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.

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We are, once again, in turbulent political times. This week, Andy Burnham took the keys to Number 10 as our seventh Prime Minister in a decade. It will be tempting for Westminster to spend the coming weeks absorbed in questions of leadership rather than delivery, but the young people we exist to serve cannot wait for the dust to settle, so below we've set out where we think his government needs to focus first.

That's also why, last week, we published Closing the Youth Jobs Gap, the final report in our decade-long Youth Jobs Gap series. We calculate that each young person who becomes NEET costs the state an average of £244,000 over their lifetime; with the number of young people neither earning nor learning now over a million, that's a bill we can't afford to keep paying. It has been heartening to see the response so far, and I'm hugely proud of what Ayesha, Claire and the team have built.

Elsewhere, recent findings from Education Policy Institute and the Education Endowment Foundation, which Impetus established alongside The Sutton Trust back in 2011, were a stark reminder of why early intervention matters: 44% of the GCSE disadvantage gap is already baked in by the end of primary school. It's exactly the logic behind our Attainment Fund, which backs partners including Action Tutoring, Football Beyond Borders, Get Further, The Tutor Trust and Voice 21 to deliver high-impact interventions before those gaps widen out of reach. And it was a real pleasure, earlier in the month, to spend a sunny day at the Festival of Education, hearing from our portfolio partners on Inclusion Bases and post-16 transitions, and catching up with old friends and colleagues from across the sector - not least some of my old Action Tutoring team! I always leave the Festival refreshed and inspired by the commitment and passion from across the sector.

Enjoy reading,

Susannah

In this issue

In this edition, we lay out four key asks for the incoming Prime Minister: from the persistent crisis in school attendance and the stalling of progress on the attainment gap, to the structural rise in young people who are neither learning nor earning. We also welcome the first drop in suspensions and exclusion since the pandemic, and mark a proud milestone - the publication of our Closing the Youth Jobs Gap report, which proposes concrete ways the government can deliver the Youth Guarantee specifically for young people facing socio-economic disadvantage. A decade of evidence-building has brought us to this moment, and we hope this edition reflects both the urgency of what remains to be done and the progress that makes us believe change is possible.

Priorities for the new PM

The biggest news right now is that by the time you read this the country will have a new Prime Minister - the MP for Makerfield, Andy Burnham. You won’t have escaped the tsunami-sized wave of content about what Burnham thinks (or what he should think), what this means for the country and government policy. Loyal readers know that Impetus exists to create the conditions young people from disadvantaged backgrounds need to succeed in education and employment. In his speech at the end of June, Burnham said “we need a complete rethink” about how young people are supported to do well and this “has to start with the education system.” Yes! But none of us know what this means in concrete terms yet. So - on the off chance that Andy needs something to read as he sits down with his cuppa (milk first apparently) - here are our top four asks:

1. Close the attainment gap: Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are 40% less likely to get core qualifications than their more affluent peers. The schools white paper published in February committed to halving the attainment gap, and we want Burnham’s government to honour that commitment. GCSEs remain the qualification of choice and are the gateway into progression pathways that includes college, university and an array of interesting careers that young people from more advantaged backgrounds take for granted. But the stark message in this month’s EPI report is clear - progress on closing the attainment gap has stalled and the white paper’s ambition is moving further out of reach, not closer. The new PM and his team must grip the issue, building a focused and evidence-based strategy accompanied by watertight delivery plan with resourcing to match.
2. Address the school attendance crisis: You are never going to halve the attainment gap if only around a third of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in Years 8-11 are in school nearly every day; a catastrophic state of affairs. The government set itself a target to recover 20 million more days by 2028/29 in the white paper, but we know very little about what works to recover attendance - especially for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. We know people in government are working hard on this and we welcome the recognition that belonging, mattering, being noticed and having access to trusted adult relationships are critical. But we’d ask a Burnham government to double down on its efforts to understand what it will take to get young people from disadvantaged backgrounds back into the classroom, and provide both the incentives and conditions needed to test genuinely innovative ideas. Part of this is about ensuring Ofsted and other accountability systems are evolved to support this kind of approach and that schools are not be penalised for honest experimentation.
3. Ensure young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are at the heart of efforts to tackle soaring NEET rates: Over one million NEET young people means government will understandably be focused on reducing headline figures. But by focusing on this, the young people we exist to serve are at risk of being left behind. NEET young people closest to the labour market will be buoyed by the tide of growth and stronger economic conditions, but without intentional focus on those from disadvantaged backgrounds - who often have multiple barriers and face compound disadvantage - we risk exacerbating the Youth Jobs Gap, rather than closing it. Luckily for Andy Burnham, we’ve just published an entire report on how government can realise this aim, covering national leadership and data infrastructure, education, stronger pathways into work, apprenticeships and employers and reaching hidden NEET young people.
4. Channel Gordon Brown on child poverty: According to the IFS, Child Poverty fell 18% during the Labour governments from 1997-98 to 2010-11. This took concerted effort and a Chancellor and PM who saw it as their most important KPI. No child deserves to grow up poor and childhood poverty casts a long shadow over whole lives in ways that are expensive to the economy and wider society. International evidence also shows that increasing parental income boosts educational attainment. On the basis that squandering the brains and talents of millions of our own children is holding us back from building the prosperous and healthy society we all want, PM Burnham should channel his predecessors and see this as the metric by which all others are judged.

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.

• Annual exclusion statistics showed that in academic year 2024/25 there was the first drop in suspensions and exclusion since the pandemic. Whilst this should be welcomed, 326,000 pupils were suspended at least once and a large disparity remains – with young people eligible for FSM four times more likely to be suspended than their non-eligible peers. It was great to see Impetus’s research with EPI featured by the BBC, showing that suspended young people are twice as likely to be NEET in young adulthood compared to their never-suspended peers. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)
• EPI’s annual report shows progress on closing attainment gaps has stalled, with gaps at all stages of education still higher than pre-pandemic, with those children who have been eligible for FSM the longest being the furthest behind - nearly two years behind their more advantaged peers by the time they get to their GCSEs. This is bad news, especially for a government that has recently committed to halving the disadvantage attainment gap. Bold moves will be needed to make any progress on this issue. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)
• Last week we published Closing the Youth Jobs Gap, the final report of our groundbreaking multi-year Youth Jobs Gap series. We have worked with experts across the sector, including Impetus’s portfolio partners, to design fourteen recommendations which we believe will be most impactful for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in supporting their transition to EET. Rounding off Impetus’s Youth Jobs Gap programme has been one of the proudest moments of my career - not just because of the research itself, but also because of what it represents. For more than a decade, Impetus has been making the case that too many disadvantaged young people face significant barriers to finding and staying in work, and that these barriers deserve far greater attention from policymakers. Over those ten years, Impetus colleagues past and present have worked alongside our portfolio partners to build the evidence, amplify young people's experiences and push youth employment higher up the policy agenda. This report, in my view, represents the best of Impetus. It highlights our role as a convenor and our commitment to evidence-based policy. But it’s also about timing. And at this crucial moment when the new Prime Minister is getting his feet under the table, and the Milburn Review team work to deliver their final report, we're no longer making the case from the sidelines. The evidence we've built over the past decade means we're now part of the conversations and in the rooms where the foundations for change are being laid. There's still a long way to go, but in policymaking, it's often useful - and necessary - to stop and see how far you’ve come. I hope this report can play its part in ensuring young people facing disadvantage are at the heart of the reforms (we hope are) to come. (Ayesha Baloch, Head of Youth Employment Policy)

Top reads

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

• The final report of the White Working-Class Inquiry was published this month with lots of coverage across the media. All young people from disadvantaged backgrounds have worse outcomes than their more advantaged peers - whatever their ethnicity - but with 1.25 million young white British pupils receiving FSM, they make up the largest number of the young people we exist to support. The main message - that young people and families in this demographic do want to do well but feel that education offers little to them - is stark. I also found this Channel 4 news piece very powerful. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)
• A conversation with a colleague about what a “quality” education, employment or training (EET) outcome looks like sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. This blog from Nuffield Foundation, drawing on research from the Youth Futures Foundation, explores what “good work” means for young people. At a time when policymakers are rightly focused on increasing employment, it's a useful reminder that the conversation shouldn't stop once someone gets a job. The research found that young people consistently value fair pay, security, opportunities to develop, supportive managers and a healthy work-life balance. Too often, discussions about youth employment focus on getting young people into any job as quickly as possible - and understandably so. But insecure work, poor progression and low pay can all contribute to young people cycling between employment and unemployment rather than building sustainable careers. As government develops its wider employment reforms, we should celebrate young people moving into work, but also think critically about whether the jobs available offer a realistic route to stable and sustainable EET. (Ayesha Baloch, Head of Youth Employment Policy)
• This month, Impetus research was referenced in both the Race Equality Engagement Group: One Year of Action report from the Race Equality Unit, and the APPG on Poverty and Inequality's latest report. Whether the conversation is about racial inequity, poverty or employment, the same themes emerge – early intervention, sustained investment and better coordination between services. Reading the reports together, it was heartening to see recognition of the role charities can play beyond delivering services. Alongside supporting young people directly, the sector is generating increasingly robust evidence about what works. Seeing that evidence inform national conversations is a positive reminder that research and practice are strongest when they go hand in hand. (Ayesha Baloch, Head of Youth Employment Policy)

Look ahead

• Thursday 6 August: Annual Statistics Release for Attendance
• Thursday 13 August: A Level Results Day
• Thursday 20 August: GCSE Results Day
• Monday 2 August: Get Further Conference, Never Too Late to Learn. Tickets available here.
• Wednesday 26 August: Quarterly Statistics Release for Young People Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET)

And finally...

Andy Burnham has plenty of immediate and urgent policy challenges to keep him busy as he moves into his famously tiny Number 10 office. But on his ‘less urgent, but fundamentally important’ list is rebuilding a stable electoral coalition, so that he is still PM the next time the World Cup rolls around. To do this he needs to find a way to reunify Labour’s traditional working class vote with ‘woke’ progressives in our biggest cities. And this is all about communication.

In this LabourList article, Liam Evans argues that progressive parties have been getting it all wrong when trying to reach so-called Red Wall voters. After spending “1,000 hours immersed in right-wing media”, the author concludes that successful communicators don't start with policy. They start with identity, emotion and belonging. They make people feel seen first, and only then introduce their political ideas. According to Evans, you can’t brow-beat voters with essays and facts and expect to change their minds. People aren't persuaded by facts alone, they're persuaded by stories.

The article reminded us of an earlier piece of research by CLASS and our very own Ayesha Baloch. The work of the UK Race-Class Narrative (RCN) project sought to challenge divisive culture war messaging by showing how people of different racial backgrounds often share common economic struggles and values. Rather than accepting narratives that pit communities against each other, it promotes an inclusive story that identifies unfair systems and powerful elites as the real source of inequality, encouraging solidarity across race and class.

Taken together, the message for Burnham’s team is pretty clear; if progressives want to win people over, better policies aren't enough. How those policies are communicated matters just as much. That means telling stories that connect with people's everyday experiences, creating a sense of shared purpose, and making people feel like they're part of something bigger. In an era where attention is scarce and trust is hard won, the ability to build compelling narratives may be just as important as having the right policy solutions. (Claire Leigh, Director of Public Affairs)