Even good organisations can get better – and getting better means more young people succeeding. We provide the expertise, the funding, and the support to help organisations on a journey to real impact.
Nat Sloane, Co-founder of Impetus
The combined value of our grants to organisations, the expertise provided by our pro bono network and the hands-on management support from our Investment team.
We find, fund and build high potential organisations. We give them long-term, unrestricted funding, and also manage co-investment partnerships for them with individual donors.
We work shoulder to shoulder with our portfolio partners to help them become stronger, better and bigger - to reduce the gap between young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and their better-off peers in school attainment, access to university and finding and keeping a job.
We support our portfolio partners to become stronger and more resilient organisations
2024: Number of partner organisations growing their income by:
Data for organisations that partnered with us from late 2022 not included. Two of the three with significant negative growth is explained by cuts to government contracts.
*The organisation with significant negative growth intentionally deferred some income into their next financial year
We set up and manage additional funding streams for our partner organisations
Funding delivered to our partner organisations through co-investment over time (£000’s)
The 2020 investment spike was a result of additional investment raised to combat impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Data for organisations who partnered with us from late 2023 onwards not included.
*We changed our financial year end from December to March in 2023.
We support our partner organisations to become bigger - to help more young people
2023: Number of partner organisations growing their reach by:
Data for organisations who partnered with us from late 2023 onwards not included. Two of the four with significant negative growth experienced cuts to government contracts/subsidies; another saw a fall in reach for young people aged 16-24 yrs that was offset by an increase in reach for older people.
We support our partner organisations to become better - to improve the impact they are having on the lives of young people
More information on these benchmarks
The Tutor Trust & SATS Maths: The Tutor Trust, Impact Report, 2023/2024
Action Tutoring & GCSE English and Maths: Action Tutoring, Impact Report, 2023-24
IntoUniversity & access to universities: IntoUniversity, Impact Report, 2023
Resurgo & Education, employment, training: Employment Data Lab analysis: The Resurgo Spear programme, November 2022 (last updated March 2023)
"Impetus has been with us since we first became a registered charity – and the partnership has been transformational. They’ve provided us with a winning combination of three types of support: substantial financial generosity, pro-bono expertise, plus ongoing, crucial advice and experience from the inhouse Investment team at Impetus."
Rachel Carr, CEO, IntoUniversity
How likely are our portfolio partner CEOs to recommend Impetus to another organisation's CEO?
Our portfolio partner CEOs value our partnership and would recommend us to others.
A Net Promoter Score is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company's products or services to others. It is calculated by asking ‘How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?' and scoring the answers on a zero-to-ten scale. The final Net Promoter Score is the percentage of customers who are promoters (those who scored 9 or 10) minus the percentage who are detractors (those who scored 0 to 6).
We combine what we learn from work with our portfolio partners and our own research to influence government and the wider sector. Together, we can unlock opportunities for all young people to achieve meaningful, lasting change.
Tutoring for post pandemic catch up
Impetus funds Action Tutoring because studies show it is one of the most effective ways of raising the attainment of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.
An extensive evaluation commissioned by Education Endowment Foundation on the Tutor Trust shows the impact of their tutoring and Impetus begins funding them too.
Education Endowment Foundation research suggests the pandemic will hit pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds hardest, potentially widening the attainment gap by 75%.
We work alongside the Education Endowment Foundation, Nesta and the Sutton Trust to develop the original proposals for using tutoring as pandemic catch-up programme.
Working in partnership with EEF, the Sutton Trust, and Nesta, we launched a new online tuition pilot to show that tutoring can reach young people from disadvantaged backgrounds even during school closures. The pilot was delivered by four established tutoring organisations (Action Tutoring, MyTutor, The Access Project and Tutor Trust) and reached 1,425 learners in 65 schools. It was co-funded by Impetus, EEF, Wellcome Trust, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Hg Foundation, Porticus UK, the Dulverton Trust, the Inflexion Foundation and other funders.
The National Tutoring Programme was set up by the Government to support schools in using tutoring to help pupils who have fallen behind to catch up channelling billions of pounds towards tutoring.
More university places for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds
We form a coalition of nine widening participation charities to advocate on issues that affect fair access – forming the Fair Access Coalition.
Together we call for government to protect money that universities are required to spend on widening participation activity as part of their access and participation agreements.
We meet two universities Ministers to discuss widening participation.
We campaign against changing the university admissions system to post qualification admissions, a move we don’t believe would help young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Government drops plans to move to post-qualification admissions.
Government protects university widening participation funding in their response to the Augar review.
More young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into training and employment
We publish the Youth Jobs Gap - a ground breaking collection of reports investigating the link between education and employment outcomes.
In response to the pandemic and its impact on young people we work with Youth Futures Foundation, Youth Employment UK, the Institute for Employment Studies and The Prince’s Trust to form the Youth Employment Group (YEG) to advocate for full and inclusive employment for young people. It is the UK’s largest coalition of youth employment experts with 300 member organisations.
The YEG launched their recommendations paper ‘Securing a place for young people in the nation’s economic recovery’, calling for government to support the creation of 1,000 extra opportunities per day for young people.
The government created a 250,000 place funded youth employment scheme – Kickstart.
The YEG's recommendations largely adopted in the House of Lords Youth Unemployment Committee's Skills for Every Young Person report.
Minister Mims Davies announces her new role as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Social Mobility, Youth and Progression following YEG calls for greater cross-government accountability and collaboration to tackle youth unemployment.
The YEG launched their paper 'The Young Person's Guarantee'. This paper emerged from a broad series of conversations, discussions, and consultative sessions and was shaped by a range of experts, organisations, and perspectives. On this basis, we proposed a transformational offer for our young people: The Young Person’s Guarantee.
We can’t make change happen alone. We work in partnership with other like-minded organisations to tackle the most difficult and under-supported challenges together and increase our impact.
All this is made possible by our generous donors who give their time and expertise as well as financial support. Together we can achieve greater outcomes for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in the UK.
As part of our focus on evidence and impact-based policy development, in 2011 we helped to establish the EEF along with the Sutton Trust, with a £125 million grant from the Department for Education. The EEF is the government-designated What Works Centre for Education. We work closely with the EEF to support young people to succeed at school.
We established the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) - an independent charitable trust, established in March 2019 with a £200 million endowment and ten-year mandate from the Home Office. The charity’s mission is to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence. It does this by finding out what works and building a movement to put this knowledge into practice.
In 2020, in response to the pandemic and its impact on young people, Impetus, Youth Futures Foundation, Youth Employment UK, the Institute for Employment Studies, the Learning & Work Institute and The Prince’s Trust formed the Youth Employment Group (YEG) to bring together the youth employment sector to help drive the UK’s response. Now with over 300 member organisations, our coalition advocates for full and inclusive employment for young people.
In 2018 we formed a coalition with eight other organisations (the Access Project, Brightside, The Brilliant Club, Causeway Education, IntoUniversity, Push, upReach and Villiers Park) to advocate on issues that affect fair access to University that is not determined by background.
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we worked with the Education Endowment Foundation, Nesta and the Sutton Trust to develop proposals for using tutoring as pandemic catch-up programme. The Government subsequently set up the National Tutoring Programme in late 2020 to support schools in using tutoring to help pupils who have fallen behind, more than 3 million courses have been started so far.
We continue to work with our partner organisations Action Tutoring and The Tutor Trust and also with Get Further to advocate for tutoring as the best evidenced intervention to support accelerated progress at school for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Analysis shows that leadership teams within the UK charity sector are predominantly white, and funders are disproportionately funding white-led charities. Yet we know that racial diversity is not only good for society, but it is also good for performance. So, in 2020, we partnered with Bank of America to set up unique programme of management training, personal development, and corporate mentorship for emerging leaders from the UK youth sector, from ethnic minority backgrounds, to support them into senior leadership positions.
