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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September started with a bang here at Impetus as we launched our exciting new Youth Jobs Gap interactive tool, which lets users explore and compare NEET risk factors by local authority area. If you haven’t yet done so, check it out! A week later we published the final report in our school attendance series, 'A crisis of disengagement: listening to, and learning from, teachers on school attendance' to a packed audience in Parliament.

We will be talking about these at Labour Party Conference next week, where the Impetus Public Affairs team will be out in force bringing together our research, our portfolio partners and the voices of young people to help shape the debate on education and employment.

We’re hosting two events, firstly, with the Centre for Social Justice and Get Further, discussing how to close the Youth Jobs Gap and get Britain’s young people into work, with Alan Milburn joining us. Then, with LabourList, we’ll be looking at what we can learn from teachers about the attendance crisis, based on our new report. Full details of both events are below.

You’ll also find members of our team speaking at a number of other events across the three days, including on how Labour can deliver good jobs for every young person across the UK, and a roundtable exploring the curriculum and assessment barriers contributing to the NEET challenge.

There is clearly a lot to discuss. With almost a million young people currently NEET, and outcomes for young people who have experienced poverty consistently worse than their better off peers, there is a real opportunity to turn the current focus on youth employment, skills and education into lasting change.

If you’re heading to Liverpool too, do get in touch. We’d love to see you.

Enjoy reading,

Susannah

In this issue

The Impetus Public Affairs Team have been busy travelling around the country for party conference season. By the time you read this we will be fuelled primarily by canapes and warm white wine. The roadshow continues this weekend at Labour Party Conference, where we are running two fringe events; do come along if you’ll be in Liverpool. In this edition of Insights we also look at what’s behind the latest PISA scores for England, we take a first look at the flurry of reports being published on NEET young people ahead of the initial report from Alan Milburn’s Review, we delve into our new research on what teachers think about the crisis in school attendance and….did we mention we’ll be at Labour Party Conference?

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Impetus at Labour Party Conference

• On Sunday afternoon, we'll be teaming up with Get Further and the The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) to host “Tackling the Youth Jobs Gap: How to get Britain's young people into work.” Join the Rt Hon Alan Milburn; Szu Ping Chan, Economics Editor at The Telegraph; Susannah Hardyman MBE, CEO of Impetus; Joe Shalam, Policy Director at the CSJ; and Alice Eardley, Interim CEO at Get Further for a debate on the causes and solutions to the youth worklessness crisis | 2:30-3.30pm, Sunday 27 September, Arena Room Tyne, The Convention Centre at the Liverpool Experience Campus (secure zone).
• On Monday morning, we are partnering with LabourList and Public First to discuss new findings from our latest attendance research: “Listening to and learning from Teachers on school attendance”. Speakers include: Rachel Sylvester, Political Editor at The Observer UK; Helen Hayes MP, Chair of the Education Select Committee; Susannah Hardyman MBE, CEO at Impetus; Wesley Davies, CEO at The Two Counties Trust; Kiran Mahil, Deputy Headteacher; Paul Waugh MP, Minister for Education; and Ed Dorrell, Director at Public First | 10-11am, Monday 28 September, Revolution Liverpool, Albert Dock.

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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.

• Alongside partners Public First, we launched our new report - A crisis of disengagement: listening to, and learning from, teachers on school attendance - this month. It’s worth a read in full but four things really stood out for me. Firstly, teachers don’t speak with a single voice on attendance. Those in classrooms see it as one burden among many, whilst leaders are certain that to move the dial attendance needs to be everyone’s business. Secondly, school staff are far more worried about pupils drifting away from school through disengagement than about illness or term-time holidays and think policy should treat those as different problems. Thirdly, the most effective route back into the classroom is building relationships with trusted adults. But without the time and scaffolding to sustain that, staff experience it as relentless and exhausting rather than as a strategy that's supported. Lastly, attendance fines split opinion, with many believing they damaged the relationships so critical to getting attendance back on track, particularly amongst the pupils and families struggling the most. Despite the early start, our report launch event was busy, and an article about the report topped The Guardian’s most read list for much of the day it was published, a sign of how live this issue is. This is the last report in the series, but not the last time you’ll hear from us on attendance. Join us for our panel at Labour Party Conference, and if you aren’t going to be in Liverpool but want to hear more about what’s next get in touch. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)
• Every three years, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests the reading, maths and science skills of 15-year-olds in countries across the world, with the latest results published this month. The headline story is a big decline in teenagers’ reading skills, with the OECD pointing to tech as a potential culprit; students who don't use AI for specific schoolwork tasks outperformed those who do by around 20 points on average - roughly a year of schooling. By comparison with other countries, students in England fared well, increasing science scores and holding steady in reading and maths. As Tim Leunig’s fascinating substack explores, the strong performance of children from immigrant backgrounds in England may be helping to maintain its high scores. But the headline numbers disguise some more worrying aspects of England’s performance. Scores were significantly lower for disadvantaged students across all three domains than their more advantaged peers (although these gaps are no bigger than the OECD average in maths and science and – in perhaps one bright spot – significantly narrower in reading). And troublingly, English students' sense of belonging at school was among the lowest internationally. As we’ve said repeatedly at Impetus, belonging is closely tied to school attendance and engagement. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)
• This month, we launched a new interactive digital tool, Who Are NEET Young People?, opening up the data from our Youth Jobs Gap research series in a form that anyone - a policymaker, a local authority, a journalist - can explore for themselves. The tool uses the government’s Longitudinal Educational Outcomes (LEO) dataset, which covers around four million young people, allowing users to interrogate and compare NEET rates across every region and local authority in England and to understand how risk factors compound within different groups in different places. As our report last year found, while the headline NEET figure is important and has rightly attracted significant attention, there are stark nuances within this. A young person who is from a disadvantaged background, with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and low qualifications is 171% more likely to be NEET compared to the average. Broadly speaking, we now know who is missing out, and where. The question is no longer whether the gap exists, but what is being done about it in each place. We hope this tool makes that case in a way that is accessible and concrete, and that it helps local and regional policymakers ask sharper questions about who is NEET in their area and what it would take to reach them. In producing the tool we were lucky to work with Polygraph, the brilliant company behind The Pudding, which was a bit of a pinch-me moment for our team. Thanks, as ever to Ares Foundation who funded this work and a special shout out to our Head of Communications, Robin, who executed the project brilliantly. (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...

• Researchers at IPPR asked 150 young people about what it’s like to be growing up in Britain today and have published their findings in a new report. The authors draw some stark conclusions. The conditions young people need to grow up well have been eroded significantly and the barriers they face in making the transition into adulthood have got ever higher. It was the loss of friendship and the profound sense of loneliness in the report, though, that resonated with me most deeply - a legacy, perhaps, of my time as a researcher at Samaritans. We're social by nature, and we're deeply harmed when connection is absent from our lives. As the adults in the room, it's on us to rebuild the conditions where those connections can flourish - through the relationships, spaces and time that young people need, and too often don't have. (Carlie Goldsmith, Head of Education Policy)#
• This month has seen no shortage of reports on young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), in anticipation of the Young People and Work Inquiry’s final report, led by Alan Milburn. IPPR's A Better Deal: Tackling the NEET Crisis, explores the mismatch between where NEET young people live and where vacancies exist, and the data is striking. Areas with the highest NEET rates consistently have the fewest suitable opportunities. Their idea for a WorkStart programme of publicly funded, paid placements in geographical “cold spots” is therefore particularly welcome, alongside reform of the apprenticeship system to prioritise young people - something we recently called for - and a specialist youth employment service focused around participation and progression, and including a youth allowance. Meanwhile, our Youth Employment Group co-chairs, Youth Employment UK have put forward a brilliant report calling for a move from a Youth Guarantee to a Youth Participation System which is nationally guaranteed, locally organised, employer-enabled, economically connected and accountable for sustained outcomes. The central argument of the report is government should fund the service nationally, use devolution to organise delivery locally, and mobilise existing economic activity to create additional opportunity for young people. Rather than measuring initial starts or activity delivered, the system should track access, quality, youth experience, employer experience, sustained participation and progression. Both reports call for the kind of locally tailored, relationship-based support that Impetus has long argued is essential to reach those furthest from the labour market. (Ayesha Baloch, Head of Youth Employment Policy)
• A further two important reports this month add meaningful nuance to the question of who we mean when we talk about young people who are NEET and, critically, who our systems are currently failing to reach. The Children's Commissioner's Hidden NEETs uses data powers under the Children Act to examine FE college attendance for 16 and 17-year-olds and the findings are seriously worrying. Half of all young people in colleges are persistently absent by the standards applied to schools, yet because FE settings are not required to collect or report attendance data, this cohort is entirely invisible to existing data collections. These young people would show up as being in education but in practice, they have many of the characteristics and risks of being NEET without any of the targeted interventions reaching them. The Commissioner's call for urgent action on FE attendance chimes with our own Closing the Youth Jobs Gap report. The IFS and The King’s Trust meanwhile examine the nearly 300,000 NEET young people who claim no benefits at all and therefore fall outside the employment support system and the Youth Guarantee. Importantly, it highlights the heterogeneity of this group. The majority are actively looking for work and have relatively good qualifications and health outcomes, supported financially by their families many will move into employment without intervention. But a significant minority have been NEET for over a year and are locked out of Youth Guarantee programmes solely because their eligibility is tied to benefit duration rather than need. The report's recommendation that Youth Guarantee programmes be opened up to all long-term NEET young people, regardless of benefit status, is one we called for in our report over the summer (and we were pleased to see our research cited!) (Ayesha Baloch, Head of Youth Employment Policy)

And finally...

For most people, January represents the start of the new year. But for children, parents and teachers, the ‘real’ new year happens in early September, when children head back to school and classrooms reopen for another year of learning and friendship. It is also an expensive time of year, with school shoes and uniforms to replace, and school dinner accounts to top up. This new school year was therefore an important one because, thanks to campaigning by The Children’s Society and others, free school meals were extended to every family receiving Universal Credit, meaning around half a million more children will get fed at school each day, with all the benefits to wellbeing and learning that that brings. New school uniform rules should help too, by limiting the number of branded items schools can require to three in primary schools (and four in secondary schools where one is a tie). As a charity supporting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, we know how practical financial barriers can have a real impact on engagement, attendance and attainment at school, from finding the bus fare at the end of the month to being sanctioned for uniform infractions. With these new reforms, alongside the gradual roll-out of free breakfast clubs in primary schools across the country, more children will hopefully be able to come to school well dressed, well fed and ready to learn. (Claire Leigh, Director of Public Affairs)