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 long-awaited Schools White Paper landed this week, and we were delighted to see contained in it concrete commitments to halve the attainment gap for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Back in 2012, I set up Action Tutoring precisely because I was so appalled at the scale of the attainment gap in the UK: these young people are currently 30 percentage-points less likely to get the GCSE qualifications that are crucial for progression into employment. It's a great moment to see the government recognising the need for concerted action to tackle this huge challenge that blights the life chances of so many young people.

On that note we are really pleased to be welcoming a new organisation to our portfolio this week. Get Further works with the young people at the sharpest end of this attainment gap, by providing in-person, small-group tutoring to students who left school without a standard pass in GCSE English and maths. We are looking forward to working with them to improve their impact and make the case for evidence-based solutions, like tutoring, to help close this stubborn gap.

There is much more on our response to the White Paper in the rest of the newsletter below, including the significant wins for our Who is Losing Learning coalition on inclusion, but I also want to highlight how pleased I was to see the government make the case that “high standards and inclusion are two sides of the same coin" - our work across school engagement, attainment through to employment speaks to how much these things are linked across a young person's life.

Enjoy reading,

Susannah

In this issue

• The Schools White Paper is finally out! Government adopted the Who is Losing Learning Coalition’s definition of whole school inclusion and committed to halving the attainment gap.
• Some things we enjoyed reading from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Washington Post, the British Education Research Journal and NFER.
• Our thoughts on youth employment, including the latest labour market statistics, whether a university degree is still worth it and how skills fit into the picture.
• If you get to the end, Claire shares a few thoughts on the Epstein scandal, and what it means for a political engagement and trust.

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.

• The publication of the long-awaited Schools White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, is the only story in education town right now. At the time of writing, it is only four and a half post-publication hours old, and we’ll be offering more detailed analysis in the coming days but there are many things to welcome. After many years of stagnation, the government has committed to halving the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their better-off peers. It feels particularly sweet to see the words “high standards and inclusion are two sides of the same coin” when we’ve made the case repeatedly that inclusion is a necessary condition for attainment for young people, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. There is a veritable trove of proposals that if delivered will be a game changer:
  • Government adopted the Who is Losing Learning Coalition ’s definition of whole school inclusion – a huge moment for coalition members Impetus, The Difference, IPPR and Mission 44, and our 60+ Inclusion for All partners (yay!).
  • It committed to a universal and targeted offer – backed by investment – so the routine and predictable needs of all children are met at the earliest opportunity in every school.
  • It made inclusion and SEND training a requirement for all staff, boosting expertise.

It’s important to recognise that there are people feeling anxious about what this means for children, families and schools. There are no guarantees, of course, but we support the direction set and look forward to working with the Government on next steps. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)

• Student debt is dominating the news cycle at the moment, competing for space on the front pages with fretful articles on the youth employment crisis . The number of unemployed young people reached the highest rate for a decade in recent labour market stats (if excluding the pandemic years), with AI and the related disappearance of graduate jobs being blamed among other things. John Burn-Murdoch takes on the thorny question of whether a university degree “is still worth it” in the FT this week . When I was a wee policy advisor in the Cabinet Office looking at this issue some 18 years ago, it was treated as a matter of gospel that increasing the number of degrees in the labour market should not degrade the value of having a degree. The market simply responds by growing the number of jobs requiring degrees, the nation upskills and the economy grows. Voila! And according to John B-M, that theory has held in most other countries around the world. Just not the UK. Apparently, the reason is our weak productivity growth vis-à-vis other countries, which was shot to pieces and has never really recovered since the Financial Crisis. So the Government has a simple task when it comes to restoring the graduate earnings premium; restore growth! Someone should really tell Rachel Reeves before the Spring Statement. In the meantime, TikTok influencers like Joshua King will continue to acquire young followers with his message of skipping university altogether in favour of getting a trade. And AI isn’t coming for your plumbing job anytime soon. (For what it’s worth, we at Impetus still think the evidence backs up the value of a degree, considerably decreasing your chance of becoming NEET, and the graduate wage premium - while shrinking - is still significant.) (Claire Leigh, Director of Public Affairs)
• Tutoring has been much in the zeitgeist this month. High-quality, structured programmes can accelerate progress by up to five months, making tutoring one of the most effective tools we have to raise attainment. But access is unequal. A Sutton Trust report published last week finds young people in middle class families are 3.5 times more likely to receive private tutoring than their working-class peers. The good news is that school-based tutoring has levelled the playing field, with gaps narrowing dramatically when it’s offered. With various newspaper headlines reporting a spike in demand following the introduction of VAT on private schools, and with the lack of funding for school-based tutoring, gaps could widen. The Department of Education has pointed to AI as a potential solution, announcing trials of AI tutoring with the ambition to reach 450,000 students from disadvantaged backgrounds. When used in conjunction with human tutors and teachers who can keep a pupil engaged, encourage resilience, and establish trust, we believe AI has the potential to scale some of the key aspects of tutoring. But the evidence isn’t there yet and robust evaluation is needed to ensure it narrows and doesn’t further widen gaps. If you want to know more, listen to this month’s Inside Your Ed podcast . If you’re interested in Edtech and AI in schools, it’s a corker. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)
• This month’s labour market statistics received a lot of attention across the media, as the UK’s unemployment rate rose to 5.2%. Young people are bearing the brunt of these changes, with youth unemployment standing at 14% - the highest level since 2020, and young workers seeing increasing competition for entry-level roles. There is no doubt that this is extremely worrying, not least because we know young people from disadvantaged backgrounds will face the sharpest end of these trends. But there is also cause for hope. Firstly, whilst rates of youth unemployment have been going up, rates of economic inactivity – i.e. those not looking for work – have been steadily declining. This suggests some people are falling into the unemployed bucket because they are now looking for work. Secondly, this issue has come so far. Impetus began making the case for reducing rates of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) over a decade ago. Many of you reading will be familiar with the long slog of policy influencing: years of building up evidence, shaping the public narrative, engaging with key stakeholders and even then, it doesn't always work. But for this, it has. Not a day goes by that I don’t read a news piece about unacceptably high levels of NEET young people; we have seen government commit £1.5 billion to the issue, and I have witnessed their appetite to get it right firsthand. We have the ingredients to shift the dial, including political will. We must remember to have hope that we can. (Ayesha Baloch, Head of Youth Employment Policy)
• “Kids love school trips” isn’t exactly headline news - at least not to those of us with great childhood memories of them. I can still remember polishing off my entire packed lunch by 10am on a coach full of over-excited ten-year-olds, enroute to peer at a single square metre of Roman mosaic five hours from home. At the time, getting off my estate felt like the greatest adventure. But school trips being the biggest driver of a sense of belonging amongst all children - including those with higher rates of absence, SEND, symptoms of depression and anxiety, and pupils who feel lonely - might be news to you. This was the finding of research by the University of Oxford involving 35 thousand pupils across 95 schools. It was lovely to be reminded again that children want very simple things - opportunities to connect, have fun, socialise, do something new. The absence of this, as our attendance report made clear last year, has made school feel transactional for many. We shouldn’t forget that friendship and belonging are not side effects of education; they are conditions for it and must be fostered carefully by schools. Impetus are doing more on attendance this year, so watch this space. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)

Top reads

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

• Poverty in the UK feels far worse than it’s been for decades, but you’d be forgiven for feeling a bit gaslit by some politicians on this point, including by widely-debunked claims during the last General Election that child poverty had actually fallen since 2010. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s UK Poverty 2026 report helps untangle the data with six key words: “Nothing’s changed? Everything’s changed. It’s worse”. The report shows that, while on the surface the level of those living in poverty is high (20-22%) but hasn't moved much since 2006 (the 'nothing's changed' part), in reality the impact of persistent poverty on individuals has been building in the system for years. Outcomes for this group have worsened as a result, including in areas such as health and nutrition, and the number of people in very deep poverty (being far below the poverty line) has surged to be about 50% of the total. This is the "everything's changed. It's worse" part. Scrapping the two-child benefit cap shouldlift 350,000 children out of poverty, and - as the JFR report shows - this couldn’t have come quickly enough. (Claire Leigh, Director of Public Affairs)
• It is now widely accepted that milestones that were essentially a given for previous generations (a stable income, a house, a family) seem to have shifted ever-further out of reach for younger generations. Coupled with the sometimes unforgiving discourse that Gen Z are “too lazy” or “too picky” to work (or buying too many oat lattes to ever save up for a home), I can imagine many young people might question whether it is their fault. This Washington Post article nicely summarises why it is not. While the baby boomers “entered the labour force during decades of strong economic growth, rising productivity and relatively high real wages”, young people now are living in largely stagnant economies, with slow wage growth and productivity. While I’m certainly pleased with the policy attention being given to growing youth unemployment, economic inactivity and chronically high-NEET rates, I think more is required if we are to see long-term change. For previous generations, working hard paid off. Young people today, who are showing so much resilience in the face of some of the toughest labour market conditions we’ve seen in a century, deserve the same. (Ayesha Baloch, Head of Youth Employment Policy)
• We rarely talk about the centrality of emotion to education, so I was really pleased to see it discussed as central to good practice in internal alternative provision in a paper published in the British Education Research Journal this month. Also, the author uses a novel form of analysis that might be of interest to other researchers. Check it out. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Youth Policy)
• Skills is something I’ve been thinking (and learning) a lot about over the past year or so, when we opened our Skills Fund grant round. I’ve found NFER’s work in this area to be absolutely brilliant and have written previously about the final report of their Skills Imperative project. This month was National Apprenticeship Week, which led me to read their brilliant report on apprenticeship continuation, based on the longitudinal educational outcomes (LEO) dataset. It finds young people who already face the greatest barriers in education and employment also face the biggest barriers to apprenticeship completion, including those from disadvantaged and certain minoritised backgrounds. Despite increased attention on vocational pathways, there still isn’t huge amounts of research on how the skills system interacts with young people from marginalised backgrounds. So you can imagine my delight at finding a research project that combines this with the LEO dataset. Well worth a read. (Ayesha Baloch, Head of Youth Employment Policy)

Look ahead

On Tuesday 3 March, the Chancellor delivers her Spring Statement

On Thursday 26 March Pupil Absence in Schools 2024/2025 is published

We are expanding the Public Affairs team and recruiting a Research and Evidence Officer and Public Affairs Officer, both part time. If you want to join an ambitious and friendly team and make a direct contribution to improving the lives of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds do apply. Deadline 9 March.

And finally...

… I’ve been reflecting on the fallout from the Epstein scandal, beyond the tabloid exposés of individuals and those still to be held to account. One of those most interesting things I’ve read on this to date is from economist Adam Tooze here . His meandering post edges towards something really important that we are learning through the unique insight into the global elite that some three million emails and other documents affords us. His argument is roughly this; we have all assumed we are living through a ‘rupture’ (Mark Carney’s term) or ‘polycrisis’ (Tooze’s term) in the liberal democratic order. But what the Epstein files show us is that previously assumed political boundaries, geopolitical alliances and opposing worldviews are in reality utterly elided by a globalised elite who – while representing the highest echelons of academia, business and statesmanship from across the ideological spectrum – mixed business and pleasure freely in a world seemingly devoid of all sincere belief, either political or moral. It is therefore worrying but perhaps understandable that – according to More in Common polling - half of all Brits now believe it is probably or definitely true that “there is a secret group of people who are responsible for making all major world decisions, such as going to war”, versus 16% who say this is ‘definitely false’. What can be done to restore trust in a political system that has been revealed to be so vulnerable to co-option by self-serving elites? (Claire Leigh, Director of Public Affairs)