving, but children who simply need a different approach."

Lead researcher Dr Tracy Alloway said: "Working memory is a bit like a mental jotting pad, and how good this is in someone will either ease their path to learning or seriously prevent them from learning.

"We believe the only way children with poor working memory can go on to achieve academic success is by teaching them how to learn despite their smaller capacity to store information mentally.

Early identification of these children will be a major step towards addressing underachievement."

Recommendations for teachers include repetition of instructions, talking in simple short sentences and breaking down tasks into smaller chunks of information.