We are looking for one new partner organisation

Getting Grade 4 or above in GCSE English and maths means you’re 50% less likely to be “not in education, employment or training” (NEET) in later life.  

Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are 40% less likely to secure Grade 4 GCSEs in English and maths, and 31% less likely to achieve age-related expectations at age 11 than their better-off peers.

As part of our response to this, we’re looking to fund one new partner organisation supporting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in mainstream education to develop the competencies and knowledge to pass their SATs and GCSEs in English and maths. See detailed eligibility and selection criteria below.

Successful organisations will receive:

• £100k in core, unrestricted funding for an initial period of one year (with potential for us to become a longer-term funder)
• Hands-on support from our Investment Team to help build organisational capabilities for impact and growth
• Support from our network of pro bono experts on anything from strategy planning and financial modelling to legal support
• Access to our peer learning forums, providing training, networking and co-learning opportunities with 23 partners across our portfolio
• Access to sector-based coalitions to influence policy and the national conversation on issues faced by the young people we serve
• Access to additional grants through our network of donors

About Impetus

Impetus and Generation are clearly very mission aligned, and so for us this was always a partnership that we hoped to launch and grow. Both organisations also share a commitment to understand impact at a deep level, using data and learner feedback to improve, innovate, and scale. We are working closely together on all of those fronts and hope to change many more lives in doing so.

- Michael Houlihan, CEO, Generation UK

We have 23 years' experience finding, funding, and building the best organisations working in the youth sector. Since 2013, we have given £100m worth of support to our partner organisations, including £32.6m of core unrestricted funding.

But we are more than a funder. Our backing comes with focused, structured, hands-on support from our experienced Investment team and network of pro bono experts across all aspects of our charity partners’ work - deepening their impact, upskilling their leadership and helping them achieve sustainable growth. Our approach is working - our portfolio partners become stronger, bigger and better organisations that transform the lives of the young people they serve.

Our non-financial support is valued highly by our portfolio partners. In a recent survey of our partner CEOs, all rated our support as either delivering significant or transformational impact.

What we are looking for

Impetus is seeking applications from non-profit organisations:

• Working to improve school attainment outcomes for students (age 7-18) from disadvantaged backgrounds in mainstream schools.
• Committed to supporting these young people to secure the expected standard in their SATs and/or GCSE Grade 4 in English and/or maths.
• With an ambition to grow their impact using meaningful, benchmarked data.

All interested organisations should first check they meet the eligibility criteria from the following sections.   

1. Programme requirements

Your attainment programme must:

• Deliver directly to students. 

This could be solely direct interventions working with students (this might be through any combination of one-to-one, group, classroom-based, or out-of-classroom delivery) OR a combination of direct delivery to students and indirect delivery (combining your direct delivery with working with other stakeholders, such as school staff or parents, to deliver or embed positive outcomes for young people).

• Be delivered predominantly in England.
• Work with young people between the ages of 7–18.
• Focus on young people who are or have experienced socio-economic disadvantage, typically demonstrated through eligibility for free school meals and/or pupil premium.
• Work with a minimum of 250 young people per annum.

2. Organisational requirements

Your organisation must:

• Be a UK-registered charity, social enterprise or non-profit organisation.
• Be dedicated to improving attainment outcomes. You might also be working in other areas like wellbeing, physical/mental health, violence reduction but your attainment work should represent the majority of your work with young people.
• Have a minimum turnover of £650k, based on last audited/examined accounts.
• Have a minimum of 10 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff.

Missing out on attainment outcomes affects certain groups unequally, with significant disproportionalities based on ethnicity, gender, and special educational needs and disabilities. For this reason, we are particularly interested in organisations whose programmes or interventions explicitly address the presence of these structural inequalities.

We will also be considering the extent of applicant organisations’ own commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion - through organisational practices and policies, incorporation of lived experience into programme design and delivery, and representation across the staff team and Board.

3. Outcomes

Organisations must be committed to improving outcomes for children and young people in at least one of the below categories, and managing and refining their programme to achieve these outcomes:

• Expected standard in reading SATs
• Expected standard in maths SATs
• Grade 4+ GCSE English
• Grade 4+ GCSE maths

Organisations we aren’t seeking applications from

Although there may be future opportunities, given our current portfolio and priorities, we are not currently seeking applications from:

• Schools and academies
• Organisations focused solely on indirect delivery e.g. quality of teaching provision, without direct delivery to young people
• Alternative provision schools or alternative provision multi-academy trusts (AP MATs)
• Organisations working exclusively with AP or Special schools – though those working across mainstream and AP/Special are welcome to apply
• Organisations working exclusively on policy, without any specific programmes
• Organisations focusing on attainment outside of English and/or maths (e.g. science, geography, history etc.)

How to apply and timelines

We have designed an initial application process focusing on information relevant to our investment decisions – the eligibility and application forms should take less than two hours in total to complete and the majority of information should be easily accessible to organisation leaders.

If you are what we are looking for (as outlined above), and would like to be considered as a potential Impetus partner, please complete the following steps.

Please note, the below timeframe is indicative.

Additional information

Compensation

We appreciate our selection process is time-consuming for applicants. Therefore, any organisation that makes it to our site visit stage and is unsuccessful will be compensated for their time. Similarly, organisations that go through our partnership building and due diligence process and are unsuccessful will also be compensated for their time.

Inclusivity

At Impetus we are actively trying to improve the accessibility and inclusivity of our funding rounds. If you require any adjustments to enable you to engage with our process, or if you would like to provide any feedback on the accessibility or inclusivity of our process, please do email us at attainment@impetus.org.uk.

Find out more about our commitment to embedding diversity in our work.

Your data

All information collected is used and stored in order to make informed decisions throughout the application process. We will only ever share this information externally if it is with pre-vetted individuals providing external scrutiny or support during our selection process, who will have signed a confidentiality agreement.

Our privacy policy has more information about how we use your personal data.