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 final Impetus Insights of 2024 is with you a week early, because my Comms team insist that no matter how juicy the contents, only our most committed readers would have read it on Boxing Day. To be fair, it would also have involved doing all the layout stuff in the background on Christmas Day/the first day of Hanukkah. So, here we are.

We'll be back in 2025 with more insights and analysis – and a new CEO. Whatever you're up to over the coming weeks, I ho-ho-hope you are able to get some R&R in. And that your cracker jokes are better than that.

Enjoy reading,

Ben

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In this issue

• Our thoughts on the last month’s news and announcements including the employment White Paper, Ofsted’s annual report, and some work on the cost of getting an education
• Some things we enjoyed reading on maths, AI for lesson planning, and essays from charity leaders
• Some things to look forward to over the next month including conferences, the BETT show, and the New Year’s Honours
• If you get to the end, we’re challenging existentialism

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.

• This month, the Government released its long-awaited employment White Paper, setting out further detail on their Youth Guarantee. DWP will be providing £45 million of funding to eight "Youth Guarantee Trailblazers" across England, which will design and test interventions to reduce rates of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET). Impetus is a founding co-chair of the Youth Employment Group (YEG), so we were pleased to see the Government explicitly mention the YEG as delivery partners for implementing the guarantee. The White Paper also committed to extra funding for English and maths provision - something we called for back in 2020 as part of our Youth Jobs Gap research series. (Ayesha Baloch, Senior Policy Advisor)
• Interesting to see OFSTED's annual report ringing alarm bells about the number of children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, missing school. As many of you know, Impetus is part of the Who is Losing Learning coalition and our report from earlier this year set out the sobering scale of the lost learning epidemic currently experienced in England and it was good to see OFSTED agree that this is both alarming and now a chronic, or to use their term, stubborn, problem. It wasn't so helpful to see in news reports that Sir Martyn Oliver was blaming this on parents working from home. Research we commissioned on attendance shot down that old chestnut and revealed instead that Covid had caused a seismic shift in parental attitudes to school attendance that will take a monumental, multi-service effort to change, which worryingly there are no signs of yet. (Carlie Goldsmith, Senior Policy Advisor)
• We often dabble in Insights in questions of causality, so worth highlighting this Centre for Young Lives report looking at how poverty can cause issues with school engagement. From costs of uniform and transport, to challenges around housing, there's some rich colour on the experience of poverty. As always when a report about poverty calls for universal free lunches, a reminder that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds already get them, and that's probably not the most effective thing you can do. Fortunately the report has other better ideas. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• The New Britain Project has done some helpful work on how to learn the lessons from the National Tutoring Programme in the rollout of primary school breakfast clubs. TES had a good summary and it's all stuff I am happy to endorse – maintain quality, measure outcomes, protect the funding, procure sensibly. Vital in all of this with breakfast clubs in particular is to remember it's not just the breakfast that counts – making sure the right people are coming really matters. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• The Key Stage 2 figures have been revised (standard practice) since their first release in September. Since we didn't cover them in Insights at the time, we'll take it from the top. The percentage of young people achieving age related expectations in English and maths is still a few points down on before the pandemic, although ticking up. Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are still around 30% less likely to be on track at age 11. As a June birthday I always enjoy month of birth statistics – it's the obvious pattern with young people born Sep-Feb achieving at above average rates and Mar-Aug below average. I've FoI-ed to try and get a month breakdown for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and I will let you know if it shows anything interesting. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• The Social Mobility Commission published its long-term approach to improving social mobility in the UK, Innovation Generation. There is a lot here I think is good and deserves attention from policy and decision makers. The social mobility ‘problem' is ill-defined and the ‘lucky few' approach – when you take people like me out of housing estates through educational opportunities and push them into professional jobs while leaving the rest of their family untouched – is a busted flush. Impetus always supports calls for developing a better evidence base for what works in policy terms and it's important to us the policies like the Young Person's Guarantee support those furthest away from opportunities for education and skills training and good jobs. But while it's positive to think harder and concentrate efforts on the 50% of young people who don't go into higher education, we wouldn't want to see anyone's eyes taken off the ball when it comes to supporting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university, especially as the most recent figures show a fall in the numbers going for the first time. (Carlie Goldsmith, Senior Policy Advisor)

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Top reads

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

• Another government release which emerged with far less pomp and pageantry is a report looking at the impact of ethnicity, socioeconomic status and special educational needs and disabilities on labour market outcomes, using longitudinal educational outcomes (LEO) data. It seeks to answer the same key questions that we are asking in our Youth Jobs Gap 2 report (coming in the new year). Understanding the link between more granular characteristics and labour market outcomes will help government deliver more effective policy, and it's something we've been calling for since our first Youth Jobs Gap seven years ago. (Ayesha Baloch, Senior Policy Advisor)
• I have a feeling we're going to talk about AI more and more in Insights in the years ahead. EEF and NFER have done a proper trial of ChatGPT as a tool for lesson planning. It reduced lesson planning time by 31% with no noticeable reduction in quality. Given teacher workload remains a major problem in the system… very promising. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• As Impetus' resident maths grad, I don't need telling twice to share the latest international comparisons from TIMSS. Remarkably year 5 and year 9 performance held steady in 2023 compared to 2019 despite everything going on, and England continues to be significantly above average (if not among the absolute top performers). Related – the Observatory of Mathematical Education at the University of Nottingham have launched their introductory report and among other things will be running some decent cohort studies for the rest of the decade. Good research is never quick, but I am excited to see what they find! (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• A series of essays from charity leaders, Forces for Good from the Charity Reform Group, calls for a fresh understanding of charity — not as vehicles of relief but as independent, resourceful and determined agents of social reform. Titles range from 'We are here for the young people who need us, but we passionately hope to work ourselves out of a job' to 'New government, new beginnings: time to get around the table and implement innovative social solutions at scale.' Choice quote from Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter: "If charities only work to solve the problems of individuals, we are doomed to fail. And worse, it makes us no more than a cog in a destructive wheel, allowing systems to continue to cause harm." (Robin Lanfear, Senior Comms Manager)
• We primarily use eligibility for free school meals as the basis for measuring disadvantage, but the Social Metrics Commission have continued to do good work on understanding the nature of poverty. Some slight surprise for me with one in three young people in poverty on their measure, and poverty at the highest rate this century – other measures are broadly flat. Andy Harrop has a great blog trying to explore why different poverty measures are showing different things, and trying to pin down what's really happening. All in all I have moved to being more worried about rising poverty than I was. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• A bit late to the party perhaps, but I was lucky enough to attend this year's SEA Caroline Benn Memorial lecture with Sammy Wright, headteacher and author of Exam Nation. More supportive of exams as an assessment tool than the title of the book suggests (and too soft on private schools for my liking), his views on the ways the marketisation of education and the sorting of children into education winners and losers through assessment further stack the odds against children from disadvantaged backgrounds makes compelling and interesting reading whatever your politics. (Carlie Goldsmith, Senior Policy Advisor)

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Look ahead

Friday 27 December is Carlie's birthday!

Monday 30 December is our best guess for when the New Year's Honours will be released (1030pm?)

Saturday 11 January is The Difference's IncludEd conference. Tickets here

Thursday 16 January is the Rethinking Assessment conference – sold out

Wednesday 22 to Friday 25 January is the BETT EdTech show at London ExCel

And finally...

... You can't exist without causing damage

"You have to learn to be comfortable making people upset" begins this short but important piece. It's partly about being comfortable in your own skin, and partly a call to arms to focus on doing good, not minimising damage. After all, it's "impossible to do anything important in the world and not have someone in the world upset at you". I know many readers of this newsletter are trying to do important things (and I love you all), so I think it's a must read. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)