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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It's been a quiet month in the policy world, which has been great for easing back after taking the first week of July as annual leave…

Many thanks for to Ayesha for holding the fort last month. My team have always been important providers of content for this newsletter, despite it normally having my face alarmingly large at the top. In keeping with the whole "country wants change" thing, we're going to tweak a few things to make it clearer whose thoughts you're reading as you work your way through our smorgasbord of thoughts and articles.

I was recently at a party and discovered I was chatting to a newly elected MP. Fortunately, I discovered this after giving them an authentic compliment and before committing any major faux pas. To avoid this fate, there's a handy course and quiz for learning all the new MPs names, faces, and constituencies. Given that "female MPs first elected in 2010" has been a quiz show round before, there are plenty of reasons to bone up.

Enjoy reading,

Ben

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In this issue

• Our thoughts on the last month's news and announcements including exclusions stats, UCAS personal statements, and an entirely new government doing entirely new things
• Some things we enjoyed reading on tutoring, attainment gaps, and an entirely new government doing entirely new things (so important we can name it twice)
• Some things to look forward to over the next month including all the various results days for different types of qualification
• If you get to the end, there's an interesting data viz on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)

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 – educational attainment, access to higher education and sustainable employment.

• It may not have made the headlines, but the alarming rise in school exclusions in England has continued, and there are now around 4,100 exclusions per day, on average – an 80% increase compared to before the pandemic. Clearly, addressing whatever is causing this rise needs to be an urgent priority. Alongside our Who's Losing Learning coalition partners IPPR, The Difference and Mission44 we're launching a report on this on 5 September – you can sign up to join us here.
• The government has kicked off several important pieces of work. The curriculum and assessment review is officially launched. We're super pleased that EEF Chief Exec (and previous Impetus board member) Prof Becky Francis has been appointed as chair – it seems like a guarantee the review will build on the evidence base. The terms of reference also explicitly talk about supporting young people from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Everyone now eagerly awaits the opportunity to feed in before it reports back next year, and we'll be looking to highlight the importance of oracy.
• Over in DWP Liz Kendall has set out her priorities for the "back to work" plan. The Youth Guarantee for 18-21 year olds will hopefully build on the similarly named Young Person's Guarantee from the Youth Employment Group, which was shepherded by our former colleague Phoebe. The FT reports she wants to shift job centres from policing benefits to giving good advice. It's a good idea – one of the things we wanted Youth Hubs to do was have a culture of hospitality, specifically because JCPs really don't. But I can't help but worry the Jobcentre brand is going to be a barrier to that, even if you change what goes on inside the building. A taskforce for a child poverty strategy is also very welcome.
• BBC front page education story of the month: UCAS gets rid of personal statement. This feels like important news, until you realise they have replaced it with three questions, with a total length limit the same as the personal statement, and the freedom to choose how to allocate that length over the questions. So… it's a personal statement in response to questions. UCAS "says the change will encourage applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds to apply to higher education". Impetus has better ideas for how to do this – maintenance support anyone? (To be fair, not something UCAS have any real say over). I can't quite believe this made the BBC front page.
• Not going to be hugely relevant, but for the next few months we have a new interim Conservative opposition team. Gagan Mohindra and James Wild join the DfE team led by Damien Hinds. Work and Pensions is shadowed by previous Secretary of State Mel Stride. Neither Wikipedia nor that press release have any confirmed shadow Ministers underneath him – I think the sole survivor from the group of junior Ministers that were in government was Mims Davies, and she's now in Shadow Cabinet covering women and equalities issues? I've probably missed something.

Top reads

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

• The Guardian visited an Action Tutoring school as part of their coverage of the end of the National Tutoring Programme this summer. The major question now is what next for tutoring? The NTP was originally intended as a time limited intervention to bridge to a world where tutoring was available to all schools who wanted to purchase it, but it's always been clear to me there would need to be some kind of pro-tutoring signal in the system, ideally identifying what's quality and what's snake oil.
• For those looking for an easy way to start to understand the new government's education priorities, the Guardian interview with Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, SchoolsWeek's coverage of her initial speech to staff will both be of interest (SchoolsWeek also covers her letter to the sector, her first speech, the King's speech etc, as you'd expect). Less on Liz Kendall though this Mirror article gives an overview of what she's started with.
• The EPI annual report is always a must read for the latest state of play in the education sector for various disadvantaged groups. Closing the gap between rich and poor will ultimately be one of the success measures of the government's new opportunity mission. The curriculum review looks likely to lean heavily on the evidence, fingers crossed the breakfast club rollout builds on proven models like Magic Breakfast too.
• We're members of the FEA, and their priorities for the new government is a nice summary of what organisations are calling for on a wider range of education issues than Impetus is engaged with. While not everything in it reflects Impetus worldview, we've worked closely with them on tutoring, and the calls around essential skills and the curriculum and collecting wellbeing data chime with our work.
• Carlie enjoyed ImpactEd's latest research on attendance. Building I guess on the FEA's point about collecting data, when a study like this of 70,000 pupils finds "sense of belonging continues to be associated with school attendance, and quality of relationships may be an important influence" the lack of clear consensus on which measures to use for these things makes it hard to develop a system wide focus, let alone a foundation from which policymakers can debate what to do about it.

Look ahead

Tuesday 30 July Tuesday is the last day the for both Houses of Parliament before the summer recess

Tuesday 6 August is results day in Scotland, for Nationals and Highers

Tuesday 13 August is the monthly labour market statistics

Thursday 15 August is results day for A levels and other level 3 qualifications

Thursday 22 August is results day for GCSEs

And finally...

I have a bit of a backlog of things for this slot now, but this piece from the Pudding in March is worth the wait. Cool data viz? Check. About a major US longitudinal study of young people? Check. With a particular focus on the link between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and later life outcomes? Check. For a number of years, I've thought that brain development linked to ACEs is one of the causes of differences in outcomes between different groups of young people (see eg this), so I'm always keen to highlight interesting ways to understand their prevalence and correlation to later life chances.