In this issue

• Our thoughts on the last month's news and announcements including National Foundation for Educational Research's (NFER) report on skills, changes to pupil premium and a flurry of youth policies
• Some things we enjoyed reading from Stephen Bush on NEETs, more from NFER and our top reads of 2025
• Some things to look forward to over the next month like the IncludED conference and a long-awaited Schools White Paper (we think)
• If you get to the end, we're talking about Covid school closures

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 – school engagement, educational attainment, and sustained employment.

• As an organisation who have been banging the drum on young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) for almost a decade – from the inception of our Youth Jobs Gap project in 2017 to present day - we're pleased to see the enormous progress that's been made on the issue. Now firmly established as not only a moral but economic challenge too, attention is turning towards solutions which will genuinely reduce the almost one million young people who are NEET. We were therefore really pleased to see the Chancellor's recent commitment to an £820 million Jobs Guarantee for NEET young people aged between 18-21 in her autumn Budget. We've also been fortunate as co-chairs of the Youth Employment Group (alongside the Institute for Employment Studies, Learning and Work Institute, King's Trust, Youth Employment UK and Youth Futures Foundation) to have helped shape it behind the scenes. There's lots in it to like including an expansion of the evidenced sector-based work academy programme and Youth Hubs (which we've worked on before) complementing the Jobs Guarantee – confirmed at 55,000 placements. It's particularly encouraging to see much of this offer covering the full 16-24 age range and being open to young people not claiming Universal Credit. We're also pleased that 20,000 of the places created will be for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, while the funding will cover both employment and wraparound support costs, which we know to be essential to their success. (Ayesha Baloch, Senior Policy Advisor)
• As predicted in last month's Insights, we now have much more clarity on the future of the two-child limit. For anyone who's been living under a rock, it was scrapped in the Budget. The announcement lit up LinkedIn like I've never seen before, as the people and organisations that have campaigned long and hard for this change finally had "a moment" - and, in my view, a very well-deserved one. After all, it's not every day that 450,000 children are lifted out of poverty. The announcement was quickly followed by publication of the long-awaited child poverty strategy, Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty. It sets out a target to lift 550,000 children out of relative low income by the end of this Parliament, through a mix of boosting family incomes, reducing the cost of essentials, and investing in support delivered locally. The message is clear: growing up in poverty is devastating for children, and this new commitment is very welcome. I'm also pleased to see a "robust" approach to monitoring and evaluation promised. That said, I'd have liked to see more detail on implementation and accountability. (Carlie Goldsmith, Senior Policy Advisor)
• This month, NFER released the final report of their five-year-long behemoth project The Skills Imperative. Based on the premise that shifts in the labour market – particularly the increasing use of technology in the workplace – will impact the jobs of the future, the study identifies six "essential employment skills" (EES) which will be most needed by employers: communication; collaboration; information literacy; organising, planning and prioritising; problem solving and decision making and creative thinking. These are "transferable skills that accompany more occupationally-specific technical skills and qualifications". Impetus works with some brilliant partners who know firsthand the importance of these "soft skills" in preparing young people for work and life. However, the very nature of these skills means they can be difficult to measure. I was therefore delighted to see the report recommending the use of a common framework which can be used to measure EES, such as Skills Builder Partnership's Universal Framework. Long-time readers will know that we are big fans of Skills Builder's work here at Impetus, so it's great to see their work highlighted in such an important piece of research. Crucially, NFER also recommends increasing the share of education funding "that is targeted towards disadvantaged pupils", which we all know is a key piece of the puzzle if we are to secure better outcomes for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. (Ayesha Baloch, Senior Policy Advisor)
• Young people having access to a trusted adult is one of the golden threads of our work here at Impetus so we were delighted then to see government invest £15 million into training adults to ensure 500,000 young people have access to a trusted adult outside the family home in the new youth strategy published this month. Well done to our portfolio partner Football Beyond Borders and others involved in the Lost Boys Taskforce who campaigned for a Trusted Adult Guarantee. I'm not exaggerating when I say that youth organisations and the paid staff and volunteers in them changed my life and I've watched in horror as these services have been gutted over the past decade and a half - between 2010/11 to 2022/23, spending on youth facilities fell by 73%. Given this context, it's no surprise to me that young people want safe spaces to go where they belong. I hope this marks a genuine turning of the tide. (Carlie Goldsmith, Senior Policy Advisor)
• Well done SchoolsWeek for spotting that the Government is going to use family income as the basis for allocating pupil premium, rather than the expanded free school meals eligibility. This means as a system we will continue to have a relatively stable measure of disadvantage in schools, and target resources at those pupils with the poorest outcomes. We warned about the risks of not doing this way back in 2018 and have subsequently called for free school meals and pupil premium to be decoupled. I am counting this as a niche and nerdy win! (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• This didn't quite meet the bar for last month's edition but on the basis that I think it's critical for us to think about the education of all children, including those in secure settings, I'm proceeding on the basis that it's better late than never. I found November's news that none of England's Young Offenders Institutions met the fifteen hours a week education entitlement for young people in their care as 'shameful' as the Justice Committee. This situation fundamentally damages the chances young people have to live lives free from offending post release and should trouble all of us deeply. (Carlie Goldsmith, Senior Policy Advisor)

Top reads

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

• December lends itself to 'best read' type lists and if you follow me on LinkedIn, you may remember I set out to read one actual real live book a month in 2025. Well, I did it – and quite a bit more. Here are my top three education/policy reads of the year. At three…. Jeffrey Boakye's I Heard What You Said: a black teacher, a white system. At two…Peter Mandler's A Crisis of Meritocracy: Britain's transition to mass education since the Second World War. At number one….Sam Freedman's Failed State: Why nothing works and how we fix it. All great stocking fillers for the education policy nerd in your life. (Carlie Goldsmith, Senior Policy Advisor)
• It's somewhat unusual being a maths grad and working in policy so I am always keen to shout out interesting STEM research. Mark from our portfolio partner Ada, the National College for Digital Skills flagged this NFER research showing the benefits of tech qualifications on earnings – given how fast-moving the sector is I'm really encouraged to see long-term benefits. And specialist maths schools seem to be small but mighty, with the University of Nottingham showing they boost grades and the maths pipeline, especially for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• The safeguarding review into Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy in Hackney was a challenging read. Good grades are important but, in my view, cannot be used to justify a behaviour model the report concludes created a "culture that prioritises compliance and control above all else" that disproportionately affected some pupils – particularly Black boys and pupils with SEND. I hope the report is read with care by everyone, whatever your personal view on how schools deliver best for children. (Carlie Goldsmith, Senior Policy Advisor)
• Last week, in his newsletter, the Financial Times’ Stephen Bush wrote that he believes the increasing minimum wage - particularly the Labour Government’s changes - is driving the “surge in NEET rates”, an argument by which I’m unconvinced. I have lots of thoughts on this but let’s start with the basics: if we are looking at the grand scheme of the last 25 years, NEET rates are once again roughly at the level they were at in 2002 (around 15%), while the minimum wage has increased steadily since 2002. If we are thinking specifically about the Labour Government's recent increases, there is often a lag between shocks and seeing the effects in the data (e.g. NEET rates after the 2007 recession continued to rise until 2014) so it will be some time until we can safely attribute any changes to this minimum wage increase. FWIW, I do understand Bush’s point - we are undoubtedly seeing a different labour market to the one a few years ago, not least due to high inflation, economic uncertainty, increased taxes on business such as NICs and yes, a higher minimum wage. We know that younger workers are last in and first out. But we - and Bush no doubt - also know that long-term trends like this are underpinned by a range of interconnected factors, requiring complex and long-term solutions. It would be wrong-headed to claim that by reversing increases in the minimum wage (which to be clear, he does not) we could reverse the chronically high numbers of NEET young people. As much as we’d all love a quick-fix policy solution, that this has been an issue for over two decades suggests unfortunately, it is not an option we have. (Ayesha Baloch, Senior Policy Advisor)
• While Impetus measures socioeconomic disadvantage based on individual characteristics rather than geographic ones, the official indices of multiple deprivation have always been the go-to tool for thinking about which areas face the biggest challenges. This cool blog maps the data onto school intakes in a novel way, highlighting schools with particularly disadvantaged communities. While it's a very similar pattern to free school meals, there are some anomalies that are worth thinking about – potential hotspots for unclaimed free school meals? (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)

Look ahead

Saturday 10 January is The Difference's school inclusion IncludED conference

Friday 30 January is the final day to submit evidence to the Milburn Review into Young People and Work

And hopefully in January we will also see the long-awaited Schools White Paper from the DfE...

And finally... Covid school closures

We're clearly going to be arguing about Covid and pandemics forever, and I was struck by this research from Australia which found basically no difference in attainment outcomes for young people whether their school was shut for 10 days or 110. The authors speculate that in a low Covid environment (Australia pursued a much harsher strategy than England - zero Covid) parents and pupils may have been more able to learn remotely, reducing the impact of school closures. Weirdly they didn't see much difference for disadvantaged pupils. I sort of assume there's a lot of country difference going on… Is poverty less bad down under? More widespread quality internet? If you're Australian and you have thoughts, please let me know. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)