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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I don't know about you, but my inbox suggests the holiday season is very definitely over and normality has returned. Already the spending review looms on the horizon, then it's exams, we'll have to start planning party conference events… Still, at least we don't have to worry about an election this year (famous last words).

The best thing that happened over the festive season (in work terms) was the New Year's Honours. It was great to see our new CEO Susannah Hardyman get an MBE for all her work at Action Tutoring. Similarly, Ken Cowen, CEO of our partners School of Hard Knocks was awarded the British Empire Medal. It's always reassuring to see good people rewarded for good work.

Here's your usual round up of interesting and/or overlooked gems from the last month or so.

Enjoy reading,

Ben

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In this issue

• Our thoughts on the last month's news and announcements including the IncludEd conference, the last ever National Tutoring Programme stats, and EDI
• Some things we enjoyed reading on skills, demographics, and the legal drinking age
• Some things to look forward to over the next month including apprenticeship week and an event on productivity in schools
• If you get to the end, I'm asking what would happen if you asked Disney to design the National Tutoring Programme

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 I attended The Difference's annual conference IncludED for the first time. As someone who has been to a lot of conferences, I was really struck by how putting lived experience at the front and centre of a large-scale event can create a real sense of purpose and energy that lasts throughout the day. It's certainly something I'll take with me. There are too many takeaways to mention but key for me include: relationships matter and giving young people time and opportunities to build meaningful relationships is foundational and shapes lives for the better; and inclusion needs to be a core principle, not an add on. This last one was from an excellent panel made up of members of the Who is Losing Learning coalition Solutions Council. As a coalition partner we are really looking forward to the launch of the lost learning solutions report in March so watch this space for more details. (Carlie Goldsmith, Senior Policy Advisor)
• Issues with the reliability of the Labour Force Survey persist, while this month's labour market statistics show a mixed picture. The positive news is that the UK is now in its 18th month of real pay growth – its longest run of sustained growth since 2019. The flipside is that there are now 1.25 million young people not in work or full-time education - up by 29% since the pandemic. Worse still, unemployment rates for young people remain high, while figures indicate long-term unemployment - normally being unemployed for six months or more - is on the rise. Given this, it's encouraging to see the Government's continued commitment to a Youth Guarantee (and working with the Youth Employment Group to implement this!) as reiterated in the Get Britain Working White Paper. (Ayesha Baloch, Senior Policy Advisor)
• And so we receive the final set of statistics on the National Tutoring Programme, almost five years on from when we first started talking about the idea during the first wave of the pandemic. If you had told me then there would end up being over 6 million tutoring courses, I'd have said you were a fantasist. It hasn't led to quite the long-term shift we wanted and it's sad to see it end, but I think I've been guilty at times of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you want more detailed reflections on NTP and the future of tutoring save the date: 2 April. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• Our friends at Voice 21 flagged this very helpful short blog on lethal mutations in the rollout of evidence backed programmes – if you don't do it right, it's not evidence backed anymore! It's focussed on classroom practice but applies to any wider "evidenced backed" programme you are rolling out, e.g. breakfast clubs. More broadly it's why I'm always slightly sceptical about how we use meta-analyses in education and employment – just because something is e.g. "small group tutoring" it doesn't automatically mean you get whatever progress the EEF toolkit implies. Effective implementation is the key to impact. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• This CityAM piece talking about how social mobility is often missing from conversations about EDI got us all talking as a team. Socio-economic background and how it intersects with other characteristics is something that can be missing from the debate. The article urges employers to confront the often difficult structural inequalities that shape who enters, thrives, and belongs in professional spaces. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)

Top reads

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

• The IFS education spending report is out and outlines the challenging environment for schools, colleges and universities with government departments needing to find savings of 1-2% per year from 2025. At the launch event, Anne Longfield made a strong case that funding should be directed at the most disadvantaged children. There was general agreement that the current spending on SEND is one of the key, if not the key, challenge, with a need to plan preventative support in a more collective way to address the current funding shortfall. (Carlie Goldsmith, Senior Policy Advisor)
• The Hechinger Report's piece on America's "demographic cliff" got me thinking about the future of our higher education and economy. In the US, a decline in university applications is expected to begin next year and universities are already closing rapidly, with more than one a week shutting in early 2024. The UK's situation is slightly different, with the ONS forecasting a peak of nearly 900,000 18-year-olds by 2030, followed by a drop to just over 750,000 a decade later. However, with the higher education regulator predicting that "nearly three quarters of higher education providers will be in deficit by 2025-26," it's unclear how our institutions will handle this demand. (Hint: I don't think a one-off inflationary tuition fee rise will do the job). While these demographic shifts are worrying, the next decade or so will certainly be an interesting experiment in policymaking. (Ayesha Baloch, Senior Policy Advisor)
• The Department for Education put out the Survey of Adult Skills for England last month. It found England scored above the OECD average on both literacy and numeracy skills, with Japan and Germany the only G7 countries to outperform England. What I found interesting was "frequent readers and writers in England achieved high literacy and problem solving scores and the least frequent readers and writers had disproportionally lower literacy, numeracy and problem solving scores". With skills policy a particularly hot topic right now, I wonder if we're going to start seeing more opportunities for adults to develop their literacy and numeracy skills. (Ayesha Baloch, Senior Policy Advisor)
• Early education isn't part of our mission, but this paper is interesting for its wider implications. It's well known that the benefits of early education seem to fade away over time. You'd think that would mean that expanding early education means more delivery with impact that fades away over time, but this paper concludes the opposite. "We find that the fade-out effect is critically-linked to the share of classroom peers assigned to preschool access—with enough treated peers the classic fade-out effect is muted. This is because human capital accumulation is inherently a social activity, leading early education programs to deliver their largest benefits at scale when everyone receives such programs." If that finding holds on other education programmes I need to rethink my entire philosophy of targeting based on need. Thoughts very welcome – email me. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• Look, you know I'm a sucker for good use of data, but I loved how Learning with Parents have partnered with Datakind to turn their programme data into insights. As always, it's the counterintuitive that caught my eye – a lower reading target actually led to more people reading overall. Beautiful. Also, the day of the week you start a reading log seems to matter. No idea if this stuff would be true for other organisations but worth considering. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)
• Meanwhile in peer reviewed findings… In Spain, raising the legal drinking age reduced alcohol consumption (no surprise) and increased test scores by 4% of a standard deviation. This looks to be due to the direct impact of alcohol on cognitive ability (surprise to me at least). I guess if I am asked to sign an open letter on reducing teenage drinking I will probably now lean towards yes… And our increasingly regular feature on AI, this time it's an RCT showing undergrads who received feedback from the latest version of ChatGPT got the same grades on subsequent assessments as undergrads who got human feedback. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)

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Look ahead

Tuesday 28 January is an Institute for Government event on productivity in schools

W/c 10 February is National Apprenticeship Week. There are comms toolkits available if you want to get involved

Tuesday 18 February is labour market stats day

And finally...

...What if Disney designed the National Tutoring Programme?

I always find time over Christmas to read a few "best of" lists from websites that I don't really have time to pay any attention to during the year. That's how I stumbled upon this piece from Behavioural Scientist magazine. In part, it asks the question what would've happened if you hadn't given the brief for High Speed 2 to a load of engineering firms, but to Disney instead. It then discusses how they'd have asked a completely different set of questions about what mattered on the project. I've decided I love this as a question and will now be asking "how would Disney tackle this problem?" in an annoyingly high percentage of meetings. (Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research)