Welcome to Impetus Insights... a place where we discuss ideas, articles and interesting reading about education and employment policy - and what we think it means for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. We'll be sharing this every month alongside news and updates about our own policy work. We'd love to hear what you think of this edition, and what you'd like to see in future newsletters.

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The clocks have gone forward, the local election campaign is in full swing, and there's snooker on TV. April is most definitely here.

A highlight of the month was seeing this interesting BBC news article on the front page, clicking it, and discovering it was all about our charity partner Babbasa! They do super cool stuff in Bristol supporting young people into work, and it's always great to stumble across coverage of our charity partners' work.

Jobs is an appropriate theme for this intro, with Robert Halfon leaving role as Minister for Skills, ahead of a planned retirement at the next election. Luke Hall takes up the reins. Perhaps Rob is interested in becoming the new UK Director for the Centre for Evidence and Implementation? If you're an evidence and research nerd, I hope you'll apply too.

Enjoy reading,

Ben

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In this issue

• Our thoughts on the last month's news and announcements including the Impetus Manifesto, Sure Start, and post-16 pathways.
• Some things we enjoyed reading on essential skills, primary exclusions, and higher education funding
• Some things to look forward to over the next month including a statistics conference, a new book on mental illness, and a bank holiday
• If you get to the end, there's a cool blog that says we should try to find the people who are willing to do the right thing even when it's inconvenient.

News and views

Our focus here, as at Impetus, is on the outcomes that we know work to improve the life chances of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds – educational attainment, access to higher education and sustainable employment.

• No-one knows when the election will be, so the Impetus Manifesto is out now with five ideas from across our work in recent years to spruce up any manifesto. From tutoring to maintenance support for students to the young person's guarantee, there's an evidence-based suggestion covering almost all of the big education, training and jobs issues faced by young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Sharing encouraged, pinching ideas for your own manifesto also welcome with attribution…
• The monthly labour market stats get less attention than they should, but the IES diligently produce a monthly briefing for the refined palate. Useful point this month that "if (youth unemployment) issues were being driven by the economy, we would expect to be seeing unemployment rise, redundancies up, vacancies falling and earnings growth weak." The data mostly shows the opposite. Conclusion – right now the lack of available labour is holding back the economy, rather than economic weakness hitting the labour market.
• Union leader and former English teacher Geoff Barton will lead an independent oracy commission to help flesh out what a national entitlement to oracy could look like. Hosted by our charity partner Voice 21, it will be interesting to see what the commission concludes and to what extent its work influences the shape of Labour's commitment to oracy. More in SchoolsWeek.
• Everyone got really excited by the IFS report that found a positive impact of Sure Start on later attainment and almost everyone wanted to bring back Sure Start centres – indeed, Paul Johnson's balanced Times op-ed is headlined "Sure Start achieved its aims, then we threw it away". Sadly, the truth is somewhat less glossy than the narrative. Two important points, the "Sure Start centres" that everyone gets obsessed with aren't the thing that worked, it was an earlier and more targeted offering that showed impact. Yes, I am once again criticising universalism *cough free school meals cough*. Secondly, the cost benefit analysis is strong enough (!) that it also has to point to previous research on health benefits and future work on the benefit of reduced offending. From my maths the cost-benefit ratio is about 1.4 – so worthwhile, but not exactly a silver bullet, particularly for education. Yes, I am once again suggesting that if the health benefits are the big prize, maybe the health department could fund it *cough free school meals cough*.
• This Education Datalab/University of Westminster report on post-16 pathways is almost the opposite of the Sure Start report as it's about things that we do that do not work. My main takeaway - "post-16 pathways taken by the lowest attaining pupils in the 2011 KS4 cohort do not improve employment outcomes". My view is this will in part reflect the importance of English and maths, so we need to double down on supporting students to succeed if they have to resit (contra Polly Tonybee's "let's give up" attitude).

Top reads

Here's our roundup of some of the most useful and thought-provoking reads across a range of interesting areas...

• The annual Skills Builder Essential Skills Tracker is always essential reading and the Edge Foundation's twitter thread is a great place to start. Teachers think Essential Skills matter, but they aren't prioritised enough in schools. Like oracy work specifically, there's a set of things here that are widely agreed to be important and undervalued in the system due their (relative lack of) curriculum and assessment status. It will be interesting to see how Labour's promised review of these things treats them. Full report here.
• Like buses, two things came along this month on exclusions in primary schools. EPI released a blog outlining attainment outcomes for suspended pupils – the primary version of the suspension grades gap from the research Impetus funded. It's the same basic picture as in secondary with pupils more likely than not to be off track at 11. Chance UK asked Education Datalab to do something similar, but looking at secondary outcome finding 90 per cent of pupils excluded in primary school don't go on to pass English and maths GCSEs – covered here in TES or the original datalab blog is here.
• HEPI have an interesting set of essays out exploring options for the future funding of higher education. Worthwhile for the policy content but I particularly enjoyed the polling, with around 40% of potential applicants saying they wouldn't apply to university if fees went up by inflation. It is true that people said this, but not likely that this is meaningful – as HEPI point out, in 2010 polling suggested two thirds of students would be put off university by fees of £7,000 and yet we have not seen that kind of drop off. Similarly, 77% of applicants in the current system said they would not apply under the current system. Yes, you did read that sentence correctly. Add it to the list of reasons to be a bit sceptical about polling and self-reported measures.
• Polling caveats noted, the Youth Futures Foundation's survey on young people from ethnic minority backgrounds facing prejudice and discrimination as they enter the workforce throws up some worrying results. I think the most shocking things for me were 66% of young people saying they have overheard a coworker or supervisor say racist slurs or make racist jokes, and 20% saying they have been referred to in a derogatory manner by colleagues. Further research needed to explore and understand these issues.
• One of the most interesting roundtables I have been to post-pandemic was to feed into what became Cambridge University Press' "Mapping the way to educational equity" report. The big thing I realised was how much I undervalue the importance of the strength of relationships, because it's so hard to measure, a theme which author Loic Menzies expands into "continuity of care". It's a bit more abstract than most "policy" reports but it deserves to find an audience.
• Manifesto watch. We'll try and share all the other relevant ones we see. This month it's all umbrella bodies… The Sixth Form Colleges Association always punch above their weight so expect some of their manifesto to crop up again and again… Check out the National Youth Agency manifesto for all things Youth Work… And Partnership for Young London, which includes our partners Football Beyond Borders, have a manifesto for the (London) Mayoral election.

Look ahead

Tuesday 30 April, Policy Exchange are hosting a book launch for the provocatively titled "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness"

Monday 6 May is a bank holiday

Monday 13 May is a JRF webinar "Shifting Power: exploring the value of pooled funds in the UK funding landscape"

Tuesday 14 May is labour market stats day, and also an IFS (academic) conference on "Higher Education Access and Funding: challenges and policy options"

Thursday 16 May is an interesting NPC event "What's next for Conservative thinking on civil society?"

Thursday 23 May sees the publication of the NEET stats, and also it's the "Labour Force and Annual Population Surveys User Conference 2024" for stats nerds

Early warning for Tuesday 25 June, I am chairing an event for the FEA on belonging in schools – I felt like part of the responsibility of the chair is to drum up interest! More details next month

And finally...

This month in what is slowly becoming esoteric substack corner I present Experimental History. This one's about incentives, motivation and how to make good stuff happen. Several quotable bits, but "find the people who are willing to do the right thing even when it's inconvenient" really spoke to me – from charity leaders to politicians, the chances are if you're trying to prioritise impact it's because of intrinsic motivation, rather than incentives. I've often thought we need to change incentives to encourage more people to prioritise impact, but "when you rejigger incentives in the hopes of changing behavior, you attract the people who are most motivated by the incentives themselves, and these are the people you want to attract the least". Thought provoking stuff.