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 share 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. 

Sign up to get Impetus Insights direct to your inbox every month here. 

The salience of the issues that we care about at Impetus – school engagement, attainment and youth employment – is not going away…

• The crisis of high levels of school absence is fast becoming an entrenched problem, an issue which the Financial Times looked at in a global context last week, and we were pleased to see our recent research cited as part of this. One of the things that we highlighted in our research was the impact of social media on attendance, and we are glad that the government is taking this seriously. We are currently working on the third in the series of our reports in this area, this time looking at what teachers think - mark your diaries for September.
• Despite the scrapping of the National Tutoring Programme over a year ago, tutoring remains the best evidenced form of catch up intervention in education, particularly for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, so we were interested to see the government inviting EdTech and AI labs to develop safe AI tutoring tools for this group. We think that there is a role for AI to play in tutoring but would be wary about replacing face-to-face tutors altogether, especially given what we know about the importance of trusted adult relationships in supporting the emotional, social and academic development of young people.
• The worryingly high numbers of young people who are neither earning nor learning is also, rightly, never far from the front pages, with Alan Milburn promising no 'no go areas' in his review that will recommend solutions. We are pleased to be working with his team to share insights from our groundbreaking Youth Jobs Gap research, which identified how young people with multiple layers of disadvantage remain furthest from the labour market.

More on this below, but something that we keep coming back to at Impetus is how all these issued are linked; young people who aren't in school are obviously less likely to pass the crucial exams needed for entry into employment, and it's refreshing to see these links being made more explicitly by decision makers.

Enjoy reading,

Susannah

In this issue

With new attendance statistics out, Impetus calculates the human cost of slow progress in tackling the crisis. The government’s call for EdTech firms to develop AI tutoring tools has sparked a debate around the role of tech in the classroom, while at the same time the social media consultation and the ban on phones in schools seeks to address the educational and mental health impacts of tech on school-aged children. And Skills Builder’s essential skills framework gets the thumbs up in an independent study and points to the areas – outside of qualifications – that may be holding young people back in the labour market.

News and views

Our focus here at Impetus is on the outcomes that we know work to improve the life chances of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds – school engagement, educational attainment, and sustained employment.

• Our focus here at Impetus is on the outcomes that we know work to improve the life chances of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds – school engagement, educational attainment, and sustained employment.
• New DfE attendance statistics published this month show that while rates of overall absence are down, progress for pupils missing ten per cent of school is glacially slow and numbers of young people missing more than half of all lessons increased. At the current rate of improvement, it will take another five years for persistent absence to return to pre-pandemic levels - and nearly twice as long for pupils eligible for FSM, leaving close to 650,000 young people at risk of missing their GCSEs. As regular readers know, we’ve been banging the attendance drum since 2023, publishing research on parents’and young people’s views on what - after much debate - we’ve called a crisis. Over that time, one thing has become clear: attendance is the canary in the coalmine, with consequences that cast a long shadow over young people’s lives through missed qualifications and lost opportunities. The media now seems to be catching up. In the past month alone, The Observer draws a direct line between absence from the classroom and absence from the workforce, while the FT – in an article featuring our research - shows that the problem is not unique to Britain. With nearly a million young people not earning or learning, school absence is like a slow bleed – damaging, cumulative, easy to ignore – but ultimately fatal to government efforts to meet the attainment and attendance targets set out in the Schools White Paper, and to its efforts to stem the NEET surge. We need better evidence on what works, and government to create the conditions needed for schools to make radical changes, so that young people make the positive decision to go to school. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)
• It's no secret that careers guidance is chronically under-resourced, and with high numbers of NEET young people such a hot topic, the Nuffield Foundation and Ada Lovelace Institute’s in-depth review of AI in UK career guidance is timely. As the report outlines, most young people are receiving just one or two hour-long sessions with a qualified advisor across their entire education. A recent piece in the Hechinger Report outlined the same problem across the pond, where the national ratio of students to “college counsellors” stands at 372:1. In the US, some schools are beginning to pilot AI platforms explicitly designed for careers guidance, programmed with expert answers and real-time labour market data. While I love the idea of this, as the Nuffield and Ada Lovelace report authors rightly point out, there are risks, “including increased inequalities in access to guidance and employment." We know young people from disadvantaged backgrounds face higher barriers to accessing the labour market. If AI is simultaneously making it easier to flood employers with applications and making it harder for employers to distinguish between candidates, the young people who will lose out are, as ever, the ones who are already furthest behind. I was pleased to see this raised in the research, which recommends ensuring career practitioners are explicitly advised to target human guidance at students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The evidence base for what works remains thin, and further research is underway. (Ayesha Baloch, Head of Youth Employment Policy)
• When we published our attendance report last year and called on government to help schools help parents set expectations for young people’s social media use, following our finding that online presenteeism was driving absenteeism in school, we couldn’t have predicted how big this issue would become, and how quickly. Following another Commons defeat on an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which would have introduced a ban on social media for under-16s after it passed in the Lords, the government has now launched a national consultation on this and wider questions about the role of technology in childhood. We’ve said before that in the absence of evidence of the impact of a ban, we don’t have a settled view on what should happen next. But I worry that whatever we do on tech will fail if we don’t address the other side of the coin. In his influential book The Anxious Generation , the inspiration for the Australian ban, Jonathan Haidt argues it is the replacement of a play-based childhood with a phone-based childhood that triggered the sudden and dramatic rise in psychological distress amongst children, particularly girls. My parents didn’t know where I was for large parts of the day, content in the knowledge that I would appear when hungry. For better or worse, modern parenting attitudes have changed and it’s foolish to think that taking social media away will lead to automatic restoration of the unsupervised outside play that was totally normal in my childhood, and essential for good development. It will require investment and for us to challenge the supremacy of the car. Perhaps it isn’t the kids that need to change after all. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)
• Following news back in January that the DfE were to pilot AI tutoring tools in an effort to offer the intervention to more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, the government has now put a call out for EdTech companies and AI labs to develop “safe, personalised” AI tutors for Y9 and 10 pupils across English, maths, science and modern foreign languages. In a climate of increased concern about the perceived damage of tech on young people, using more in schools – even if it is aimed at increased fairness and to boost attainment – might seem counterintuitive. But the AI genie is firmly out of the bottle, so the onus is on us to ensure that whatever comes next is genuinely tailored to meet the needs of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who, alongside any bots, need supportive relationships with trained adults they trust. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)
• Against the backdrop of a rapidly changing landscape as AI becomes increasingly embedded in the labour market, and the economy continues to stagnate, there is an ever-growing interest in “soft” skills. I was therefore thrilled to see a new study on Skills Builder Partnership’s Universal Framework, and whether it’s a rigorous and valid method of measuring their eight essential skills. The research uses two nationally representative samples of UK working adults to establish that the Universal Framework 2.0 is both a reliable and valid instrument, and that higher scores predict a meaningful wage premium of around £3,700–£6,100 per year, even after controlling for educational attainment. That last point is worth focusing on, and reinforces what many of us working in this space have long suspected — that “the other stuff” which happens beyond the classroom matters enormously for outcomes. The study also finds a significant link between essential skills scores and AI adoption at work, with higher scorers using AI more frequently and reporting lower anxiety about it. In a labour market being rapidly reshaped by technology, that feels like an important finding. The perennial challenge in this space has been the absence of a shared, granular definition that works across both education and employment — if Skills Builder’s framework can fill that gap, it could be genuinely game-changing for those of us trying to make the case for essential skills investment for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. (Ayesha Baloch, Head of Youth Employment Policy)

Top reads

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

• Plenty of people are rightly fretting about the impact of AI on youth employment. In this LSE analysis, Grace Lordan argues that AI is part of the problem—but not the sole culprit. Rather than replacing jobs outright, AI is accelerating the automation of routine, entry‑level tasks that traditionally provided young people with a foothold in the labour market. Entry‑level vacancies have fallen by around a third since late 2022, closely tracking the uptake of generative AI by employers. At the same time, the cost of hiring young workers has increased significantly due to large rises in the youth minimum wage and other employment costs, making automation a more attractive option for firms. A third, less visible factor is the growing number of young people who are economically inactive due to long‑term sickness, particularly mental health conditions, a trend that has intensified since the pandemic. Lordan warns that the combined effect risks dismantling the “bottom rungs” of the career ladder altogether. She calls for policy responses that focus on redesigning entry‑level jobs, integrating AI as a tool for learning rather than replacement, and tackling youth mental health alongside employability to avoid long‑term damage to social mobility. (Claire Leigh, Director of Public Affairs)
• The final report of Nuffield Foundation funded research on the outcomes of initially high-achieving children from disadvantaged backgrounds is now live – and is a tough read, especially so for those of us from poor or low income families, who I think have a stronger sense of the children behind the numbers. Whilst the story is a familiar one – bright but poor kids are more likely to disengage from school and less likely to get good outcomes across the whole education journey – some of the numbers are staggering. For example, it is reported that only 9% - yep that’s right, 9% - of disadvantaged pupils who were high achievers in maths at age 11 go on to earn at least a B at A-Level. And 2% - yep, that’s right, 2% - complete a maths-focused degree with a 2:1 or above. The human cost is profound of course, but for anyone wondering why our economy is such a skip fire do consider the gargantuan waste of potential and talent this represents. For those short on time, read the blog. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)
• In February, the Institute for the Future of Work and EY Foundation published a thought-provoking policy brief on the role of motivation in education, employment and training (EET) outcomes. The core argument is that intrinsic motivation, “the drive to engage in an activity because it is inherently enjoyable or satisfying”, is the foundation for essential skills which are increasingly needed for the labour market. The authors rightly preface their findings with a reminder about “external contextual, structural, and institutional factors”, but found that though most young people demonstrate intrinsic motivation, they “may struggle to convert these motivations towards school or work ‘functionings’”. Accompanying the report was an evaluation of a pilot to support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds foster motivation, for which participants reporting an average of 35% improvements across motivation-related measures than the comparison group. What resonated most for me was the understanding that a focus on motivation cannot replace existing interventions, but it may make them more likely to land. Young people who don't yet have a reason to engage, won’t, and why should they, considering the circumstances? However, if we take a multi-pronged approach: ensuring there are genuinely good jobs available for young people, that there are pathways into them, and that young people are prepared for them - be it via skills bootcamps or by fostering motivation - we might just be on to something! As a final thought: while it’s important to eschew deficit models, I do think an understanding of what is driving the chronically high rates of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) is incomplete without trying to understand these more nebulous factors. (Ayesha Baloch, Head of Youth Employment Policy)
• A study providing the first evidence that the effects of changes in benefits policy can be shown to influence the long-term exposure of children to poverty was published by the University of Oxford this month. Its main finding - that reductions in the share of children living in long-term poverty, defined as spending at least half of childhood before age 11 in poverty – were reversed from 2013 onwards – shows just how sensitive poverty is to policy change. The paper also underlines the importance of social transfers, particularly where gains from employment are limited by low pay, insecurity, and a lack of routes to progression. These are important lessons for policy and decision makers now grappling with how to implement the governments child poverty strategy. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)

Look ahead

• 24 April: Deadline to submit to the APPG for Poverty and Inequality’s Call for Evidence on how poverty and structural inequalities shape young people’s likelihood of becoming NEET
• 7 May: Council elections will take place across the country and in some Mayoral Combined Authorities, alongside elections to the Scottish Parliament and Senedd
• 13 May: King’s Speech
• 18 May: Schools White Paper SEND consultation deadline
• 28 May: Next NEET data release, which may see NEET numbers climb above one million for the first time

And finally...

...my former colleague at Save the Children, the inimitable Vic Langer, has written about her 10 key learnings on what makes for an effective public policy campaign, based on her 30 years of experience. Those of us in the policy influencing business are prone to making the same mistakes again and again, and in doing so we undermine our impact. In her post, Vic reflects on the importance of “mapping the power, not the process” in understanding how to shift decisions within large bureaucracies. Where are the decisions actually made? She emphasises the importance of understanding your specific organisation’s theory of change and ‘brand’ when deciding what your role is vis a vis other organisations. Often by 'staying in your lane’, and allowing other organisations to play to their strengths, we create a whole-sector impact that is greater than the sum of its parts. Vic reminds us to locate tactics within a long-term strategy for change, and that “a tactic in search of a strategy is just noise”. Finally, I love her insight that “storytelling isn’t a soft skill”. When it comes to influence, being able to communicate compellingly, authentically, and to connect to your audience’s emotions beats fact-heavy browbeating every time. (Claire Leigh, Director of Public Affairs)