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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Party conference season recedes into the rearview mirror; the budget looms not even over the horizon. If the changing colours of the leaves hadn't made it obvious, the policy calendar is clearly in autumn mode.

The changing of the leaves is my tenuous segue to mention that we're taking the opportunity to freshen things up in Insights. This email has my face and introductory wittering at the top because apparently it improves open rates (though I can't quite believe that). But it's always been a team effort. Indeed, it's Robin from comms who pointed out to me the leaves have been changing.

Going forward, each of our Insights will be followed by the name of the smart person working here who actually knows what they are talking about. Hopefully this will better reflect the talent on the team. And stop people asking me detailed questions about bits of the content about which I know relatively little.

Enjoy reading,

Ben

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In this issue

• Our thoughts on the last month's news and announcements including oracy, DWP's new expert advisor, and a letter to the Times
• Some things we enjoyed reading on education research, essential skills, and the youth voice census
• Some things to look forward to over the next month including the budget, a summit, and some stats
• If you get to the end, we're thinking about scale and learning from materials

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.

• This month, the Oracy Education Commission (OEC) - hosted by Voice 21 in partnership with Impetus - launched their much-anticipated report, We Need to Talk with an event in Parliament. As a long-standing partner of Voice 21 and supporter of oracy, we couldn't be more thrilled. Having historically suffered from a lack of consensus on what it is and how it can be delivered, the OEC's report provides a clear blueprint for oracy education, including across the thorny issue of assessment and accountability... The report was received enormously well and even garnered a shout out from Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart! (Ayesha)
• Meanwhile, Professor Becky Francis has launched a call for evidence seeking views on the current curriculum and assessment system to help shape the future of education. With oracy explicitly mentioned in the Curriculum and Assessment Review's terms of reference, the Commission's report couldn't have been more timely. Having called for oracy to be embedded across the curriculum in our manifesto this summer, we're looking forward to seeing how this pans out over the coming year. (Ayesha)
• Those of you more higher educationally-inclined may know that Impetus is part of the Fair Access Coalition, a group of eleven widening participation organisations. With recent reports on university tuition fees, we thought it was a good time to remind government that simply replacing maintenance loans with grants won't effectively support students who need it most, with a letter in The Times. It's essential that any changes to maintenance grants increase the overall amount of support students are getting. (Ayesha)
• We're super thrilled to see Tony Wilson snapped up and appointed as an expert advisor at DWP. Tony has been co-chairing the Youth Employment Group alongside Impetus colleagues and others for the last 4 years, as Director of the Institute for Employment Studies so we know firsthand how much expertise he will bring to the role. (Steve)
• The policy team were at all three major party conferences this year, a first for us! Ben spoke on an education recovery panel at Lib Dem conference. Ayesha supported an Oracy Education Commission event at Labour conference, which was very busy for an 8am start (over 50 people!). Impetus also sponsored the IPPR/Labour Together reception with special guests Wes Streeting and Lisa Nandy. It was my first ever conference experience and I enjoyed hearing Bridget Phillipson talk about building a more inclusive education system and also an impromptu introduction to Andrew Marr! Ben says there's nothing interesting to report from the Conservative Party conference, maybe next year! (Carlie)
• There is broad agreement that school accountability should focus on some sort of measure of inclusion, with Ofsted committed to including it in their report card. The challenge is knowing how best to measure inclusion. Interestingly, Ofsted have commissioned the National Children's Bureau to look at this, reporting back next year. Stakeholder engagement is promised so worth keeping an eye on. (Carlie)
• Hot off the press as we type – select committees are forming. For Education, the names for the stakeholder map are Jess Asato, Sureena Brackenridge, Caroline Johnson, Amanda Martin, Darren Paffey, Mark Sewards, Patrick Spencer and Marie Tidball. Only one of those was an MP last Christmas… The similarly green list for Work and Pensions is Johanna Baxter, Neil Coyle, Damien Egan, Gill German, Amanda Hack and David Pinto-Duschinsky. I can't see anything official but I think there will be more people appointed in due course, not least from the Lib Dems. (Ben)

Top reads

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

• Having been doing education stuff for 10 years now, I thought I was following all the relevant people. But I have stumbled across Peps Mccrea who does a weekly 5 minute evidence email for teachers, and also tweeted 16 recent education papers. As a big fan of obvious things failing, I loved that phone study reminders increase study likelihood on specific days but cause students to become overly reliant and study less on non-reminder days. Oops. (As I am also a fan of obvious things working, I should add that reassuring messages from teachers before exams boost student motivation, engagement, and performance, while lack of messages negatively affects outcomes. Almost worthy of an Ig Nobel prize) (Ben)
• We were really pleased to see the Young Person's Guarantee (which we helped produce) in Youth Employment UK's Youth Voice Census. Interestingly, the report specifies building the guarantee at a hyper-local level. We know from our Youth Jobs Gap project that differences within regions are often larger than those between regions, and with devolution seemingly high up on the government's agenda, we're interested to see how this develops. (Ayesha)
• Last month in Insights we discussed the launch of the Who Is Losing Learning? coalition report on school exclusion (or lost learning), alongside our partners IPPR, The Difference and Misson 44. It was an emotional but ultimately hopeful night, as the sobering scale of lost learning was set out and our audience heard from our panel members about the impact of lost learning on children and communities they serve. At the end, there was a strong sense of a collective commitment to developing concrete solutions to the issue and this is now the focus of our work. Do watch our short video of the evening and hear why lost learning is such an urgent challenge. (Carlie)
• The Social Mobility Commission have a very long report out on the "childhood origins of social mobility" (The SchoolsWeek op-ed is a quicker read). Who knew that all parents want their children ‘thinking for themselves' but this is less important for parents with no education or low education levels? Perhaps less surprisingly, findings "indicative of a potential crisis in adolescent mental health in the UK". Lots of rich and nuanced stuff. (Ben)
• Research increasingly finds essential or "soft" skills lead to better life satisfaction and a higher probability of being in work or education. As fans of (a) securing EET outcomes for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and (b) measuring and evaluating impact, we love Skills Builder Partnership's Essential Skills framework. This piece in the New Statesman by their CEO provides a great overview of how the framework came about and how government can utilise it for maximum impact. Increase clarity on outcomes, increase alignment, and allow consistent measurement of progress? Yes please! (Ayesha)
• There are a relatively small number of young people receiving education in young offender institutions (fortunately) and so they are often overlooked. Ofsted have done a 10 year retrospective on their inspections of them. There have been "declining educational opportunities, reduced work experience, and extremely limited time out of cells for children". The report notes that YOI shortcomings risk isolating children, "creating a cycle of frustration and poor behaviour, further reducing educational engagement." I doubt it will ever make the front pages, but it's not good enough. (Ben)

Look ahead

Wednesday 30 October is the Budget

Thursday 31 October is the official Children in Need statistics (not to be confused with BBC's Children in Need – Friday 15 November)

Thursday 7 November is UK Youth's "joined up summit"

Thursday 21 November is the quarterly NEET statistics

And finally...

From my General Election catchup pile, enjoy this Works in Progress piece on inventing materials. Delivering consistently high impact support for people at scale always feels much messier and less replicable than a production processes. I was struck by three things. First, in the materials world, scientists invent and someone else scales. Should that be the model for new programmes? Second, the problems with scaling can be "anticipated and potentially mitigated if researchers worked and talked more with people who would eventually scale and use their discoveries." That's definitely a lesson that transfers to our world. Finally, "sometimes problematic properties emerge only at scales that are too large for lab-sized experiments to reveal." This is a nice succinct way of capturing something I think we learned from the National Tutoring Programme (eg the risk of people leaving supply teaching to become tutors instead). But I also think we get beneficial properties that can only really happen at scale, eg a coordinated push to use tutoring as a recruitment tool for potential new teachers. Lots of food for thought! (Ben)