More students choosing to live at home due to rising costs

New data shows that more students are choosing to live at home for university this year than in the last nine years.

Child Maintenance Service errors leave families at breaking point

Parents tell the BBC that missed payments, errors and delays are pushing some families into debt and food insecurity.

Ofsted to review how schools prevent young people becoming NEET

Ofsted will further examine how schools and colleges identify and support pupils at risk of falling out of education, employment or training.

DfE launches study into smartphones and primary pupils

A £2 million trial will test whether delaying smartphones improves children’s wellbeing, development, behaviour and relationships.

Working and serving more than 9 to 5

From tackling school dropout to sending more than 300 million free books to young children, Dolly Parton’s philanthropy shows more than a commitment to literacy.

💡Research & insights

^{A reminder on some style changes from last term…. in the recent survey feedback, over 4,000 of you said that you sometimes struggle to keep up with the summaries and there is often too much content! I’ll keep the insights area to three ‘new’ insights (e.g. reports) and one ‘reminder’ (e.g. archives blog).}

Policy and Practice: Exploring the use of classroom removal and how it varies by school-level disadvantage

_{[Education Policy Institute; 2026]}

Access the insights here

• This recent analysis from EPI explores the use of classroom removal/internal exclusion in English secondary schools. It looks at why pupils are removed, but also whether practice differs according to disadvantage within schools

• 84% of respondents said disruptive behaviour was a reason for removal within their school policy, while 73% said disruption was the reason the last pupil they removed had left their classroom.

• Policies often describe removal as both a sanction and a route to support. More than half included removal to regulate emotions (58%), access educational support (55%) or pastoral support (53%). Yet these supportive uses were far less evident in teachers’ reports of what happened the last time they removed a pupil.

(Source: EPI, 2026)

• There is a disadvantage gradient in disciplinary approaches. Schools with higher proportions of pupils eligible for FSM were more likely to include removal for things such as uniform and mobile-phone rules.

• For every step up the FSM quartiles, respondents were around 7 percentage points more likely to report removal linked to uniform or other factors.

• In practice, teachers in the highest-FSM schools were almost twice as likely as those in the lowest-FSM schools to say their most recent removal involved a behaviour-points system.

• The indication here is that pupils and schools experiencing greater levels of need may therefore also be experiencing greater loss of mainstream classroom time through disciplinary processes.

• EPI argues that classroom removals need much greater transparency and monitoring; unlike suspensions and exclusions, we currently have no national picture of how often pupils are removed or for how long.

• ^{My takeaway: I think there is something important here about the difference between responding to behaviour and understanding what sits underneath it. Removal will sometimes be necessary and I wouldn’t argue against it in all cases, but we should remain curious about who repeatedly loses access to the classroom and why. This is something I often work with schools on when we provide support/training and poverty audits.}

You can’t do belonging

_{[Hutchinson; 2026]}

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• A useful challenge here from Jon Hutchinson to the growing tendency for schools to treat ‘belonging’ as something that can be delivered through a programme or series of projects.

  

• Hutchinson’s central argument is that belonging is much more dynamic.

• You can’t simply “do” belonging and move on. This feels like something we need to remember especially at the start of a new academic year. It isn’t a fixed state that a school can achieve through a one-off intervention; children continually reassess whether they belong.

• Those judgements are shaped by hundreds of small, everyday cues. For example, interactions with teachers, responses to mistakes, relationships with peers, language, routines and whether children feel known and valued.

• This means belonging is probably less about launching another whole-school initiative and more about culture and relationships consistently experienced by children. Something many of us working in schools already know I’m sure.

• Hutchinson has previously argued that the classroom may be a more important unit of belonging than the school itself. A child can feel very differently about whether they belong from one lesson, adult or peer group to another.

• ^{My takeaway: I especially like John’s challenge that ‘belonging’ can become another one of those ideas that schools and other settings start to ‘do’. I’d push back on it being something that informs or shapes another framework. I’d also encourage us to talk to children and young people (and adults!) about what it means and where they do/don’t experience it too.}

A meta-analysis of suicidality, depression and sense of school belonging in adolescence

_{[Tesolin et al; 2026]}

Access the insights here

• This is a heavy issue I appreciate, but really useful research bringing together evidence around school belonging, depression and suicidality during adolescence.

• The broad picture is that young people who feel more connected to and valued within school tend to report better mental health and lower levels of suicidal thoughts and behaviours.

(Source: Tesolin et al, 2026)

• This chimes with some previous longitudinal evidence also indicating that stronger school connectedness predicts lower subsequent depression and anxiety.

• The evidence appears stronger and more consistent for suicidal thoughts than for suicide attempts. A 2024 systematic review found a protective association in 73% of studies examining suicidal ideation but only 50% of those examining attempts.

• There is also an important relationship with depression which is useful for those working with children and young people here too. A separate meta-analysis of 87 studies found a moderate negative association between school connectedness and depression, although the strength varied according to age, gender mix and how depression was measured.

• It is important to note that much of this literature seems observational. Feeling that you don’t belong might contribute to poorer mental health, but poorer mental health may also make connecting with school and others more difficult.

• ^{My takeaway: This sits interestingly with other reflections on belonging we’ve seen from great thinkers like Dr Lisa Cherry and John Hutchinson. The evidence increasingly shows that we need to pay attention to intersectionality between poverty and the relational conditions around children and young people. When outcomes associated with belonging start to be linked with feelings of depression and ending one’s life, belonging feels less like a ‘soft’ outcome!}

From the Archives: Calculating the cost of winter

[Harris; 2025]

Access the insights here

• I know we’ve had a hot summer and winter feels like a long way off, but it’s important to plan ahead for those that experience harsher winters.

• This piece looks at seasonal poverty and how winter can intensify pressures already faced by low-income families. I look at higher energy bills, additional food costs, colder homes and the hidden costs attached to Christmas and other seasonal activities.

• I propose four simple CARE principles for poverty-informed practice:

• Cost reduction

• Assessing need

• Relationships and belonging

• Everyday signposting.

• This is something that we continue to support schools with across the UK and provide CPD on the approaches outlined. Feel free to reach out if you think this would be of use to you and your setting(s)

🪴Opportunities

Role Opportunity: SHINE

Head of Operations

• SHINE is recruiting a Head of Operations to help lead its next stage of growth, overseeing areas including finance, governance, compliance, risk and organisational systems.

• The permanent role is 0.6 FTE, with a £55,000 FTE salary, flexible remote working and travel to Leeds at least once a fortnight.

• This is a wonderful organisation to work with and you’ll get the benefit of also working with a brilliant team

• Applications close 12pm, Wednesday 9 September 2026.

• Find out more and apply here

Funding Opportunity: Awards for All

• The National Lottery Community Fund’s Awards for All England Environment programme is open for applications from groups who want to take small, practical steps to make a positive difference to the environment and help people connect with and care for nature in their area.

• You don’t need to be an environmental organisation, they fund everyday community groups taking action close to home.

• They’re interested in funding a wide range of projects including:

  • Climate adaptation and resilience projects

  • Youth‑led or climate action

  • Community growing and food projects

  • Repair, reuse and waste‑reduction activities

  • Greener community buildings and shared spaces

  • Nature and wildlife projects close to home

  • Transport decarbonisation projects

• Grants range from £300 to £20,000 and can support running costs for your organisation, equipment, volunteer expenses, transport and utilities and more.

• Find out more and apply for the funding here

Research Opportunity: Call for Evidence

• The newly launched Boys’ Education Commission, chaired by Peter Hyman, is seeking evidence from educators and others working with boys and young men.

• It is exploring why boys are, on average, falling behind in areas including literacy, attainment and engagement, and is particularly interested in practical solutions that help boys flourish in education and beyond.

• Responses will inform recommendations for government and the education system, with the Commission reporting in Spring 2027.

• Deadline: 21 September 2026.

• Share your insights and evidence here

In the first part of this blog, I focused on the importance of understanding inequality before rushing towards intervention or action. Continuing with the medical analogy, my argument is that good practitioners do not reach immediately for treatment before they have taken time to assess and understand what might be happening. The same should be true of strategies designed to tackle educational inequality. Before prescribing another intervention, initiative or programme, schools and other settings need to be much clearer about the problem, the context in which it exists and how it is actually being experienced by children, families and communities.

But it’s important I stress that diagnosis without response is never enough either. Once we understand more, there comes a point when we have to decide what we are going to do differently. It’s easy to just continue ‘weighing’ the problem more too in the hope that at some point the idea or solution will just become really clear, and I’ve been guilty of this in school leadership at times. This is where strategies can become crowded with evaluation and where there is a temptation to equate knowing more with achieving more. A better strategy, I would argue, is not necessarily one with the longest list of interventions or data. It is one that makes better-informed choices about where action is needed, what is within our influence, who needs to be involved and how we will know whether the response is actually helping things to get better.

The medical metaphor still needs handling carefully here (and not just because I’m not a doctor!). Children, families and communities are not people to whom we simply administer chosen treatment, and schools should not position themselves as the sole experts holding the prescription. Just as effective healthcare rarely depends upon one practitioner working alone, tackling inequality requires us to think about the wider team around children and places.

In this second part of the blog, I want to move from understanding towards action. There is no ten-point plan that will eradicate educational inequality. Schools cannot solve poverty independently and it would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise. However, education settings make thousands of decisions that can either reduce the impact of inequality or inadvertently compound it. Having considered five ways to better understand inequality, here are five practical considerations for what leaders might do next and as part of working out whether anything is ‘getting better’

(6) Make surgery everybody’s business

In schools, there is a danger that tackling educational disadvantage becomes the responsibility of the Pupil Premium lead or an isolated senior leader. Usually, this person writes the strategy, monitors the datasets, reports to governors and likely manages or oversees interventions. Meanwhile, everybody else gets on with the other ‘day jobs’ or priorities of school life. In my experience, this is mostly unhelpful.

Some of the most important work to tackle educational inequality and implement strategy happens in classrooms every day. A good parallel is ‘safeguarding’; whilst schools will have a designated safeguarding lead, no school would survive by simply working in the belief that safeguarding is implemented by one person and others do not have a critical role to play in the surgery and treatment of it. Like safeguarding, tackling inequality is found in clear expectations, strong explanations, carefully curated learning for teams, consistent language, responsive assessment and strong relationships between children and adults.

Disadvantage and tackling inequality is not addressed by singular or siloed interventions that are owned by a limited number of leaders or staff. Staff development, internal briefings and communications should continuously remind all colleagues (and external stakeholders where possible) that the school (or organisation) is committed to tackling inequality, what understanding of inequality is in place and the role that each person plays in surgically addressing it.

In Tackling Poverty and Disadvantage in Schools we worked with co-authors across education and other settings to help illustrate how poverty-informed practice should never become a deficit model. This is something that every member of staff in an organisation has a role to play in developing. Children experiencing poverty do not need a diluted curriculum, nor should eligibility for Pupil Premium become shorthand for ability. They need the same ambition alongside thoughtful consideration of the barriers that might make accessing that ambition more difficult. Every colleague has a role to play in developing this mental model within the school or organisation.

What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)

• Ask five members of staff in very different roles what your organisation is trying to achieve through its approach to disadvantage or tackling inequality.

• Do you hear a broadly coherent answer? Or does one person talk about tutoring, another about attendance and somebody else simply point towards the Pupil Premium lead or statement on the website?

• Build disadvantage and inequality work/thinking into curriculum conversations and professional development rather than treating it as a standalone strategy.

• When reviewing teaching, look not only at what adults are doing but at how different pupils are responding and participating. This is something that all staff can be involved in monitoring and being curious about to a point.

• Ask whether a teacher, teaching assistant, receptionist, pastoral colleague and governor could each explain the part they play in reducing inequality.

• The best disadvantage strategy should be visible in the culture and practice of the school, not simply downloadable from the website.

(7) Make treatment accessible to all, especially those with less

Schools can be very good at describing what they offer. We offer breakfast clubs, music lessons, residentials, careers opportunities… but it is important to remember that availability is never the same as access. An after-school club might be free but inaccessible to a child reliant on school transport. Meanwhile, a heavily subdised residential may still be unaffordable for some families.

It is also important to be clear about why the activity is being offered. Once problem analysis has been established (see part 1), this should dictate what is being offered, to whom and why. If teams or strategy documents are not clear on this, then it is plausible to assume that there may be mission drift if others pick up the strategy or if it is only understood by a limited number of people.

Three questions can be useful here and may even be built into the strategy to help ensure that leaders habitually ask them:

• What are we providing?

• Why are we providing it? (What issue is it trying to address?)

• Who is not accessing it and why?

This moves us beyond the comforting idea that equality means making the same offer to everybody. Sometimes tackling inequality requires us to make different arrangements so that children and families can access the same opportunities. This isn’t about expecting schools to offer more either, it may be about refining what provision is currently available to ensure that those with less get more access to it.

What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)

• Choose three significant opportunities offered by your setting: perhaps a residential, an after-school programme and a cultural or careers experience.

• Look at who participates and then look carefully at who repeatedly does not.

• Speak to those pupils rather than assuming why.

• Audit the hidden conditions for participation. Does somebody need transport? Equipment? A packed lunch? Money in advance?

• Set an expectation that leaders monitor access to opportunity with the same curiosity they apply to attainment.

(8) Put poverty on the brain of adults in classrooms

When schools discuss disadvantage strategies, it is imperative that classroom practice is a core part of this dialogue. I have written extensively about the fact that great teaching will not eliminate poverty and I am increasingly concerned about the ways in which the educator sector holds us ‘great teaching’ as the perfect pill by which to cure persistent and complex inequalities. But it does remain one of the most strategic things that schools control.

The issue is what excellent, inclusive teaching actually looks like for pupils who may have different starting points, experiences or access to background knowledge. It is interesting that in recent years we have seen attempts from national organisations and thinkers to define neat toolkits for ‘inclusive’ teaching. But, poverty and disadvantage have been missing from some of these well intentioned attempts. When it comes to understanding and tackling inequality, it can be helpful to ask these questions (even though they don’t demand easy to find answers)

• Where does the curriculum presume experiences children may not have had?

• Where do we assume pupils understand particular vocabulary?

• Which children regularly experience success at a classroom level rather than simply in end of unit or course assessment points?

• Who participates confidently in everyday classrooms?

• Who has learned to sit quietly while understanding very little?

As noted in Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools, children and young people with more barriers to language, background knowledge or self-regulation may particularly depend upon high-quality explanation, assessment and relationships. I’ve written about the impact that poverty can have on the learning brain in various corners of the internet and in publications. It is a prickly subject perhaps, but every adult in and around a classroom environment needs to understand that these are real issues that demand careful consideration. This is not about lowering expectations but about about making success and ‘better learning’ more accessible.

What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)

• During curriculum reviews, identify where pupils are expected to possess knowledge or experiences that have never explicitly been taught.

• Examine vocabulary and language carefully. Which words or concepts are essential to understanding a topic? How are these made accessible without reducing intellectual challenge?

• Look at intervention timetables. Are pupils who already find learning difficult routinely removed from valuable teacher explanation or curriculum content? Sometimes more intervention is more overload for those already struggling.

• When observing learning, pay attention to pupils who are quiet and compliant. Are they genuinely participating and understanding? Passivity is something we should always be cautious of in classrooms.

• Ask staff whether poverty-informed practice has genuinely influenced pedagogy or simply influenced pastoral provision.

(9) Shift strategy from interventions to ecosystem

I have reached the inconvenient truth that schools and charities cannot solve poverty. I think we need to be more comfortable saying that because no high dosage of self belief, moral conviction or fancy slogan is going to shift these complex inequalities. They are unable to fix inadequate housing, raise household incomes, redesign transport systems or remove every structural inequality facing children. But nor should we give up and write ourselves off with terminal helplessness.

Schools can completely reduce barriers within their control. Leaders, educators and support staff can notice problems early, build trusted relationships, connect families to support and use their position within communities to bring different organisations together. This is increasingly how and why we think of schools as civic and social anchors within the places they serve. The PLACE approach at Tees Valley Education has taken us much further and deeper in this direction.

Take sleep inequality as an ongoing example across the places that we serve in the Tees Valley. Our response was not to decide that schools should suddenly become experts in beds or sleep science. Instead, we worked closely with organisations such as Zarach and The Sleep Charity that brought expertise we did not have in our classrooms and corridors. Schools also brought trusted relationships, knowledge of families, the ability to identify need and a place where support could be connected. This partnership, and of course strategy, is stronger because nobody pretends to do everything. I also think this requires a shift in mindsets in schools and organisations from asking ‘what programme should we adopt?’ to ‘who should we be working with to co-design a solution’?

What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)

• Identify three barriers affecting pupils or families that your school cannot realistically address alone.

• For each one, ask: Who already knows more about this than we do?

• Map the organisations operating in your community and the relationships your school already holds.

• Look for gaps. Are you repeatedly signposting families to services with no idea whether they successfully access them?

• Think about what your school brings to a partnership beyond money or resource. It might be physical space, trusted relationships, knowledge of place, convening power or professional networks.

• I would also be cautious about too many partnerships that are simply transactional. A one-off assembly or workshop may have value, but deeper challenges often require longer-term relationships.

(10) Repeatedly ask if it is actually getting better

I often think that education has a complicated relationship with evaluation. Sometimes we evaluate because we genuinely want to know whether something is working or getting better. But, sometimes we evaluate because we want to prove that something we have invested heavily in was a good idea, even if the impact cannot be seen. These are not the same thing and I’ve used both as a leader.

Education leader Shaun Allison stressed the need for educators to ensure that we don’t mistake activity for impact. He also notes that educators need to understand the challenges through observation of pupils and their learning experiences in classrooms. This is also key for evaluating the effectiveness of strategies and how well they are being enacted.

Our mission in seeking to tackle inequality should also be to understand inequality, and this means we should be in the business of understanding rather than simply proving (especially to external inspectors!). It is important to separate evaluation from accountability and recognise that activity rarely equals impact. We should also be real about the time that careful implementation and evaluation takes. Relationships take time, forging community partnerships takes time, cultural shifts take time and rarely are these achieved in the neat format of a school development plan or strategy document designed to sit across one full academic year. Children’s experiences of belonging and succeeding in the face of barriers do not necessarily shift because a twelve-month action plan says they should or must. A few years ago, I stopped thinking only in academic years. Of course we need milestones, accountability and opportunities to review progress but we need to be clear that a strategy to understand and tackle inequality will take time. The challenge for leaders is also knowing when to stop something that is not working, when to adapt it and when to give promising work sufficient time to mature. The best advice I can offer here is to remember that evaluation, like implementation, is a process and not an event.

What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)

Take the significant activities in your disadvantage strategy and remember to PACE them. It is important this is not done quickly or in a short space of time after running the activities. I would suggest a termly look at this can be helpful. I also propose these as principles rather than a neat model to apply to all activities.

• Pause: There is little evidence that the need exists or that the activity is benefiting pupils at the present time. We may need to pause or come back to this.

• Adapt: The need remains important, but the current approach is not working as intended or there is limited evidence. So, we need to adapt it carefully.

• Continue: There is promising evidence of impact, but the work needs more time. So we will continue with it and schedule the next review point.

• Extend: There is sufficient evidence of benefit to consider extending the approach to more pupils or with additional foci.

Remember to avoid evaluating only the easiest things to count. An intervention that reached 100 pupils did not necessarily improve outcomes for 100 pupils. Therefore, leaders and educators need to build space in the strategy for qualitative evidence alongside quantitative data. Leaders should also be rigorous about whether they are judging an initiative because it has genuinely had sufficient time to mature, or simply because another academic year has ended.

Writing a ‘better’ strategy is not about having more interventions, more activity or more certainty about all aspects of inequality. But, it should be enabling teams and leaders to have a deeper understanding of the problem and a deeper level of response to the issues alongside others. Tackling educational inequality requires ambition, but it also requires the discipline to question our own diagnosis, to change the course of treatment and to recognise that no school, charity or health care provider can do this work alone.

Sir William Osler was a Canadian physician remembered particularly for promoting bedside medicine teaching, careful observation of patients and the idea that good medicine depends not only on scientific knowledge, but also on judgement, humility and attention to the individual person. These seem pretty decent principles of good medicine I think. Osler is cited as claiming that, “medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.”

Perhaps tackling inequality requires us to become a little more comfortable with this uncertainty in our strategy documents and team meetings. Educators and leaders are often making decisions in imperfect conditions, drawing on evidence, professional judgement and what they know about the children, families and places they serve without pretending that every answer is complete or neatly measurable. We can get better at doing this. But this does mean also getting better at resisting the temptation to let external accountability frameworks, inspection criteria or headline measures become the sole definition of what matters in the places that we serve. Ofsted, government and other stakeholders will inevitably shape the things schools are asked to report on, but a serious strategy for tackling inequality has to be broader than the mandate of those who hold us to account. It should also be shaped by what children and families experience, what local places need and what leaders believe, on the best available evidence, is most likely to make a better difference for those with less.

I have been thinking a lot recently about what makes a strategy for tackling educational inequality a better one. I use the word better intentionally; it isn’t perfect and I would never claim to have found quick fixes or easy solutions to understanding or tackling educational inequality. But, the more time I have spent in health systems and networks, the more I think we can learn from what good medicine is; when prescribed well medicine is not simply about giving out more intervention. It starts with listening, assessment and diagnosis; trying to understand what is happening and why, before considering the most appropriate therapy or best informed response. Even then, the work is clearly not finished. Good medical practitioners evaluate, ask whether things are in fact getting better, notice unintended consequences and change course if it is needed.

I sometimes think that our collective work to tackle educational inequality should feel a little more like this. Too often in schools and other frontline teams, we can move remarkably quickly from identifying a gap or labelling a group of children to deciding what intervention they need. At the same time, I want to caution against medicine being used an easy link here. Children, families and communities facing persistent poverty are not passive patients waiting for education or charity leaders to heal them, and poverty is not an illness located within an individual person. There is no messianic role for schools, charities or standalone community leaders here.

A better strategy begins with recognising inequality needs both understanding and tackling. It also recognises that schools cannot, and should not, do this work alone. Children and families bring knowledge that organisations often do not have, while community organisations, charities and public services bring expertise that schools cannot easily replicate. Perhaps, then, a better strategy is one that takes us more carefully through understanding, diagnosis, response and evaluation getting closer to the problem before prescribing the solution.

In this blog, I’ve compiled ten principles that I think can better inform and steer strategies for understanding and tackling educational inequality. I split these across two parts (part two follows next week). This first part focuses on understanding inequality better. The second will move towards action and consider what leaders can practically do about some of the inequalities they uncover. Whilst it is mainly aimed at those working in education settings, I am sure some of the principles hold up for those serving in other sectors and anybody interested in forming better solutions to addressing poverty.

(1) Diagnose before you prescribe

A phrase sometimes used by commentators on these topics is the need for ‘assessment, not assumption’ of need. We can become far too quick in education to diagnose the problem from a distance; this is understandably driven at times by a desire for prompt action or early outcomes increases. A pupil is eligible for the Pupil Premium, attendance has fallen, assessment grades are way below average or a parent has not attended parents’ evening and we begin to construct a story around why. Sometimes that story might contain some truth, but sometimes it tells us more about our own assumptions than it does about the lived realities of children and families facing persistent poverty in their everyday lives.

I appreciate that ‘labels’ are problematic in any work, but the reality is that they can sometimes help busy and time poor leaders identify patterns, allocate resources and notice trends in data concerning inequalities. However, problems surface when labels become the diagnosis.

Marc Rowland’s (2021) work in Addressing Educational Disadvantage in Schools and Colleges: The Essex Way is helpful here. Marc encourages schools to take a learning-led rather than label-led approach and to understand how disadvantage is actually affecting the pupils in front of them. His wider challenge is to recognise that disadvantage is neither static nor experienced identically by every child, and that eligibility for a category should not automatically become a proxy for low attainment or low ability.

This idea is something that we explore heavily in Tackling Poverty and Disadvantage in Schools too. Data matters enormously, but aggregated data only takes leaders and educators so far. Two pupils who both qualify for the Pupil Premium may have entirely different experiences, assets and barriers around them. One may be thriving academically but unable to participate in wider school life because of costs associated with those activities. Another may have strong family support but struggle with housing instability. The leadership task is therefore to move from categorisation towards understanding; and the mechanics of this should be built into any strategy or policy for tackling inequality through the work of your setting.

What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)

• Take 3-5 of the most significant activities currently sitting within your disadvantage strategy and work backwards. Ask what evidence originally told you that this was a priority. Were these activities selected because of a clearly identified need, because it was supported by evidence, or simply because it was something the school had always done or others are doing?

• Look within groups, rather than only between them. Which pupils eligible for the Pupil Premium are thriving? Which are not? What seems to be different about their experiences? (I appreciate PP is not the only proxy either…)

• Consider the extent to which the strategy has break points or milestones for looking at broader datasets too. Triangulate attainment and attendance data with pupil conversations, family insight, pastoral information and what teachers are noticing in classrooms.

• This may seem obvious, but before adding another intervention in another academic year or term, make sure you genuinely understand what you are trying to solve. How clear is this in the strategy?

(2) Understand the conditions in place

National datasets are useful, but it is important to remember that inequality is always being experienced somewhere. So, we need to be mindful about relying on broad illustrations of poverty to inform what we are doing in the places we serve. The same can be said of local datasets too, they allow trends to be seen, patterns to be understood and can be a starting point for discerning need.

One of the strongest lessons from our own PLACE work at Tees Valley Education has been the importance of understanding the particular places that children and families inhabit. Poverty does not present itself in exactly the same way everywhere. Transport, housing, employment, childcare, access to health services, digital connectivity, the local labour market and even the geography of a community can shape children’s experiences.

This is why I think education leaders need to become more curious about what is happening beyond the school gates. We rightly spend a great deal of time examining school-level data. We know attendance figures, attainment gaps and demographic profiles well. But we have been more intentionally curious about we know about the wider environment children return to at the end of each day.

• What are local housing organisations seeing?

• What are food and multi-banks experiencing?

• What are public health colleagues concerned about?

• Which community organisations are seeing rising demand?

• What are families themselves telling us about the pressures they face?

Understanding place is not about lowering expectations because a community faces challenges. Quite the opposite I’d argue in that it allows leaders, educators and others to make better decisions about where barriers exist and where schools might have influence. Our PLACE (People, Learning and Community Engagement) approach is not merely a model, but rather a habit and behaviour based blueprint for understanding and tackling need. It also helps to protect us from parachuting solutions into communities based on generic assumptions or untested ideas about what said communities need (something we see too much of in education and other sectors)

What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)

• Build a simple ‘place profile’ alongside your existing school data system or MIS. This does not need to become another complicated dashboard. Identify the handful of local issues most likely to influence the lives of children and families in your setting. You cannot solve everything and, arguably, simply framing the problem as ‘child poverty’ is far too vague.

• Speak to organisations outside education or whatever sphere of influence that you are in. Invite local voluntary organisations, public health colleagues or community groups into a leadership meeting and test assumptions about problems. Ask them to share what they are seeing that they think schools or others should know about.

• Look at the assets in the community too. Place-based work should never become a catalogue of deficits but nor should it simply be a spreadsheet of local ‘good practice’.

• I’d also challenge yourself and leaders (including governors, Trustees…) to consider whether your ‘disadvantage strategy’ could realistically belong to any school in the UK. If you could change the school logo and postcode and nobody would notice, it may not yet be sufficiently rooted in your place. The same goes for any reports or outputs from any organisations existing to help schools become more poverty informed or aware of their context.

(3) Take a regular pulse

When we think about tackling disadvantage and child poverty in schools, it is easy to often think about the big interventions such as tutoring programmes, mentoring, attendance interventions or funded research projects. These things can all have value. But inequality is also experienced through hundreds of small moments across a school week and by those facing the daily hardship of poverty and disadvantage.

It can be found in the child who does not have the ingredients for food technology, the family worrying about a deposit for a trip or the pressure of non uniform days. These are important considerations and schools should, of course, give careful attention to them. But, they can at times mean school leaders and educators end up with a generic audit of ideas and practical suggestions for simply removing costs. This will be a useful support to some families, but it does not always tackle the less visible aspects of inequality and the system change needed. This is why poverty-informed practice should not sit solely inside a Pupil Premium strategy. It should influence the everyday architecture of school.

In Tackling Poverty and Disadvantage in Schools, we encourage leaders to think carefully about the lived experience of education and other aspects of daily life. One useful exercise is to move through a typical school day or week from the perspective of a child or family with limited disposable income and notice where costs, assumptions or potential stigma emerge. This does not mean removing every trip, celebration or opportunity because somebody may struggle to afford it. Poverty-informed practice should broaden access to rich experiences rather than narrow them. But, any strategy for tackling these issues should recognise that there has to be intentional and practical opportunities to find out what ‘everyday’ inequality looks ad feels like for those with less.

What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)

Choose 2-3 parts of school life and audit them forensically.

• Look at uniform and equipment. What happens when something is missing? Is support discreet and dignified, or does the response inadvertently expose poverty?

• Look at trips and enrichment. Who participates and who repeatedly does not? Do you actually know why?

• Look at homework and resources. What access to devices, books, printers, quiet space or adult support is being presumed?

• Look at food and the school day. Are there moments when children become visibly marked out because of what they can or cannot afford?

• Look at communication with families. Do payment systems, apps and letters make participation easier, or do they inadvertently create another barrier?

• The question I keep coming back to in our work with schools nationally and in our own academies is this… just because something is technically available to every child, does that mean every child can genuinely access it? Those are two very different things.

(4) Listen before deciding what ‘better’ is

Schools collect huge amounts of information about children and even families. Yet schools, like other organisations, are sometimes less effective at generating insight with them. One of the strongest lessons from our own work, and increasingly from my doctoral research, has been the value of creating deliberate space for children to tell us what adults might be missing or not attending to.

Children and young people can have sophisticated understandings of inequality, and I can point you to a stack of evidence to show this if you want it. They have a tendency to notice who cannot afford to participate, differences in clothing, access to food and experiences. Young people also understand embarrassment and belonging way more than they are often given credit for. It still fascinates me in all of the talk around missions, opportunity areas and ‘belonging’ discourse that children and young people are passengers in the dialogue rather than playing a key role. The things that children and young people notice are not always the things adults have chosen to measure.

The same principle applies to families. ‘Hard to reach families’ is a useful example here. It’s a phrase still commonly used across schools. Yet, a parent or carer who rarely attends school events may be working shifts, have had poor experiences of education themselves, lack transport or simply find the systems we use difficult to navigate. Sometimes it is worth asking whether the family is genuinely hard to reach, or whether the school has become hard to reach (to cite the ever brilliant Professor Liz Todd). Listening is therefore not an additional intervention but part of understanding need. Any strategy for tackling inequality needs to be clear how this is being implemented, where it is being done and how the insight is being used.

What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)

• Meet with a small and diverse group of pupils and ask what makes it easier or harder to participate fully in school life. Avoid turning this into another satisfaction survey or tokenistic piece of ‘pupil voice’

• Ask families about the costs associated with education (and living!) they find most difficult to manage. The answers may include the small and unexpected costs that leaders or educators rarely see.

• Look at whose voices dominate consultation. Which parents attend meetings? Which children join councils? Which families respond to surveys? Then ask whose perspectives remain missing.

• Provide different ways for families to contribute. Anonymous surveys may surface things that people are understandably reluctant to discuss face-to-face.

• Most importantly, close the loop. Tell children and families what changed because of what they said. But I would also avoid this being transactional language only such as ‘you said, we did’.

• Consultation without visible action quickly becomes performative. We should not repeatedly ask communities to describe problems to us without being honest about what we can change, what we cannot change and where we need other people alongside us. So, be mindful how often this is being done and how.

(5) Get better data beyond headline and accountability measures

Attainment and attendance matters. Yes, I know the Department for Education and Ofsted look closely at these and I don’t want to suggest that tackling educational inequality should dilute the value of these. But they are not the entirety of inequality.

If we look only at headline outcomes and what schools are ‘judged’ on externally, we risk missing important differences in children’s experiences long before they appear in examination results. Participation in enrichment will now be more closely looked but it should not take a government mandate for schools to want to care about this (the schools tackling inequality will already be doing this).

Again, Marc Rowland’s work makes a useful connection here between disadvantage, classroom belonging and positive learning experiences. His commentary also challenges schools not to confuse activity with impact and to look carefully at whether pupils are actually thriving rather than simply counting what has been delivered. This is useful because some inequalities are hidden by averages. A school may have an excellent enrichment programme, but the same pupils may participate every time. A careers programme may reach every year group, but some children may still struggle to imagine themselves in the opportunities being presented.

We therefore need to broaden what we are curious about. To give examples, through our PLACE work we focus on looking also at the metrics and measures that underpin the problems we are working with others to address (e.g. food insecurity, careers opportunity take up, sleep inequality gains, participation in child agency opportunities to understand about poverty etc)

What can this look like? (These are intended as suggestions rather than an exhaustive list of ‘must do’ activities)

• Alongside your existing attainment and attendance measures, identify two or three experience measures that matter in your setting (you will need to identify what these are if you have not yet identified them)

• You might look at participation in enrichment, access to trips, pupil belonging or representation in pupil leadership.

• Disaggregate participation data where possible. Do not simply ask how many children attended but ask who didn’t and then be curious as to why.

• Use qualitative evidence alongside quantitative measures. Sometimes a conversation with ten pupils will reveal something that a spreadsheet of ten thousand cells might be unable to. Data is rarely linear!

• Please avoid choosing measures simply because they are easy to count! Measure what matters, rather than allowing what can easily be measured or what is judged externally. A strategy should never be determined only by what ‘others’ judge or care about.

Before we ask what we are going to do about inequality, it is important to become much better at understanding it. That requires data but it also requires curiosity, proximity and a willingness to have some of our assumptions challenged. In the second part of this blog (coming next week), I will move from understanding to action and consider five practical things leaders can do to tackle some of the inequalities they uncover, within classrooms, through school corridors and alongside the communities they serve.

No sooner had the end-of-term bell sounded than we were packing the car, checking the passports for the hundredth time and heading for the airport. Given the nature of my job, I never really take the full academic summer off. But this year, despite reaching the end of term somewhere between tired and completely exhausted, we had already schedule to get away right at the start of the holidays.

We’re heading somewhere rather ‘magical’. Slightly less magical is packing four people for intense heat and for a place where knowing almost anything seems to come with a fairly hefty price tag. Packing in our house is quite the operation; digital lists, itineraries and enough forward planning to impress a small military unit. The grown ups strive for organisation; the two teenagers travelling with us are fiercely independent while remaining remarkably dependent on Mum knowing where absolutely everything is! When the inevitable panic starts (e.g. Have we got this? Did somebody pack that?) we usually come back to the idea that as long as we have the ‘essentials’, we can work out the rest along the way.

I think the same is sometimes true of our work to understand and tackle inequality. The issues are complex, systemic and sometimes described as ‘wicked’. All of this can feel somewhat heavy to those of that are at the frontline of understanding and tackling these issues (especially when we throw tiredness into the mix!). But every now and again, it helps to check we have packed the basics in this work I think.

• Are we listening?

• Are we noticing what is happening in people’s lives and the places we serve?

• Are we working with communities rather than doing things to them?

• Are we staying furiously curious?

Perhaps these are the ‘bare necessities’ of this work. We get these principles right and it enables us to interrogate the more complex issues along the way. That is what I have tried to intentionally craft this Substack to become; a place to signpost people, partnerships, places and principles that are helping me think differently about inequality. I remain genuinely humbled that so many of you choose to read it.

I write post this whilst in transit and I’ve curated some of the most-read and most popular pieces from the past academic year. Consider them a few essentials worth packing away for reading in the summer or as go into the boarding area of another academic year. Save them, share them and come back if they’re useful. Then, after a bit of a rest, we can unpack the more complicated stuff together again.

“You’ve got a friend in me”

Posts exploring the value of partnerships and place-based work

• Lean into knowing: a post exploring the ways in which we can work with others to shift from assumption to assessment of need.

• Beyond classrooms and clinics: A fantastic guest blog from Dr Guddi Singh on ensuring cross sector lenses in our work to dismantle inequalities

• Cuppa with a Change Makers: A post exploring some of the trending contributors that were featured on the Cuppa with a Change Maker series this past academic year

“Do you wanna build a snowman” (or evidence base?)

Posts exploring the value of evidence and curiosity

• Out of Touch: In this two part blog I explored the value of evidence and using it with intent and integrity when it comes to disrupting inequality.

• Don’t kill the cat: Here I explore how we can remain curious in our work to understand inequality, without killing any cats in the process…

• Being furiously curious: this is where I explain how the term ‘furiously curious’ came about and why it might be helpful in your own work

“Be our guest!”

Posts from guests that have landed brilliantly with readers

• Coaching equity: Jonathan Ferstenberg on the value of coaching to develop others in understanding and tackling inequality

• On improving schools: Paul K. Ainsworth on the basics of school improvement to support communities facing persistent inequalities

• Lace up, left out: Jo Lowes on developing a culture of inclusion and reducing the cost of participation in sport and other activities

• Look Who’s Talking: Eleanor Lake on the value of accents, belonging and curiosity in a world of inequality.

Thanks for journeying with me!

If you’d like to pitch to feature something on this Substack next academic year then I’d love to hear from you. I can’t promise that everything makes the cut, but always welcome ideas and reflections from others.

Complete this application form to offer your suggestions

I’m taking some needed time off for holiday during the summer months. So, expect less of these summaries. I’ll be back during the mid-late August time with more regular updates. Thanks for journeying and learning with me.

Sean

Stubborn disadvantage gap ‘early challenge’ for incoming PM

The ‘disadvantage gap’ has widened again in England across every phase of education and is wider than before the pandemic, according to a recent analysis.

Debt before desks, UN report reveals

Over 100 nations are now spending more on foreign debt repayments than education as global education aid continues to fall

Scotland to provide more activities for children with less

An additional £2.5 million is being invested across Scotland to expand free after school activity clubs for primary school children from low-income families.

World cup impacted attendance in classrooms

Around 332,000 fewer pupils attended school after England’s late-night victory over Mexico, prompting more concerns for children not attending school.

Research matters in shifting policy

New analysis highlights how research helped secure the scrapping of the two-child benefit limit, a change expected to lift around 450,000 children out of relative poverty by the end of the decade.

💡Research & insights

^{A reminder on some style changes…. in the recent survey feedback, 4,288 of you said that you sometimes struggle to keep up with the summaries and there is often too much content! Thanks for this feedback. Although this wasn’t everybody…. it is worth testing an adaptation. I’ll keep the insights area to three ‘new’ insights (e.g. reports) and one ‘reminder’ (e.g. archives blog). I’ve also included a personal takeaway for each insight as many of you shared you like to get a personal insight from me on the papers! (Don’t take my words as solemn though!)}

Connecting data:

_{Intelligent and informed delivery to support every child to succeed}

_{[Child of the North, N8 Research Partnership, Health Equity North and Centre for Young Lives, 2026]}

Access the insights here

• A substantial new Child of the North report here arguing that children’s lives are connected across education, health, social care, housing and family circumstances, but the services intended to support them still too often operate separately. It’s a good report on how actionable change can be achieved.

• It’s useful for showing how the UK has spent considerable time worrying about the risks of sharing data, while paying less attention to the risks of not sharing it.

• When different agencies each hold one piece of a child’s story, emerging needs can be missed, support can arrive late and families can repeatedly be asked to explain the same circumstances to different professionals.

• The report draws together learning from the wider Child of the North programme, involving policymakers, researchers and public-service leaders, and practical examples including Connected Bradford.

• The proposed response is a national network of Connected Integrated Care Boards. These would link relevant health, education, social care and wider public-service data through secure NHS infrastructure, but remain locally governed and responsive to the needs of particular places. Importantly, the report does not call for one enormous central database. It proposes nationally supported but locally delivered systems.

• Connected Bradford provides the main proof of concept. It has securely linked health records with education, social care, housing, benefits, environmental and policing data. This allows local partners to see how needs overlap across neighbourhoods, rather than counting each contact with a service as an isolated problem.

(Source: CotN, 2026)

• There is also a particularly useful section on education. Schools, nurseries and colleges are among the few institutions reaching almost every child and family, so they should be full partners in connected public-service delivery. However, the report is clear that this should not leave schools carrying responsibility for every social challenge. Their role is to help identify emerging needs and connect children and families with wider support.

• One of the most important cautions is that data alone will not improve children’s lives. The report’s recommendations and practical suggestions emphasise children first, equity, place-based approaches, partnership, education, responsible information sharing and research.

• Usual outputs here for those developing place-based work. National datasets may tell us where inequalities appear, but they cannot be separated from local context.

• ^{My takeaway: Probably going to become one of my go-to reports for showing that children do not experience poverty, health, education, housing and family life in separate departments. So our responses cannot remain departmental either. Better data only matters when it leads to earlier help, less friction for families and more meaningful action. We can’t rely on datasets alone to do this…}

Impact of school breakfast programmes in primary schools in England

_{[Holford and Rabe; Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, 2026]}

Access the insights here

• New research looking at the impact of free, universal breakfast schemes operating mainly in disadvantaged primary schools in England. It fells timely given the government’s national rollout of before-school breakfast clubs!

• The scale is worth noting. The researchers bring together provision data from Magic Breakfast, the Greggs Foundation and the National School Breakfast Programme between 2006 and 2024, linking this with the National Pupil Database, National Child Measurement Programme and Understanding Society.

• This means it covers almost 17% of English primary schools and an estimated 60% of schools offering free breakfast provision.

• One of the most useful findings is that the way breakfast is provided. Classroom provision reaches 84% of pupils, Grab and Go more than 65%, Mixed provision around 51%, but traditional before-school Breakfast Clubs reach only 28%. Free does not necessarily mean accessible, especially where attending requires families to reorganise pressured morning routines.

• Attendance findings are much less impressive. Breakfast schemes reduced absence by around 0.13 days per child each year, with fewer than one child in a typical school moving out of persistent absence. This cautions about presenting breakfast clubs as an attendance intervention in themselves.

• There are more encouraging findings for learning. Breakfast provision was associated with approximately one additional week of progress in KS2 Reading and Maths. This is a modest effect, but a potentially meaningful one when delivered at scale and as part of a wider response to disadvantage (I also think we have to be careful about presenting these datasets as totally conclusive!)

• There is an important complication worth being aware of here too. Breakfast schemes were associated with a small increase in obesity prevalence: 0.25 percentage points in Reception and 0.36 percentage points in Year 6. These effects were mainly driven by classroom provision, where breakfast may become a social default for children who have already eaten at home.

• But I am hoping this is not another route to blaming children or families for bodyweight. It does, however, reinforce that the nutritional content, timing and delivery of breakfast is important. High take-up alone is not evidence of a successful model, particularly where provision risks encouraging children to eat twice rather than reaching those experiencing genuine food insecurity.

• The study found no measurable improvement in families’ reported financial situation or their spending on groceries and takeaways. A free breakfast may still provide welcome relief for individual families, but its monetary value may simply be too small to shift wider household finances in a way that is detectable within this data (except I do know some personal exceptions to this….)

  

  (Source: Holford & Rabe, 2026)

• ^{My takeaway: Free breakfast provision is important and no academic evidence will tell be otherwise, but the food, timing and route into it need to be considered. Don’t confuse provision with access, access with take-up, or take-up with impact etc. A national rollout should not become a childcare offer with some food attached; it should provide a flexible, inclusive and nutritionally strong start to the day, built around the realities of children and starting the day right. Otherwise both learning and children will likely suffer….}

If the new Prime Minister is serious about the next generation, it starts with the disadvantage gap

_{[McCulloch; Education Policy Institute, 2026]}

Access the insights here

• A timely commentary from Julie McCulloch at the Education Policy Institute, challenging an incoming Prime Minister in the UK to retain the commitment to halve the disadvantage gap.

• The latest EPI analysis shows that disadvantaged children are already nearly five months behind their peers at age five. This grows to ten months by the end of primary school and 19 months by the end of secondary school.

(Source: EPI, 2026)

• We know that obsession with gaps is unhelpful, but analysis like this is useful for showing that attainment gaps are not simply created in classrooms. Around 40% of the disadvantage gap seen at age 11 is already present by age five, reinforcing the importance of early development, family income, access to services and the wider conditions surrounding children before they even begin school.

• The post-16 findings are particularly concerning. Almost one-quarter of disadvantaged young people are not studying towards a substantial qualification or apprenticeship after Key Stage 4, compared with fewer than one in ten of their peers.

• Place matters too. By age 16, the difference between the strongest- and weakest-performing local authorities is equivalent to almost two years of learning.

(Source: EPI, 2026)

• EPI is using this analysis to call for stronger early years access, investment in SEND and mental health services, a 16–19 student premium and additional funding for persistently disadvantaged pupils. They are also pushing for wider measures of wellbeing, belonging and engagement rather than relying only on attainment and attendance data (something I absolutely support!)

• Usual outputs here for schools and trusts. Gap data should help us ask better questions, not reinforce deficit assumptions about children, families or communities. Schools matter enormously, but they cannot independently compensate for poverty or unequal access to opportunity.

• ^{My takeaway: Useful reminder that disadvantage gaps are not evidence that low-income families/children lack aspiration, effort or ability. It shows how inequality accumulates around them over time and across all phases of their educational trajectory. Measure the gap, but then please look beyond it…. the data tells us where inequality appears; children, families and communities help us understand why.}

From the Archives: Mud, sweat and slippers

How to be ‘furiously curious’ without culling calories or cats

[Harris; 2024]

Access the insights here

• A while back I offered this personal reflection on school attendance, hardship and the danger of reducing absence to simple stories about parental attitudes.

• I begin with my own experience of secondary school, when migraines, difficulties with PE and a growing sense of not belonging contributed to a pattern of Friday absence. Check out the blog to see how I once had a full head of hair!

• My argument throughout is that poor attendance is rarely the whole problem; it is more often a symptom of something else. Health, food insecurity, unaffordable uniforms, transport costs, insecure housing, SEND, caring responsibilities and negative experiences of school can all make regular attendance more difficult.

• The blog challenges punitive and overly simplistic responses. Attendance fines, rewards and tighter routines may address the visible absence without understanding, or changing, the conditions producing it.

• The policy implications include widening free school meal eligibility, reducing branded uniform requirements, recognising poverty within attendance guidance and ensuring schools can provide practical financial support when families face crisis. It’s interesting to now see some progress being made on these…

• ^{My retrospective takeaway: I still advocate for what’s written in this piece! A school or college register tells us that a student is missing, but not why. Before blaming routines or parental attitudes, we need to understand the hardship children may be navigating. Attendance becomes more attainable when belonging matters alongside it.}

🪴Opportunities

Opportunity: Invitation to Tender

Learning Programme for SHINE-Funded Project Leads

• SHINE is seeking an experienced partner to design and deliver a two-year learning programme that will support teachers leading SHINE-funded innovation projects.

• Our project leads are developing ambitious ideas to improve educational outcomes for children from disadvantaged backgrounds across the North of England.

• They are looking for a partner who can help them build the skills, confidence and networks they need to take their projects from early-stage ideas through to sustainable, scalable programmes.

• The successful partner will design a learning programme that strengthens leadership, project management, evaluation, collaboration and reflective practice, while creating opportunities for peer learning and connections beyond the SHINE network.

• We are particularly interested in hearing from organisations with experience of supporting social entrepreneurs, founders or early-stage innovations to grow and scale, alongside a strong understanding of collaborative learning and, ideally, the education sector.

• The programme is expected to begin in September 2027, with a budget of up to £60,000 over two years.

• Proposals should be submitted by 30 October 2026.

• For full details of the opportunity, including the programme scope, eligibility, evaluation criteria and submission requirements, please download the Invitation to Tender here.

Role Opportunity: Turn2Us

Research & Learning Manager

• Turn2us is a national charity tackling financial insecurity and its structural causes.

• They work with co-producers and partners to provide people in financial crisis with the means and agency to get back on their feet, build resilience, move forward with their lives and thrive.

• The Research and Learning Manager will lead Turn2us's research activity in complex and emerging areas including place-based approaches, co-production, stigma and systems change.

• Salary: £46,901

• Contract: Permanent, full-time

• Location: Hybrid between home and the Turn2us London Hub in Farringdon, with at least one office day each week

• Deadline: 9am on 7 August 2026

• Visit here to find out more and apply

Funding Opportunity: Children in Need

Core and project funding

• BBC Children in Need supports organisations working to improve the lives and wellbeing of children and young people aged 18 and under across the UK, including those affected by poverty, poor mental health, disability, family difficulties and social injustice.

• Grants range from £1,000 to £40,000 per year and can be awarded for up to three years. Organisations can apply for either project delivery costs or essential core costs such as staffing, administration, communications, governance and evaluation.

• Eligible applicants include charities, CIOs, qualifying CICs and other not-for-profit organisations working directly with children and young people.

• Schools and other statutory organisations should note that the fund will not pay for services they already have a legal duty to provide. It may, however, consider clearly additional work that sits beyond normal statutory provision and is targeted towards children experiencing disadvantage.

• Find out more about the funding here

Last Chance: Bag your bargain summer reads quick!

30% Off Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools

• Thanks to those lovely people at Bloomsbury Education, you can grab a copy of our award winning book in the Bloomsbury Summer Sale

• Get access to insights, research, case studies and reflective activities to help prepare for a new academic year for a bargain!

• You’ll also get access to free-to-use downloadable content and resources linked to the book which can readily applied in schools and other settings

• Get access to and order your copy here

If you read Part 1 and returned for this, then it means I’ve got your attention. Thanks! Last week, I explored why attention deserves more attention in conversations about poverty, inequality and learning.

For some children and young people, attention may already be stretched by stress, hunger, poor sleep, shame or uncertainty before learning even begins. I explored how we should avoid making crude assumptions or lower expectations. Instead, I argued for the need to ask better questions.

Attention is something worthy of our attention. It is the difference between noticing something and not noticing it; a good split decision and a poorly executed one. Part 2 explores further implications for practice… probably worth more of our attention

Many educators will be familiar with the famous ‘invisible gorilla’ experiment by Simons and Chabris (1999). Participants were asked to watch a video and count basketball passes. While concentrating on the task, a person in a gorilla suit walked through the scene. Remarkably, the vast majority of participants did not notice the gorilla at all. The study became one of the best-known demonstrations of inattentional blindness; when our attention is intentionally focused elsewhere, most of us can miss something obvious right in front of us. I’ve ruined the ending now, but if you want to see it play out check out this video.

I have been giving this attention recently and its implications for those of us working in areas of high need. Rightly so, our focus is often on the impact of poverty and inequality on the children and families it hurts the most. That must remain central, but I wonder whether there is another gorilla in the mist. The experience of serving in high-pressure, high-need environments may also be shaping the attention, judgement and cognitive bandwidth of those working and serving within them.

Gorillas in our mist

Let me give a personal example. In one of my various leadership roles some years ago, I worked in an area of high challenge. Resources were tight, budgets were limited and need was rapidly increasing in the community. It was a role I enjoyed, for the most part. The staff were brilliant; pupils were wonderful. Yet, like all schools filled with human beings, there were mistakes, difficulties and moments that hurt. I ended up working around the clock. Evenings, early mornings and weekends all became part of the routine, and the problem was that it still did not seem to shift the levels of high need seen in almost every area of the community. Every day became a fire fight; there was always another issue, another urgent need, another problem to solve, another plate to keep spinning. I am sure there were things we could have done differently even then, but we didn’t seem to have the capacity to do anything about this.

Eventually, I left the role for pastures new. I did not leave under a cloud and in many ways, I still look back on the role with appreciation. But in the months and years that followed, I noticed something. I could think more clearly, I could focus better; sense-check decisions more sharply. My interactions with friends, colleagues and, above all, family seemed to be generally healthier too. Yet I hadn’t spotted the gorilla amidst the daily fog or mist that I had been working in.

This is worth your attention if you care about your efforts to make a difference.

Looking back, I now think I had normalised a stress response. I had normalised the aches and pains at the end of the week; standardised walking into school wondering what would go wrong that day and how long it would be before an ‘urgent’ issue was brought to me. I had normalised the growing sense of dread as results days approached too. I knew aspects of the improvement model were not working, but amidst the mist of urgency and gorilla workload, I did not have the attention to give that realisation the attention it needed. Perhaps others and I did not have the cognitive bandwidth to fully appreciate what was happening because we did not really understand the barriers or the problem.

Evidence is perhaps worth further attention here again also. Lupien et al (2009) reviewed evidence on the effects of stress across the lifespan and showed how stress can affect the brain, behaviour and cognition. Chronic stress is not just an emotional inconvenience; it can shape attention, memory, decision-making and how people respond to threat or uncertainty.

This is worth your attention if you care about your efforts to make a difference.

This feels especially important in education and charities because improvement work often assumes that we can keep adding more; more interventions, more monitoring, more data, more meetings, more urgent actions, more “quick wins”, more strategies, more everything. Yet cognitive load theory reminds us that working memory is limited and that learning can be hindered when unnecessary load overwhelms the capacity to process what matters (Sweller, 1988). This is usually applied to pupils in classrooms or students in university, but I think it has something useful to say about adults too. If leaders and educators are overloaded, distracted and constantly switching between urgent demands, then we should not be surprised when deep thinking becomes harder. Yet deep learning is something that we often need.

This is worth your attention if you care about your efforts to make a difference.

I wonder how many others are in this position. Some may still be in schools, charities, councils, health services or community roles trying to serve children and families in increasingly complex circumstances. Some may have already left these helping professions; I do not judge that. This is not about resilience, grit or trying harder. I am not sure “have you tried being more resilient?” has ever been the supportive insight people seem to think it is. I am more interested as to whether the topic of attention is getting the focus it likely needs.

If educators, support staff and leaders are constantly operating in high-pressure environments, then their ability to reflect, notice patterns, interpret evidence, challenge assumptions and make careful decisions may also be affected. This is important because any organisation serving areas of high need are not simple teams solving simple problems. The work is complex, relational, emotional and often unpredictable (very much like poverty itself). It requires careful thought, not just urgent action.

This is worth your attention if you care about your efforts to make a difference.

Poverty-informed practice needs attention. I am learning more and more that a commitment to deep social justice needs deep social listening; this is supported by deep learning and deep curiosity. Problems and challenge need time to diagnose, not just reactionary solutions. Poverty and inequality needs leaders, organisations and educators who are supported to think, not merely expected to cope. So perhaps one of the most practical things we can do is to give attention back to the adults too. That might mean coaching, structured reflection, pre-mortems before major projects, peer review, curiosity clusters or protected time to ask what is missing. It means creating cultures where staff, at all levels, can share the struggle with another person before the struggle becomes a private burden. Not as a wellbeing bolt-on, but as a necessary condition for better thinking.

Deep work for deep social justice

Cal Newport’s Deep Work literature argues that the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks is becoming increasingly rare and valuable. He distinguishes between deep work, which creates value and develops capability, and shallow work, which often keeps us busy without necessarily helping us think better.

This is worth our attention if we want to have a deeper impact.

There is something important here for education especially, but not because schools need another productivity slogan or policy paper. I really want to avoid here any kind of additive to school leaders believing that high-need schools should simply “work smarter, not harder”. That phrase can sound like a laminated insult when someone is already working flat out, eating lunch next to a laptop, replying to emails at night and wondering whether tomorrow will be any calmer.

This is not about squeezing more output from exhausted people. It is about creating enough space for the kind of attention that complex work requires. Schools and other organisations serving communities facing poverty and inequality need more than speed; they need depth. They need time to understand the barriers faced by communities; they need space and depth to look beyond averages and assumptions. Leaders and other colleagues need time to connect curriculum, relationships, attendance, family support, health, sleep, housing, transport and local opportunity. They need time to notice the gorillas in the mist of the everyday.

This is worth our attention if we want to have a deeper impact.

This is also where classroom practice matters. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) showed the value of retrieval practice for long-term retention. For pupils whose memory, attention or processing may be under pressure, routine opportunities to retrieve, rehearse and revisit knowledge can be especially important. This does not need to be elaborate either; regular low-stakes quizzing, self-explanation, deliberate revisiting of concepts and carefully sequenced opportunities to connect prior learning can all help pupils strengthen recall without constantly overwhelming them with new material. Whilst this is important for educators, I would stress that it is valuable for team meetings, professional learning, virtual conferences and for anybody that plays a role in designing information or learning opportunities in any capacity.

Similarly, reducing unnecessary distractions is not about creating joyless learning environments where nobody smiles until it is finished. It is about being intentional. about showing that we know memory and attention is finite. Sweller’s work on cognitive load reminds us that unnecessary information, competing instructions and cluttered presentation will likely make learning harder (Sweller, 1988). Mayer’s work on virtual learning also warns against overloading learners with too much simultaneous visual and verbal information (Mayer, 2009). Sometimes the most inclusive educational motion is not the most colourful, animated or exciting one. Sometimes it is the clearest one which is designed with attention in mind.

This is worth our attention if we want to have a deeper impact.

That does not mean every hour can be protected. Schools, charities and healthcare settings are are busy, human, unpredictable places. A wasp entering a classroom can destroy the most carefully sequenced learning episode known to humankind (spoken with experience and a scar from the sting!). But some time has to be protected; some time has to be carved out for focus and curiosity. Some capacity and resource has to be treated as precious because attention is not a luxury in this work.

For pupils, that might mean classrooms where distractions are reduced, concepts are revisited, retrieval is routine and cognitive overload is avoided. For staff in organisations, it might mean fewer performative meetings, clearer priorities, better-designed professional learning, coaching conversations and space to think together before rushing to the next initiative or conference. For leaders, it might mean resisting the urge to fill every gap with another project, another dashboard, another urgent action plan. It might mean looking at what is already happening and asking how to have a deeper impact with it, rather than introducing something new.

This is worth our attention if we want to have a deeper impact.

Sometimes the most poverty-informed thing we can do is not to add more. It is to pay better attention to what is already happening. To notice the patterns; listen more carefully and recalibrate activities around the longer-term impact or deeper purpose that we are here to have. John Hitchin’s recent blogging on place-based evidence and practice is a good example here. I’m humbled that the work of Tees Valley Education feature here, but more encouraged by the fact that it gave us opportunity to be attentive to the learning and insights we have gained from working with others on place-based approaches in the Tees Valley.

John and team have been working to develop a deeper taxonomy of place-based change which outlines five categories for typical approaches for intervening in places. The case study that we provide particularly fits within Category 3, which seeks to change how institutions understand their relationship to communities and the terms on which that relationship operates. John’s blog is well worth your attention if you interested in the deeper impacts that can be achieved through place-based thinking, evidence and practice.

(Source: Place and Evidence, 2026)

If we want to shift the conditions holding poverty and inequality in place, then we need to understand the problems in front of us and the structural issues driving them. Diagnosis then is not a luxury or clever skillset, but rather a vital part of our work in and alongside communities and people facing need. If we want to see and coordinate an impact then we need to co-construct conditions where both children and adults can have enough cognitive space to think, be curious and learn.

Attention is not simply about concentration or being sharply focused; it is about care and curiosity. It might be the difference between what we choose to notice, what we are too busy to see and what becomes possible when we create the conditions to think and understand better. In work and communities shaped by poverty and inequality, what we notice can change what we do next and what might be possible today and tomorrow.

If I still have your attention, then thank you :)

There are a bunch of writers and thinkers below worthy of it too

References and further reading

• Blair, C. and Raver, C.C. (2016) ‘Poverty, stress, and brain development: New directions for prevention and intervention’, Academic Pediatrics, 16(3 Suppl), pp. S30–S36.

• Evans, G.W. and Schamberg, M.A. (2009) ‘Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(13)

• Hanson, J.L., Nacewicz, B.M., Sutterer, M.J., Cayo, A.A., Schaefer, S.M., Rudolph, K.D., Shirtcliff, E.A., Pollak, S.D. and Davidson, R.J. (2015) ‘Behavioral problems after early life stress: Contributions of the hippocampus and amygdala’, Biological Psychiatry, 77(4), pp. 314–323. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2014.04.020.

• Harris, S. (2026) ‘Tackling Poverty and Disadvantage in Schools’, Bloomsbury Education.

• Hitchin, J. (2026) ‘Institutions changing how they think about place’, Place & Evidence, 3 June. Available at: Place & Evidence Substack

• Lupien, S.J., McEwen, B.S., Gunnar, M.R. and Heim, C. (2009) ‘Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), pp. 434–445

• Mani, A., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E. and Zhao, J. (2013) ‘Poverty impedes cognitive function’, Science, 341(6149), pp. 976–980. doi: 10.1126/science.1238041.

• Mayer, R.E. (2009) Multimedia Learning. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press.

• Newport, C. (2016) Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Piatkus.

• Raizada, R.D.S., Richards, T.L., Meltzoff, A. and Kuhl, P.K. (2008) ‘Socioeconomic status predicts hemispheric specialisation of the left inferior frontal gyrus in young children’, NeuroImage, 40(3), pp. 1392–1401. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.01.021.

• Roediger, H.L. and Karpicke, J.D. (2006) ‘Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention’, Psychological Science, 17(3), pp. 249–255

• Shah, A.K., Mullainathan, S. and Shafir, E. (2012) ‘Some consequences of having too little’, Science, 338(6107), pp. 682–685

• Simons, D.J. and Chabris, C.F. (1999) ‘Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events’, Perception, 28(9), pp. 1059–1074. doi: 10.1068/p281059.

• Sweller, J. (1988) ‘Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning’, Cognitive Science, 12(2), pp. 257–285

10 million free breakfasts served in schools

Free breakfasts have been served to over 300,000 children while saving working families up to £450 and 95 hours of childcare each year, according to government.

Burnham sights education system changes

A “complete rethink” of how young people are supported to succeed “has to start with the education system”, Andy Burnham has said.

Baby-bank demand rises by 11% in a year

Charities warn they cannot continue absorbing child poverty on this scale without greater government intervention

North East continues to tackle child poverty

The Mayoral Authority Child Poverty Reduction Unit continues to lead an impact; with partners recently sharing learning and priorities at a regional child poverty summit.

The schools putting more arts opportunities for those with less

With some schools cutting back on the arts, the dot-art Schools programme is fighting back. The results are on the walls of one of the UK’s most prestigious galleries.

💡Research & insights

^{A quick note on some style changes…. in the recent survey feedback, 4,288 of you said that you sometimes struggle to keep up with the summaries and there is often too much content! Thanks for this feedback. Although this wasn’t everybody…. it is worth testing an adaptation. I’ll keep the insights area to three ‘new’ insights (e.g. reports) and one ‘reminder’ (e.g. archives blog). I’ve also included a personal takeaway for each insight as many of you shared you like to get a personal insight from me on the papers! (Don’t take my words as solemn though!)}

Gender differences in peer relationships and their link with absences from school

_{[Jerrim; UCL Social Research Institute and ImpactEd Group, 2026]}

Access the insights here

• Recent research from Professor John Jerrim looking at relationship between pupils’ peer relationships and school absence, using TEP pupil-level data from the 2024/25 academic year.

• The scale is worth noting as it covers 112,629 pupils across 129 schools, linking pupils’ engagement responses across three census points with authorised and unauthorised absence rates.

• One useful finding is not simply that ‘friendships matter’ but rather more precise than that. The risk seems to sit with pupils whose peer relationship scores are very low, rather than with pupils moving from average to strong peer relationships.

• For secondary girls in particular, very poor peer relationships are associated with a sharper rise in unauthorised absence. The link is described as non-linear, absence risk is concentrated in the bottom tail of peer relationship scores, not spread evenly across the whole cohort. (worth a view of this blog from TEP on this!)

• Usual outputs here for charities and schools working to implement projects to support ‘peer relations’ or even ‘belonging’. A universal “let’s improve peer relationships for everyone” programme may be helpful culturally, but the evidence suggests it may not be precise enough to shift attendance for those most at risk.

• Many of us know that attendance is often a lagging indicator. By the time absence appears in the register, something else may already have been shifting around belonging, friendship, confidence, emotional engagement, family stress or perceived relevance of school.

• The diagram near the start of the paper is a useful illustration of how absence develops; attendance is not just a behaviour to be managed, but the product of wider conditions around the child.

(Source: ImpactEd, 2026)

• For pupils facing poverty-related barriers to learning, there are potential links here. We know that low-income pupils are already more likely to experience higher absence, with DfE data showing FSM-eligible pupils have almost twice the overall absence rate of non-FSM pupils and are over two and a half times as likely to be persistently absent.

• For pupils living with poverty, housing stress, sleep insecurities, food insecurity, caring responsibilities or wider family strain, fragile peer relationships may become one more pressure point in a much wider system.

• ^{My takeaway: Don’t read absence or gender gaps in datasets as defiance/lack of effort before you have understood the conditions around the child and family. The register tells us who is missing, but not what they are missing from, what they are avoiding, or what has made attendance harder. As always, attendance (like other aspects of school life, is relational way before it is statistical!)}

Building a Preventative Mental Health System for Children and Young People

_{A report prepared for the Child of the North All-Party Parliamentary Group}

_{[Child of the North; APPG, 2026]}

Access the insights here

• Latest report from colleagues at the Child of the North; it’s a hard read but one worth our attention (and doesn’t just explore the North of England)

• It’s further evidence that children and young people’s mental health cannot be fixed by a system that waits for crisis. Prevention has to start much earlier, by improving the conditions around children’s lives (e.g. family support, poverty, belonging, school experience, trusted adults and community infrastructure)

• A core message I’m championing from the paper is that poverty is mental health policy. Low income, housing insecurity, food and sleep insecurity, parental stress and reduced access to safe spaces all shape children’s wellbeing. The report is clear that disadvantage is not background context; it is part of the mental health story that sits in and around children and the places they navigate.

• The national picture is a bleak one, but also worth pointing out that regional disparities exist too, as shown in the diagram below.

(Source: CotN, 2026)

• Some hope in the paper is that schools matter because they can be protective environments (e.g. places of routine, relationship, safety, belonging and early support) But schools can also become risk environments when children experience exclusion, pressure, weak relationships or feel they do not belong. Something that was clearly evidenced in this recent safeguarding review

• The report makes a strong case for rebuilding the wider ecosystem around children. Youth services, libraries, sports clubs, arts provision, family hubs, voluntary organisations and safe community spaces are all part of the preventative mental health system.

• ^{My takeaway: Mental health prevention has to be rooted in places; if children’s mental health is shaped by the environments they grow up in, then the response has to be built with families, schools, communities and local partners not delivered through services alone. Something we believe firmly in PLACE, especially in our response to sleep inequalities in the Tees Valley. Read the practical policy recommendations at the end of the report too!}

A Focus On Disadvantage

_{A Set of Focused Inquiries to Drive School Improvement}

_{[Elevate Schools Partnership; 2026]}

Access the insights here

• This a practical resource bank around addressing educational disadvantage and maximising the impact of Pupil Premium. Marc Rowland describes it as a developing Padlet of resources, with further reports on place-specific disadvantage due to follow (worth signing up if you haven’t yet….)

• It’s useful for showing that the Pupil Premium should not become a compliance document or a pot of money attached to a label; as we often share in our national training with schools it should be a whole-school strategy for understanding barriers, improving provision and strengthening outcomes for pupils experiencing disadvantage.

• Whilst evidence continues to show that high-quality teaching matters most; regular readers know I caution heavily against the idea we can simply ‘teach kids out of poverty’. But in the context of the PP; the spending should be being used along targeted academic support and wider strategies.

• The reports are also useful for showing some of the challenges and wins that came from implementing some of the PP strategies too. Example below…

(Source: ESP, 2026)

• The report linked above helps to show that disadvantage is not just an attainment gap (we need to avoid obsession with closing gaps!). It is also about access, opportunity, belonging, expectations, relationships, confidence, curriculum, attendance and family experience.

• ^{My takeaway: It strengthens my view that the PP should be making us more curious and not just compliant in schools. The best strategies do not start with a funding line; they start with knowing children, understanding place, and designing school around the barriers pupils are actually facing.}

From the Archives: Don’t Kill the Cat

How to be ‘furiously curious’ without culling calories or cats

[Harris; 2026']

Access the insights here

• Back in January I wrote this piece on diets and habits season as a route into a bigger argument. Habits stick when they are designed into existing routines, supported by cues, and made manageable.

• My main idea here is that curiosity around inequality and poverty should be treated as a habit, not a one-off event. Tackling inequality requires more than “a big event” it requires building routines that help us understand problems better before rushing towards solutions or projects.

• Regular readers will be familiar with my idea of being ‘furiously curious’; I’ve noted some actionable ideas in the piece on how to do this.

• ^{My retrospective takeaway: I still advocate for what’s written in this piece, it would be helpful for others to share how this looks beyond schools too. It’s worth a read even if just for a glimpse of my cats when they were kittens (they are now much bigger… so perhaps I need to be curious about what we’re feeding them!)}

🪴Opportunities

Role & Resource Opportunity: Tackling poverty in Wales

• Children North East have partnered with Resolve Poverty and the Welsh Government to deliver a three‑year programme to reduce the cost of the school day and tackle the impact of poverty on learners across Wales.

• Running from 2026 – 2029, it will help remove financial barriers so every child can thrive, as part of Welsh Government’s commitment to equity in education.

• The programme will help schools, settings, governing bodies and education staff identify the barriers to attendance, engagement and attainment that arise from economic circumstances. It will provide evidence-based support, professional learning and guidance to help achieve equity in provision.

• You can read more about the project by visiting Minimising the Impact of Poverty in Education - Children North East

• Children NE are also appointing a project co-ordinator to help develop this project and lead on implementation. Find out more here

Role Opportunity: The Difference

Director of Engagement & School Partnerships

• The Difference is looking for a Director of Engagement & School Partnerships to help grow the relationships that bring more schools, trusts and local authorities into our work on whole-school inclusion.

• This is a front-to-back role; not a traditional sales position, and not a programme content role, bringing partnerships, delivery, impact and learning together as one coherent cycle.

• This role would suit someone with real credibility with schools, trusts or local authorities, who has designed or improved partner journeys, and who can hold commercial and mission discipline in the same breath

• We talk about the Difference in Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools and their work continues to attract regional and national attention

• Well worth a look at this role

• Salary: Up to £75,000 (depending on experience)

• Location: Hybrid, with a minimum of Mondays and Tuesdays in Bethnal Green, London, and national travel for delivery

• Contract: Permanent, 0.8–1.0 FTE with flexible working options

• Closing date: Monday 20 July

• Visit here to find out more and apply

Funding Opportunity: Historic England

People Fund

• Historic England’s People Fund supports projects that help communities understand, engage with and champion England’s historic environment, including heritage education, volunteering, skills development and community-led local history work.

• Grants range from £1,000 to £500,000, so it can support both small local projects and larger regional or national heritage programmes.

• Eligible applicants include charities, CICs, schools, educational organisations, local authorities, community groups, voluntary organisations and companies limited by guarantee, as long as the project relates to England’s historic environment.

• The fund is especially interested in inclusion, diversity and equality; community engagement; youth and education projects; heritage skills; and helping local people have more voice in decisions about their heritage.

• Deadline: Open-ended, but worth applying early

• Find out more about the funding here

Have you packed your summer reading?

30% Off Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools

• Thanks to those lovely people at Bloomsbury Education, you can grab a copy of our award winning book in the Bloomsbury Summer Sale

• Get access to insights, research, case studies and reflective activities to help prepare for a new academic year for a bargain!

• You’ll also get access to free-to-use downloadable content and resources linked to the book which can readily applied in schools and other settings

• Get access to and order your copy here

☕🫖You pour the brew, I’ll provide the content

In these ‘Cuppa with a Change Maker’ blogs, I’ll feature a guest that is passionate about social justice and tackling educational inequality.

These Cuppa with a Change Maker blogs were brewed out of a belief that there is good practice out there and reason to be hopeful.

In today’s Cuppa with…. Sharan Kaur Varaitch, founder of Build & Conquer Financial Literacy, reflects on the complex relationship many young people have with money and why financial literacy must go beyond simply teaching budgeting or banking terminology. At a time when many schools are thinking even more carefully about how education can better prepare young people for life beyond the classroom, Sharan’s insights offer a compassionate perspective on why meaningful financial education matters. She also does a great job of challenging simplistic narratives around poverty and “poor choices”, something I am equally passionate about!

So, don’t expect a blog about blame! Instead, pour a brew and consider opportunity and how to support young people navigate an increasingly complex financial world with greater understanding and dignity. Money talks, but Sharan does a better job of it….

(Sharon with pupils)

Hi, I’m Sharan and I’m somewhat obsessed with money…. but don’t worry, you’ve not stumbled on one of those ‘become a billionaire in a weekend’ influencer type reels. Perhaps ‘obsessed’ is the wrong word in this context. I’m ‘furiously curious’ (as Sean might say!) about money, finance and even more curious about how we teach it to support young people, especially those with less.

Let me tell you about my background because it helps illustrate how I ended up in this place and talking about money. I grew up in Smethwick in the West Midlands, an area often associated with high levels of poverty and inequality. Like many people, my understanding of money did not come through formal lessons or textbooks. It came through everyday life, overheard conversations at home, worries around bills, watching adults trying to make things stretch and slowly becoming aware of how much money influences stress, confidence and the opportunities people feel are open to them. We probably learn more about money in these earlier ages than many of us realise, and it is this that continues to make me curious.

As I got older, I became increasingly curious about our relationship with money and why so many people spend their entire lives using it every single day without ever really being taught how to understand it. That curiosity eventually led me into entrepreneurship and financial education, but it also forced me to reflect on my own experiences and assumptions around money. There are many phrases I hear ‘economic wellbeing’, ‘financial literacy’, ‘fiscal wellbeing’ and some of this may cause different reactions in you. At the core of it, I believe that financial literacy or ‘money matters’ is far more than numbers, cash flow or budgeting.

Money matters

(Source: Build & Conquer)

Over time, I realised that financial literacy is about far more than numbers, spreadsheets or budgeting apps. Money is deeply tied to identity, wellbeing, life chances, security, opportunity and self-worth. It can shape how safe people feel, the decisions they believe are available to them and sometimes the extent to which they feel able to participate fully in society. Anybody that has had to survive on limited or low-income perhaps knows this only too well.

This understanding has heavily influenced the work I and others do through Build & Conquer Financial Literacy. Too often, financial literacy is framed purely as a knowledge gap, as though financial hardship simply exists because people do not understand money well enough. In reality, life is much more complex than that. This is something that can become a damaging and problematic myth on some many fronts, not least because it suggests that many face poverty or financial insecurity because of bad decisions or their own mistakes in life. Whilst this may be a reality for some people, we need to be careful about suggesting that this will be the known reality for all. Furthermore, it does not account for the many structural and systemic issues facing families and young people navigating inequality.

For many children and young people, money is not first encountered as an abstract mathematical concept. It is experienced through the realities of daily life and some grow up acutely aware of financial strain within the household. Others might witness parents balancing impossible trade-offs, worrying about rising costs or working incredibly hard simply to keep things stable. These experiences shape how young people think and feel about money long before they enter adulthood. Research from Harter and Harter (2021) explores the relationship between childhood adversity and adult financial wellbeing. They found that adverse childhood experiences, including poverty and instability, could be associated with greater financial anxiety in later life, lower financial confidence and more difficulty achieving long-term financial wellbeing in adulthood.

Across the UK, millions of children children to grow up and live in contexts where financial pressure forms part of everyday life. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, almost one in three children in the UK are currently living in poverty.

(Source: JRF, 2026)

That reality is not the result of individual failings or families somehow making inherently poor decisions about money. The overall systemic evidence reflects wider structural issues including insecure employment, rising housing costs, inflation, low wages and increasing inequality. Children, above every group in society, have been hit hardest by these rising insecurities and inequalities. Let this sink in for a moment… the group with less fiscal resource, experience and knowledge are being hit hardest by poverty and other insecurities. Therefore, it is essential that children and young people are given the skills, knowledge and opportunity to help navigate these issues. Money isn’t everything and it certainly isn’t a silver bullet to happiness or wellbeing, but I believe that money matters. Especially for those with less access to it!

Money talks

(Source: Build & Conquer)

Money-based conversations around finances can still become unhelpfully moralised. There remains a tendency in some public discourse to assume that financial hardship is primarily about personal responsibility, when the evidence paints a far more nuanced picture. Think about some of the language that we use about money and what we know children and young people can be exposed to:

• “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

• “You’ll never get rich working honestly.”

• “Your network is your networth”

• “Get rich, or die trying!”

• “A penny for your thoughts?”

• “I’m terrible with money.”

• “Money makes the world go round”

• “If they stopped wasting money, they’d be fine.”

• “Take care of the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves”

• “Money is the root of all evil”

• “Talking about money is rude or impolite”

Research from Mani et al (2013) suggests that ongoing financial pressure can significantly affect cognitive bandwidth and processing capacity. When people are living with persistent financial stress or uncertainty, decision making often becomes shaped by urgency, short-term pressures and the emotional weight of instability. This is not about irresponsibility or poor character, but about the psychological impact of living under sustained strain.

In many ways, this sort of creates a compounding effect. On one level, children and young people may already be exposed to unhelpful narratives and anxieties around money within wider society and in everyday (or social media!) talk about money. Alongside this, evidence suggests that unequal access to financial security and resources can itself affect an ability to think, plan and make decisions clearly over time.

I think this matters enormously when we consider children and young people, especially those navigating inequality and poverty. For some, money is not experienced as a neutral topic. It may already be associated with stress, worry, limitation or uncertainty long before adulthood begins, shaping not only financial understanding but also confidence, wellbeing and how young people view the opportunities available to them. For some, conversations around money might carry embarrassment, stigma or shame. Others may avoid financial discussions altogether because they have rarely experienced them openly or positively.

This is one of the reasons I believe financial literacy matters so much. Not because young people from lower-income backgrounds need ‘fixing’, but because all young people deserve access to practical knowledge and understanding that helps them navigate an increasingly complicated financial world with greater confidence. Most adults were never formally taught these things either, I know I wasn’t!

Many young people still leave education without a good understanding of payslips, taxation, credit, debt, mortgages, pensions or digital financial risk. They may know how to solve equations or analyse texts, but still feel completely unprepared when faced with real-life financial decisions for the first time. I am not calling into question here the value of a broad and balanced curriculum, I am posing the challenge that without a good understanding of money in it, children and young people are likely leaving classrooms and schools without a vital component of knowledge that we know is needed by everybody, especially those navigating inequality.

Putting money in the classrooms

(Source: Build & Conquer; St Mary’s CE Primary)

Schools and colleges are already carrying huge responsibilities and I see this every week in my work across schools and alongside the education system. Educators across the world quietly support children and families facing financial hardship every single day, often far beyond what anyone outside education fully sees. I also realise that classroom curriculum is only one aspect of this. Teachers, leaders, pastoral and support staff provide stability, care, opportunities and practical support in ways that extend far beyond the classroom. Money will inevitably be a part of these day-to-day conversations with children, young people, parents and carers.

That is why this conversation or any ‘money talks’ should never become about blaming schools for not doing enough. In many ways, schools are already doing extraordinary things within increasingly difficult circumstances. I am tired of the rhetoric that schools need to simply fit more in to their PSHE curriculum alongside everything else. That is unsustainable and totally unrealistic!

What I have found through our work is that many educators and other adults genuinely want to teach financial literacy more meaningfully, but often lack the time, confidence or curriculum space to do so consistently. Financial education exists in parts of the curriculum, but it can sometimes feel fragmented or reduced to isolated lessons on budgeting, salaries and interest rates. Meanwhile, many teachers themselves were never taught these topics growing up, which can understandably make the subject feel intimidating to deliver.

Our approach at Build & Conquer has therefore been less about creating “experts” and more about helping schools create a healthier, more open and more practical culture around financial understanding. Quite simply, we want to help bring ‘money’ into the classroom for busy educators and leaders facing complex demands on time, energy and resource (including budgets!). We approach financial literacy in a way that feels grounded in real life rather than overly theoretical. We work with schools to support educators to understand that young people arrive with very different experiences of money and that financial education should acknowledge those differences rather than assuming everyone starts from the same place.

It also means creating spaces where conversations around money can happen without judgement. Sometimes what appears externally as a “poor financial decision” makes far more sense when viewed within the context of instability or lived experience. Prioritising immediate spending may reflect uncertainty about the future, avoiding financial decisions can stem from anxiety or overwhelm and a strong focus on earning money may come from growing up with very little financial security.

Understanding these issues is important because it changes the nature of the conversation. Rather than framing financial literacy around correcting behaviour, it becomes about helping young people build confidence, awareness and critical thinking. Our curriculum has been developed alongside teachers and piloted across primary schools, secondary schools, sixth forms and colleges. We encourage schools to embed financial literacy gradually and realistically through tutor time, PSHE, enrichment opportunities, assemblies and wider curriculum links, rather than treating it as a one-off initiative.

Here are some insights from some schools we have worked with.

It’s never really just money…

(Source: Build & Conquer; St Mary’s CE Primary)

What has been most encouraging is seeing how strongly children and young people engage when discussions feel relevant to their lives. When lessons move beyond abstract theory and connect to housing, employment, online influence, debt, saving or financial pressure, students often contribute with honesty and maturity. I am also regularly reminded that children and young people want to talk about money and these topics, recognising the value of it far beyond the amount a person earns or has access to.

We have also seen how these conversations can begin to reduce stigma or anxieties around these topics. Young people become more willing to ask questions, challenge assumptions and speak more openly about money without embarrassment. For me, this is important because it reminds me that financial literacy is not simply about helping young people manage money more effectively in the future. It is also about helping them feel more informed, more confident and less excluded from conversations that shape so much of today and their tomorrow.

If financial education is going to be genuinely meaningful, then I believe it has to recognise the realities children young people are already navigating, and this is especially important for those children and young people navigating inequality and poverty-related barriers to learning. It has to move beyond simplistic ideas about “good” and “bad” choices and acknowledge how deeply money is shaped by context, opportunity and lived experience. For so many of these children and young people, money has never really been just about money. We have a valuable role in helping them see this and you’re worth on this topic cannot be measured in money!

Teachers change lives. Financial literacy changes futures.

Further links

• Cooper, K. and Stewart, K. (2013) Does Money Affect Children’s Outcomes? A Systematic Review. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation

• Evans, G.W. and Cassells, R.C. (2016) ‘Childhood poverty and adult psychological well-being’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(52), pp. 14949–14952.

• Harris, S. and Morley, K. (2025) Tackling Poverty and Disadvantage in Schools: London: Bloomsbury.

• Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2026) UK Poverty 2026: The essential guide to understanding poverty in the UK. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

• Lusardi, A. and Mitchell, O.S. (2014) ‘The economic importance of financial literacy: Theory and evidence’, Journal of Economic Literature, 52(1), pp. 5–44.

• Mani, A., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E. and Zhao, J. (2013) ‘Poverty impedes cognitive function’, Science, 341(6149), pp. 976–980.

• Mullainathan, S. and Shafir, E. (2013) Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. New York.

🫖 Fancy a cuppa?

Could you be one of my next guests?

Here's a link that will take you to a quick form about the blog series. I'll be running 1-2 a month, so I would love to add prospective authors to the schedule.

Please do pass the link on to other change makers you might know of.

Ideas for content might include:

• Particular project making a difference to the lived realities of hardship for others

• Innovative approaches to understanding and/or tackling inequalities

• Signposts of further support, free resources etc on a specific issue

• Ideas or examples do not have to be school based

I’m happy to promote approaches, strategies and ideas, but avoid using the blog as a sales pitch for a particular product or traded offer please! (By all means signpost an offer if you think it helps)

It’s getting to the end of another academic year and, for many of us, focus and energy are perhaps beginning to feel like luxuries. But my attention, or lack of it, is not simply a reflection of tiredness or how much caffeine I have consumed….

If a movie isn’t gripping me, I’ll drift towards social media and somehow find myself locked into some form of educational debate or discourse, usually to find out if the internet has finally solved educational inequality in a quick post. I enjoy reading in bed too, but it only takes one of our cats to appear next to me and I find myself distracted by the comfortable purr, the tiny bean paws, and the subsequent sleep that follows. Attention doesn’t last long before shut eye. I blame the cats and my brain for this!

Attention is something worthy of our attention. It is the difference between noticing something and not noticing it; a good split decision and a poorly executed one. The difference between hearing what a child or young person is really saying and only responding to the behaviour that happens to be right in front of us. Yet, rumour has it that attention itself is getting less attention than it probably needs. This probably has some value when we think about poverty and educational inequality in any setting.

Split decisions

Many of the readers of this Substack I suspect are working in areas of need where split-decisions matter. But we also serve and exist in a world where our own attention and focus is divided and split. Netflix on the television or laptop, phone in hand, group chat open, social media scrolling away in the background. The media might technically be in the room with us, but our attention is probably elsewhere. I am as guilty of this as anyone and I’ve lost count of the number of times I have claimed to be “watching something” while also reading an article, checking emails and wondering why the plot feels thin.

It is not just the un-gripping streaming drama either. Google’s own research on mobile sites found that over 55% of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes more than three seconds to load, for context… it used to be around eight seconds. Three seconds is apparently the limit of our collective patience before we decide that tech has failed and the website no longer deserves our focus. Perhaps it says something about the speed at which we expect information, interaction and response.

I am not convinced this is all bad news. My own brain feels able to process certain things more quickly than it used to; I can skim, search, scan and filter information at a pace I probably could not manage years ago. I find myself being able to read across multiple reports, pull out the key messages and make connections more quickly than I once could. I know it won’t last forever, but for now I will use that ability and count my blessings for being in a role that allows me to be furiously curious about inequalities.

Still, it raises questions for those of us working in schools, communities and systems shaped by poverty and inequality. To what extent are our split decisions being made with the attention and focus needed.

• What happens when a child or young person arrives in the classroom with their mind already managing stress, uncertainty, tiredness, hunger or disruption?

• How do we respond to adult learners struggling to focus or maintain attention?

• What evidence are we drawing on to understand the barriers to learning faced by those that we want to support and help?

• What happens when the adults trying to support pupils and families are also working in environments that split and exhaust their own attention?

From the outset, I want to be clear. I am not suggesting that attention will be a challenge for every brain facing low-income hurdles. Poverty does not affect all children and families in the same way, and we should always be cautious about crude assumptions, deficit thinking or lazy labels. But evidence does indicate that attention, memory and learning are probably worth more of our attention.

Poverty on the brain

Poverty is not simply a social issue. It can shape almost every aspect of a child’s life, including the conditions in which learning takes place. In Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools, we explore some of the research on poverty, early life stress and the learning brain, while also being clear that this evidence needs to be handled with caution. Research evidence does not indicate that every child growing up in poverty will experience the same cognitive, emotional or neurological impact. Nor does it allow us to make simplistic claims that poverty alone causes particular learning difficulties or challenges. But it does help us understand why learning can become harder when children and young people are living with accumulated stress, uncertainty, instability and financial hardship.

Blair and Raver (2016), for example, argue that poverty can influence children’s development through multiple interacting pathways, including stress exposure, reduced access to enriching learning opportunities, environmental unpredictability and the effects of adversity on self-regulation. Their work is useful because it avoids simplistic claims that poverty causes one clearly understood outcome. Instead, it helps us see poverty and hardship as a set of conditions that can shape the development of attention, executive function, emotion regulation and learning over time.

This is worth your attention if you care about learning.

It is important because executive function is not an optional extra in learning, be in classrooms or anywhere else for that matter. It includes the ability to manage attention, hold information in mind, regulate impulses and shift between tasks. These are not simply useful skills. They are part of how children and young people listen, remember, retrieve, organise, write, solve problems and participate in conditions for learning. Research by Evans and Schamberg (2009) found that childhood poverty was associated with poorer working memory in young adulthood, and that this relationship was mediated by chronic stress during childhood. In other words, it was not simply poverty as an income category that mattered, but the prolonged exposure to stress that often accompanies poverty and navigating hardship.

Hanson et al (2015) also explored the relationship between early life stress and brain structures associated with emotion and memory, including the amygdala and hippocampus. Their findings suggested that children exposed to early life stress, including low socioeconomic status, could show differences in these areas, with potential implications for behaviour, memory and self-regulation. Again, this is not a reason for educators to overreach or start making amateur neurological diagnoses in staff briefings. You don’t have to be an educational psychologist here either, the thing worth giving attention to here is that any learning brains are shaped by lived and living experiences. This is worth our attention when considering how we support those facing more barriers because they navigate with less resource and money.

There is also useful evidence from Noble et al (2015), who found associations between family household income, parental education and children’s brain structure, particularly in regions linked to language, reading, executive function and memory. Raizada et al (2008) similarly explored socioeconomic differences in children’s neural processing of language, highlighting how inequality can show up not only in outcomes, but in the conditions that support the development of language and learning. This matters for schools and other organisations because much of what we ask children and young people to do in any learning environments depends on attention, language, working memory and the ability to process complex information.

This is worth your attention if you care about learning.

This is where I think we sometimes have the wrong conversation. It is easy to blame the most visible thing in front of children and young people; the phone, the advert, the social media feed, the video game; the constant ping of a notification. Those things undoubtedly play a role. I am not pretending that infinite scrolling has been designed by self-help gurus with a deep commitment to human flourishing, I know that the opposite is probably true. But for some children and young people, the strain on attention probably doesn’t begin with TikTok, Netflix or YouTube. It may begin with poor sleep, hunger, anxiety about money, parental stress, unstable routines, or simply the emotional load of living with less resource and too much uncertainty.

Attending to attention

If you’ve read this far, then perhaps I’ve got your attention.

The correlation of what we’ve covered so far with scarcity and attention is worth exploring briefly. Shah, Mullainathan and Shafir (2012) suggest that scarcity changes how people allocate attention. It can create a kind of tunnelling effect, where urgent pressures tend to dominate mental bandwidth and other important concerns are pushed out. Mani et al (2013) also found that poverty-related concerns can consume cognitive resources, leaving less mental capacity available for other tasks. Anybody who has ever had to navigate living on a tight budget knows full well the way in which ‘survival’ can feel like it permeates all aspects of life. The problem with evidence and research of this nature is that it sometimes gets misused to suggest that people in poverty make ‘poor decisions’, but I think the better reading is more compassionate and more useful to steer to the fact that poverty often forces people to make difficult decisions under conditions of pressure, uncertainty and reduced bandwidth.

This is worth your attention if you care about tackling inequality.

That feels important for schools, charities and other settings. A child or teen worried about whether there will be food at home, whether a parent is okay, whether their uniform will be noticed, whether they slept badly again, or whether they are going to be laughed at because they cannot afford something, is not simply choosing to withhold attention. Their attention may already be allocated elsewhere; it might be that their mind may be busy with survival, belonging, status, safety or shame.

This does not mean lowering expectations or standards. It means understanding the conditions in which attention is being asked to operate. In schools, it means asking whether some pupils are being expected to concentrate in classrooms while their minds are already carrying more than we can see. It means recognising that phrases such as “just focus” is not always a helpful instruction when the barriers to focus may be social, emotional, material and environmental.

This is worth your attention if you care about tackling inequality.

Perhaps we need to ask better questions. Have we considered whether attention might be harder for some children, teens or adults/families because their minds are already managing more?

• Have we thought carefully about how poverty-related stress may affect memory, recall and processing?

• Have we designed classrooms, learning environments, conferences, and explanations in ways that help others attend to what matters most?

• Have we reduced unnecessary noise, clutter and cognitive overload?

• Have we made retrieval routine, instructions clear, concepts revisited and distractions deliberately diluted?

In other words, are we creating learning and working environments that support strained brains rather than simply demanding that we/they concentrate harder?

I’ve split this blog into two to avoid overloading your attention. Part 2 will follow next week, but you may want to bookmark this post by way of recap

References to sources featured in Part 2

Millions could face retirement poverty

Recent data suggests 3.7 million homeowner households may fall below a moderate retirement living standard, with single women particularly exposed.

Tutors urge caution on using AI to tackle disadvantage

Tutors have called on the DfE to involve practitioners and offer human oversight before introducing AI tutoring tools for up to 450,000 disadvantaged pupils.

Early Years Ofsted ratings may not reflect daily realities for children

58% of concerns about Ofsted ‘outstanding’ early years providers were logged after their most recent inspection, suggesting ratings may quickly fall out of date.

Private school VAT has not triggered pupil exodus, claims Ed Secretary

Recent admissions data shows no surge into state schools following the introduction of VAT on private school fees.

Student creativity helps to fund social change

More than 114,000 young people have used art to explore identity and belonging, generating $1 million for organisations supporting displaced communities worldwide.

💡Research & insights

Towards a Place-Informed Analysis of Trainee Teacher Recruitment:

Rural-Coastal England as a Case Study for International Considerations

[Ovenden-Hope; DfE & Plymouth Marjon University, 2026]

Access the insights here

• Ovenden-Hope’s paper worth a read as it challenges the idea that England has one uniform teacher-recruitment problem requiring one national solution.

• Using rural and coastal Cornwall as a case study, she shows how access to teacher training is shaped by transport, housing, employment opportunities, cultural belonging and the resources available to individuals and families.

• Some of the key learning includes:

• It’s a small but detailed qualitative study. It draws on interviews with nine trainee teachers and leaders from nine initial teacher training providers. Those providers represented 75% of Cornwall’s 12-provider training landscape and included university, school-centred, MAT and further-education routes. The aim is not to claim statistical representation, but to examine how structural conditions are experienced by those trying to enter the profession.

• Geography creates material barriers to becoming a teacher. Cornwall has a population of almost 600,000 spread across 1,300+ square miles. Within this context, 78% of the trainees in the research required access to a private vehicle for their school placements. One participant described travelling almost two hours each way. Transport is therefore not a minor inconvenience: it can determine which training provider, placement or eventual job someone can realistically access.

• The costs of training are being absorbed by families. Some 68% of the trainees relied on family support to manage their training costs. This matters because a system that quietly assumes access to a car, accommodation or emergency financial help will inevitably be easier to navigate for those with greater family resources. Community support may help people remain on their course, but it can also disguise how inaccessible the system is for trainees without that support.

• Housing is part of the teacher-supply problem. The local tourism economy, growth in holiday lets and pressures associated with second-home ownership have reduced the availability of secure and affordable housing. Participants reported living in caravans, travelling long distances or depending on relatives. Recruiting someone into training is of limited value if they cannot afford to live near their placement or remain in the area after qualifying.

• Place can shape whether trainees experience belonging. Cornwall was recorded as 93.6% White British in the 2021 Census. The paper describes how ethnically diverse trainees can experience cultural and professional isolation, with one participant questioning whether they would remain somewhere they felt like “the only different person”. Workforce diversity is therefore connected not only to recruitment but to belonging, professional networks and the wider character of a place.

• My personal take-away: Place matters (but of course I’d say this…) A training course may technically be open to everyone, but access is not equitable when participation depends on owning certain assets. Place does not merely provide the background to an educational problem; it helps produce the conditions through which that problem is experienced.

Growing up hungry:

Measuring UK child food insecurity in 2026

[Shepherd et al; Social Market Foundation, 2026]

Access the insights here

• This recent report from SMF provides a useful picture of family and child hunger across the UK. It’s based on a nationally representative survey of 2,500 parents, alongside policy analysis and interviews with food and poverty experts,

• The headline is that food insecurity is not primarily a problem of individual choice or food knowledge. It is a predictable consequence of poverty, insufficient income and rising essential costs.

• Family food insecurity in the UK is concerningly high. Over the past 12 months, 15% of parents reported not having enough food at some point, including 4% going without regularly.

• Children are being directly impacted most. 1 in 5 parents (21%) said their children are being affected by food insecurity, defined as experiencing either a lack of food for their children, being unable to provide them with a balanced meal, or relying on a few low-cost foods for their children “always” or “often”.

• Child food insecurity varies sharply across regions, household types, and family size with levels the highest in London (27%), the North West (22%) and Wales (22%), compared to 21% nationally.

(Source: SMF, 2026)

• There are signs food insecurity is worsening over time. Almost half (44%) of parents polled said they struggle more today than they did five years ago, with just 20% struggling less.

• Support services may not be reaching all the families that need them. Despite higher uptake among food insecure families, use of these forms of support is still lower than might be expected given their experiences, with 21% reporting that they used none of the above, suggesting there may be unmet need or untapped access to support.

• There are four core recommendations in the report…

  • Continue to expand existing food support policies by strengthening free school meal funding and administration

  • Tackle food deserts to improve access to affordable, healthy food, such as through providing grants to food retailers in underserved communities.

  • Strengthen public procurement by incentivising farmers to supply fresh, locally produced food.

  • Introduce tax incentives for food donation, bringing the UK into closer alignment with comparable European countries and increasing the volume of surplus food redistributed to those in need.

• My personal takeaway: A useful reminder that child hunger is not principally a food problem. It is a poverty problem and it requires a whole-system response. It is something we should be forming responses to in communities and alongside others, as it impacts everything else

CAP report 2026:

Stronger together

[Christians Against Poverty; 2026]

Access the insights here

• Thirty years ago in 1996, CAP was born into a world where a quarter of the UK lived in poverty.

(Source: CAP; timeline of deepening impacts, 2026)

• Today, poverty is more severe, and it is increasingly affecting those in employment. This report goes into the complex realities of modern poverty and shares how local churches, backed by CAP, are helping to better understand and tackle it - so, it’s worth a moment of your time!

• The report evidence base comprises 511 voluntary survey responses from 3,207 active clients, administrative data covering 4,165 new client households, and interviews involving 25 people with direct experience of CAP’s work.

• The report is useful for showing that debt is rarely an isolated financial problem. It is woven into housing, food, energy, health, disability, relationships, employment and children’s experiences of education.

• It also challenges overly individualised explanations of hardship. Budgeting education may be useful, but it cannot close a recurring £273 monthly deficit.

• If priority debts aren’t dealt with, the consequences can be severe. People may face eviction for non payment of rent or their gas or electricity may be cut off if energy bills are unpaid.

(Source: CAP, 2026)

• Resilience and money-management skills cannot compensate indefinitely for an income that is insufficient to meet essential costs.

• For those working through place-based approaches, it’s useful evidence for showing the value of trusted local infrastructure.

• My personal takeaway: Churches (& other faith groups) and community organisations can provide relationships, reach and continuity that statutory or remote services sometimes struggle to. This does not replace an adequate welfare system or action on incomes, but it’s a vital part of local responses.

From the Archives: Departing Disadvantage

Strictly leadership reflections

[Ainsworth; 2026]

Access the insights here

• Every so often, it’s worth resurfacing a blog from my archives by way of a reminder for regular readers and a fresh lens for new ones.

• Given recent leadership transitions in government in the UK, it feels topical to resurface this excellent blog from my pal Paul K. Ainsworth

• In it, Paul reflects on the importance of leadership transitions in schools and other settings, especially in areas of high need.

• Whilst the opening link of the article may feel like yesterday’s news, the topic of exiting and emerging leaders does not.

• Lots in here for anybody aspiring to leadership or currently thinking about pastures new, whether in government or not….

🪴Opportunities

Final Reminder:

Support for sixth form students: Sutton Trust Online

• Get your students free support from leading social mobility charity the Sutton Trust to help them apply for and succeed in university or an apprenticeship

• Students in Year 12 or equivalent can now apply for Sutton Trust Online (STO).

• STO is packed with resources and interactive activities, including webinars from universities, opportunities to speak to current uni-students and apprentices, and expert personal statement support based on what universities are looking for.

• This is a self-paced and low-pressure programme designed to fit around study and other commitments. Programme completers will become Sutton Trust Alumni, gaining access to exclusive opportunities for years to come.

• Students can check if they’re eligible and apply via

• Find out more here and please share the opportunity with schools

Role Opportunity: Asylum Matters

Campaigns & Policy Manager (Hybrid)

• Asylum Matters is recruiting a Yorkshire and Humber Campaigns & Policy Manager (remote/hybrid) to lead collaborative campaigning with refugee and migrant organisations and people with lived experience of the asylum system.

• The role will also support the charity’s national policy work across asylum justice, accommodation, financial support and the right to work, requiring strong campaigning, policy analysis, partnership-building and influencing skills.

• Applicants must submit a CV and a supporting statement

• Candidates with lived experience of the UK asylum system who meet them are guaranteed an interview.

• Closing date:  20 July 2026

• Visit here to find out more and apply

Funding Opportunity: AI for All

The Different Foundation

• Grants of up to £2,500 are available for registered charities with annual income between £150,000 and £1.15 million that are widening access to AI and tackling inequality in technology.

• Priority will be given to projects addressing digital bias, amplifying underrepresented voices and developing AI that works more fairly for everyone.

• Deadline: 31 August 2026

• Find out more about the funding here

Thanks for your feedback!

• In recent weeks, I’ve invited readers to give feedback on the future direction and steer of this Substack. Your feedback is really appreciated!

• One lucky reader will be chosen at random later today from the list of responses and get a copy of the award winning Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools

• I’ll also be in touch in the summer to give a summary of how the Substack will adapt to meet the feedback and continue to offer support for you

The Tees Valley is our home at Tees Valley Education, it is where our work is anchored, where our understanding has been shaped and where, alongside others, we are already turning concern about child poverty into practical action.

This is important to remember when statistics and commentary can sometimes give an indication that poverty in the North East communities is beyond our reach as civic and social leaders. Of course, evidence indicates that opportunity remains deeply unequal and research from partner organisations such as the Sutton Trust continues to expose the uneven chances available to children and young people depending which postcodes they inhabit. But the Tees Valley, like many other Northern areas, is not a place standing still waiting for others to provide the blueprint for change.

Across the Tees Valley, schools, community organisations, charities, businesses and civic leaders are working together to understand inequality more clearly and respond to it more effectively. We are witnessing where collective action can make a difference not through isolated projects or optimistic claims, but by testing assumptions, listening carefully and learning what it takes to create lasting change. This work has helped us develop a stronger theory of change for the Tees Valley; identifying the conditions that hold inequality in place, understanding what must shift and imagining a more equitable future alongside the children, families and communities who live here and call this place ‘home’.

We are also immensely proud of what the Tees Valley already offers and the potential for change in local communities that we serve. The Tees is a place of rich heritage, industry, ingenuity and pioneers who repeatedly imagined possibilities beyond the realities confronting them. PLACE grew from this premise and from a conviction that local inequality is not inevitable.

Our anchor is deliberately hyperlocal, but our outlook cannot be. It is why we have committed to being deeply curious about evidence and practice locally and beyond the immediate places that we serve; working generously with others allows insights from other places to sharpen our own practice too. That commitment recently took us to Manchester; another incredible place with its own narratives and with its own problems and possibilities.

Northern narratives

I was in Manchester again, this time with the privilege of working alongside Evidence Leads in Education (ELE) as part of the North West Research School Network conference. Our day began with a reminder of the value of place, not least because the North West was once upon a time my home. As a Lancashire lad, I am aware how place connects and shapes us. I often think it is important to remember that education never sits separate to these ‘places’ that we serve.

From Annie Kenney and the Abasindi Co-operative to George Orwell’s writing about working-class life in Wigan, the North West has a long history of people refusing to accept inequality as inevitable or unmovable. My provocation was that ELEs are part of that continuing story. We are not simply leaders of evidence in education; we are leaders of evidence in the pursuit of equity for the places that we navigate and serve.

Educational inequality and disadvantage is often presented through emphasis on attainment gaps, attendance figures and broad proxies. Those measures are important to a point, but they do not give us the granular lens needed. Poverty affects children long before they arrive in a classroom or a school corridor. It has an ugly habit of permeating housing, health, sleep, food, transport, opportunity, stress and the choices available to families. If educators only look at the visible educational outcome, they risk responding to the symptom while missing the very conditions producing it.

Shifting narratives in place

The first strand of our day was about the stories we tell. We explored datasets showing the scale and complexity of child poverty across the North West, while also asking what those datasets do not visibly show. Data can reveal patterns, but it cannot fully capture the lived and living realities of hardship. Instead, that requires us to listen humbly to pupils, families, staff and communities to get a sense of what inequity looks like in ‘real world’ ways and in everyday dialogue.

Language also plays a vital part in telling and shaping stories. Deficit language can subtly lower expectations and reduce communities to what they supposedly lack. There are no clinically clean phrases readily used in discourse about poverty, but I often find these phrases especially misleading when heard in conversations:

• Families lacking ambition

• Deprived communities

• Poor communities

• Persistently disadvantaged pupils

• Areas lacking aspiration

I’m uneasy about suggesting to readers that they should or should not use certain phrases; these topics are already complex enough without people having to be concerned about everyday terminology. However, my challenge often to school and health leaders is that we need to understand what we mean by phrases such as ‘poverty’ or ‘disadvantage’ beyond that of crude headline measures. Otherwise, we run the risk of putting this to groups with limited scope or focusing only on narrow metrics that reduce visibility of barriers that other children or families face. Poverty is far more nuanced than this, and so are the effects of it.

Elliot Hahn, an ELE working in North Manchester, reflected that the conference made him question whether terms such as “educational disadvantage” always capture the strengths, experiences and potential of children and families. He plans to carry that reflection into professional development and school improvement in the coming year.

Dave Seneviratne, a school leader, took away a similarly practical challenge, to speak about “the community we serve” rather than “our community”. It is a small but important shift that helps to remind schools that we work alongside communities; we do not own them. For Dave and colleagues, this will inform their broader work on belonging and help staff speak about families with dignity.

Assessment, not assumption

Our second strand was a challenge to further replace assumption of need with assessment of barriers. We worked together to consider what costs of everyday life can feel like for families in low-income communities, thinking also about the visible and hidden costs that can prevent full participation in school or community life. The purpose was to expose how quickly narrow financial margins turn ordinary family decisions into difficult trade-offs. As part of this, we drew on insights from Tackling Poverty and Disadvantage in Schools, signposting the work of organisations such as Children North East and Child Poverty Action Group.

It is important to remember on a daily basis that what often appears in school as tiredness, absence, incomplete homework, behaviour or “poor engagement” may be the visible edge of something much wider. We therefore need to be forensic in our pursuit of understanding barriers and then testing those insights with others. The moment we begin to assume barriers and the hardship faced by families is the moment we begin to use broad brush stroke understandings. In turn, this then is likely to mean that schools, health settings and charities use interventions or activities that are not rooted in accurate diagnosis of barriers.

Sarah Dawson, who has worked at Hathershaw College in Oldham for almost 20 years, reflected that long experience can create confidence in knowing a community, but can also make poverty and inequality feel almost normal. The day prompted her to examine how much provision is based on assumption and how problem analysis could help schools understand need more precisely.

That is why we used the Five Whys as one example of problem analysis. Begin with a clear problem, then keep asking why until the team moves beyond the visible symptom towards a cause it can act upon. It is not about asking “why?” mechanically five times; but about disciplined curiosity, grounded in evidence and the experience of those closest to the issue. This helps to remove lazy ideas about a lack of parental ambition or value on education; something which we still hear too much of in education and policy spaces despite evidence illustrating this is rarely the issue.

Being curious enough to shift from intervention to ecosystem

Fury gives us moral clarity in that it reminds us that inequality should not be accepted as inevitable. But, curiosity gives us discipline because it makes us listen, diagnose, test, learn and adapt before acting. These are core behaviours that Research Schools and ELE’s stand for. Being furiously curious means refusing lazy explanations without replacing them with new assumptions. It means testing our thinking with pupils and families, and treating implementation as learning rather than labelling an initiative a success or failure too quickly. This is something that I increasingly believe should not sit in the sphere of one organisation or leadership team either; it is vital that we are in the habit of testing our assumptions with and alongside others.

ELE and school leader Luke Read described “the need for assessment, not assumption” as a key takeaway. For him, it means analysing root causes and drawing on expertise from different disciplines before deciding how to respond. He also linked this to the collective role of ELEs: interpreting evidence, providing useful exemplification and designing professional development that helps practice become embedded. This also means we sometimes need to look beyond educational situated evidence to better understand how inequality permeates other aspects of a pupils’ life (e.g. health, housing, food)

The conference ended with a challenge to take this curiosity back into our settings collectively. Education is so important, but education alone cannot solve educational inequality. Some barriers sit in curriculum, assessment and teaching, yet others relate to housing, health, sleep, food, transport, family stress or access to services. ELEs can help schools move from isolated interventions towards shared understanding. In this sense, we help to reframe what it means to truly be educators in place.

It is important to say that this conference was not about challenging schools to do more, but rather to consider how we work with others to enact change long term for places we know and serve. This could mean bringing teachers, leaders, pastoral staff, pupils, families and external partners into the diagnosis. It might lead you to connecting classroom evidence with local knowledge and lived experience and likely using charities, health teams, youth workers, local authorities, churches and community organisations not only as delivery partners, but as evidence partners who can help us understand what is happening beyond the school gate. Too often we rely on using our internal domains and expertise to solve complex issues; but poverty and its effects are far more nuanced and require multiple lenses. We cannot achieve this by working in silos or applying the lens of one sector, no matter how big it is.

The strength of the North West ELE network was visible throughout the day and in the many posts I have seen after it. I have included some comments from colleagues at the end of this post to get a sense of the learning and application of this taking place across the North West. Delegates did not leave with one intervention or a neat answer, nor did we promise that they would. But they did leave with a shared determination to look again, listen more closely and mobilise others around better questions. That gives me hope for the North West and the countless communities that they are serving alongside others in and beyond the school gate.

Be furious enough to reject the inevitability of educational disadvantage, but curious enough to understand what is really driving it in the places that you serve. At Tees Valley Education our work is not only to help schools use evidence well, but to help evidence serve equity and impact. If you’d like to understand more about these approaches or working with us, please reach out!

Insights from colleagues

As an ELE located in North Manchester, I work in a school serving a community where many children and families face significant barriers beyond just the classroom walls. As a result, discussions around disadvantage, equity and opportunity are central to our work and most importantly, our decision making. One of the most thought provoking aspects of the NW ELE RS conference was the challenge it presented to my own thinking and several others in the room. Throughout the day, speakers encouraged us to reflect not only on what we do but also how we talk about the communities we serve. It prompted me to consider whether terms such as “disadvantage” fully capture the strengths, experiences and potential of children and families we work with, or whether they risk defining communities by deficit rather than opportunity. This work will influence my work and decision making moving forward. Particularly on how we frame conversations around outcomes, CPD and school improvement. The conference also reinforced the importance of evidence informed practice and the role of language when shaping culture and expectations. Beyond the sessions themselves, it was invaluable to connect with colleagues from across the North West, sharing ideas, challenges and successes. The strength of the ELE network continues to be one of its greatest assets, providing both professional challenge and support.

Elliot Hahn, Professional Development Lead at Manchester Communication Primary Academy and ELE for Manchester Communication Research School

As a teacher at Hathershaw College in Oldham for almost 20 years I have always felt confident in my knowledge of our context and the needs of our children and their families. However, being lucky enough to hear Sean speak at the North West ELE conference has made me stop and consider how much of what we offer is based on assumption and what we can do differently in the future to fully understand the suitability of our provision.

Hathershaw College serves an area that has faced social and economic challenges and as an inclusive secondary school our ethos has always been the importance of education as a driver of social mobility and how we can improve the life chances of our students. Working in the same school for a long period of time has the advantage of experience but over time you can become almost accepting of local poverty and inequality. Sean’s words of being ‘furiously curious’ revived my commitment to fully understand the problems surrounding social injustice and how using the systems he shared, such as problem analysis, we can support schools in better understanding the impacts of poverty and ensure that all priorities are based on assessment rather than assumptions. Sean highlighted that the effects of poverty can be deeply personal and his presentation approach is not to provide all the answers but to give educators the skills and processes needed to develop their own systems to better support students affected by poverty.

Sarah Dawson, Curriculum Leader for Design and Technology at Hathershaw College and ELE for Pinnacle Learning Research School

Our school context reflects that of many primary schools across the country, with a broad and diverse intake ranging from pupils experiencing significant disadvantage to those from more affluent backgrounds. Alongside this, our staff team is deeply rooted in the local area, with many colleagues living in and being part of the communities we serve.

One of my key takeaways from the conference was the power of the language we use, particularly the distinction between referring to “the community we serve” rather than “our community.” This subtle shift is important; it reminds us to remain outward-looking, respectful, and conscious of our role as professionals working alongside, rather than owning, the communities around us.

Moving forward, this will be central to my work on belonging across our school. I want to use this thinking to help build stronger bridges between the school and the local community, and to support staff in being mindful of the language we use. By doing so, we can ensure that we are always speaking about families and communities in ways that are respectful, inclusive, and reflective of the values we would want them to hear directly.

Dave Seneviratne, Class Teacher and ELE for Alexandra Park Research School

One of my key takeaways from the ELE Conference was the challenge to become more “furiously curious” about the communities we serve. In a rapidly changing society, it is vital to develop a deeper, more holistic understanding of disadvantage and the factors that drive inequality. The phrase, “assessment not assumption”, particularly resonated with me, reinforcing the importance of analysing the root causes of challenges and drawing on expertise from a range of disciplines to identify effective solutions. This will help us make more evidence-informed decisions when addressing poverty and disadvantage.

The conference further prompted valuable reflection on my role as an ELE. Reviewing our collective strengths and areas for development will support us in working more effectively across the trust to interpret evidence, provide exemplification and facilitate high-quality professional development. Adopting a balanced approach to the EEF professional development mechanisms will shape and influence our continued work towards successful knowledge building, motivation of staff, development of teaching techniques and embedded practice.

Luke Read, Assistant Headteacher and English Lead and ELE for Alexandra Park Research School

Further links and reading

• Child of the North and Centre for Young Lives (2025) Education equity for the North of England: challenges and opportunities. N8 Research Partnership. Available at: https://www.n8research.org.uk/media/CotN_Education-Equity-Report_2025.pdf

• Harris & Morley (2025) Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools, Bloomsbury; London.

• Harris, S. (2025) ‘Measuring what matters: Supporting disadvantaged students with assessment – not assumption’, SecEd https://www.sec-ed.co.uk/content/best-practice/measuring-what-matters-supporting-disadvantaged-students-with-assessment-not-assumption

• Farley, A.N., Childs, J. and Johnson, O.A. (2019) ‘Preparing leaders for wicked problems? How the revised PSEL and NELP standards address equity and justice’, Education Policy Analysis Archives, 27(115), pp. 1–27. Available at: https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.27.4229.

• Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2026) UK Poverty 2026: The essential guide to understanding poverty in the UK. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Available at: https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2026-the-essential-guide-to-understanding-poverty-in-the-uk

• Ohno, T. (1988) Toyota production system: Beyond large-scale production. Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press.

• Orwell, G. (1937) The road to Wigan Pier. London: Victor Gollancz.

• Tague, N.R. (2005) The quality toolbox. 2nd edn. Milwaukee, WI: ASQ Quality Press.

• Tintoré, M., Cunha, R.S., Cabral, I. and Alves, J.J.M. (2022) ‘A scoping review of problems and challenges faced by school leaders (2003–2019)’, Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 50(4), pp. 536–573. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1741143220942527.

• Vale, R.D. (2013) ‘The value of asking questions’, Molecular Biology of the Cell, 24(6), pp. 680–682. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1091/mbc.E12-09-0660.

If you would like to explore how we can support you or your team with similar insights and learning in the places that you serve, then reply to this email.

A new pass mark for opportunity?

Requiring GCSE English thresholds to higher education could close the university door on thousands of young people before they get the chance to step through it.

DfE proposes changes to early years teacher training

Ministers are considering revising early years teacher status and replacing it with full qualified teacher status, bringing early years teachers in line with the wider profession.

Number of pupils with EHCPs rises by 100,000 in two years

DfE figures show that more than half a million pupils now have an EHCP, but plans alone cannot deliver inclusion without capacity, expertise and investment warn critics.

Uncertain futures for today’s youth

Many young jobseekers are being shut out by demands for experience, weak financial support and too few genuine entry points into employment.

Retailers opening doors for care-experienced young people

John Lewis and Waitrose are creating 1,000 more jobs for care-experienced young people, pairing paid work with the support needed to build lasting careers.

💡Research & insights

Crossing Paths:

How gender, ethnicity and place shape opportunity

[Lillywhite et al; Sutton Trust, 2026]

Access the insights here

• This recent research from the team at Sutton Trust looks at educational attainment and earnings by socioeconomic background, gender, ethnicity and region. It’s well worth a read!

• It also takes a close look at outcomes for white working-class pupils by constituency across the country, from educational attainment to employment outcomes.

• Alongside the brief, the team have have published an interactive map ranking constituencies according to a range of measures, from school attainment to earnings, for White British pupils eligible for Free School Meals. Worth looking at your community/contexts in this free-to-access and use resource.

• Disadvantage does not operate in isolation. Young people’s outcomes are shaped by the interaction between socioeconomic background, ethnicity, gender and where they live, meaning national averages can conceal very different experiences. Please report the full report to understand this.

• Educational success does not always translate into economic opportunity. For example, Bangladeshi girls eligible for free school meals achieve strongly at school, yet their earnings in adulthood remain considerably below average, showing that attainment alone cannot overcome structural barriers.

(Source: Sutton Trust, 2026)

• Progression into higher education varies sharply between groups. By age 19, 18% of White British pupils eligible for free school meals enter university, compared with 62% of Black African and 58% of Indian pupils from similarly disadvantaged backgrounds.

• Place matters before and after the school gates. White British pupils eligible for FSM in the North East achieve the strongest average Attainment 8 scores of any English region, but face much weaker post-16 pathways and earnings prospects.

• The report also calls for stronger student maintenance support that reflects the true cost of participating in higher education. There are also various other recommendations worth looking at at the end of the report.

• My takeaway… Improving attainment is important, but social mobility also depends on access to further study, transport, employment, apprenticeships and quality opportunities close to home. Put simply, poverty and opportunity are shaped by place and wider structural factors, not by a supposed lack of aspiration or ambition among children and families!

• There is also a brilliant blog here about the report which I’d encourage you to share with colleagues and which helps to counter aspiration myths.

Taking Action on Rural Poverty

Key Learning Report

[Poverty Alliance; 2026]

Access the insights here

• Latest insights report from the Poverty Alliance in Scotland and worth a read if you want to get some practical and actionable insights on tackling rural inequality.

• Living in rural Scotland comes with a hidden, unjust financial penalty that can trap households in hardship. This report contains lessons learned from a three-year Taking Action on Rural Poverty project, funded by The Robertson Trust.

• People with lived experience should help lead the response. Sustained participation produced richer insight and more practical solutions than one-off consultation. Many of us working in place-based work will know this already.

• There is a distinct rural poverty premium. Living rurally can mean paying more in money, time and opportunity for essentials such as energy, food, transport, childcare, healthcare and education. These pressures are interconnected.

• Policies need both a rural lens and an anti-poverty lens. National data and mainstream services can overlook the realities of rural life. The report gets across that poverty policy must account for rural circumstances, while rural policy must consider its effects on people living on low incomes.

• Childcare and energy are particularly significant pressure points. Limited childcare can prevent people, especially women, from entering or sustaining work, while high fuel costs, off-grid heating and poorly explained heating systems can leave households facing impossible choices.

• Learning should continue throughout implementation. Testing ideas, reflecting openly and adapting along the way allowed the project to generate wider lessons for policy and practice, not simply judge whether individual interventions succeeded. There are obvious connections here to learning in education spaces through the likes of EEF implementation thinking too.

• My personal takeaway: Effective place-based action begins by listening over time, recognising how different barriers interact, and combining community knowledge with coordinated action. But again, this takes time and commitment!

Class dismissed:

Closing the gap for persistently disadvantaged pupils

[Teach First; 2026]

Access the insights here

• I was fortunate to attend a recent briefing about this research; it’s encouraging to see Teach First pivot back to its roots to understand and tackle these issues.

• Research indicates that a million pupils in the UK live in long-term poverty. That means they spend at least 80% of their school lives relying on financial support like free school meals to meet their basic needs. This is sometimes referred to as ‘persistent disadvantage’.

• In this report, TF found that by the time they reach their GCSEs, persistently disadvantaged pupils are:

  • 22 months of learning behind their non-disadvantaged peers

  • 6 months behind shorter-term disadvantaged peers

(Source: Teach First, 2026)

• After Year 11, they have a one in four (25.5%) chance of not progressing towards a qualification (equivalent to at least one GCSE) or an apprenticeship.

• The average grade of a persistently disadvantaged pupil is 3.3 in GCSE English and Maths.

• The report also shows that many pupils and entire schools who were bucking the trends and closing the gap. TF have identified 88 state-funded schools where persistently disadvantaged pupils actually outperformed non-disadvantaged pupils nationally.

• There are a number of useful case study insights in the report and policy recommendations worth being aware of.

• My personal takeaway: This provides a welcome challenge to the way we talk about disadvantage in education. Too often, one broad label is used to describe children whose experiences of hardship may be very different. But, I’m also cautious about us being obsessed with attainment data outcomes as the only mark of schools making a difference in these topics.

Institutions changing how they think about place

Local authorities and schools engaging in institution-led culture change in places

[Hitchin; Place & Evidence, 2026]

Access the insights here

• Place thinker and change maker, John Hitchin, has written this excellent piece capturing some of our learning from PLACE at Tees Valley Education and reflected on this alongside others insights in this space

• In it, Jon brilliantly puts across that genuine place-based institutional change requires much more than training, new language or a short-term programme.

• The conditions for it are more effective when organisations change their underlying assumptions, everyday practice and formal structures so that communities become partners rather than people services are simply “done to.”

• This is something we continue to learn at Tees Valley Education, but something we are delighted to see featured in the blog too - thank you John and team!

• Read out latest on PLACE in this report in case you missed it.

🪴Opportunities

REMINDER: Support for sixth form students: Sutton Trust Online

• Get your students free support from leading social mobility charity the Sutton Trust to help them apply for and succeed in university or an apprenticeship

• Students in Year 12 or equivalent can now apply for Sutton Trust Online (STO).

• STO is packed with resources and interactive activities, including webinars from universities, opportunities to speak to current uni-students and apprentices, and expert personal statement support based on what universities are looking for.

• This is a self-paced and low-pressure programme designed to fit around study and other commitments. Programme completers will become Sutton Trust Alumni, gaining access to exclusive opportunities for years to come.

• Students can check if they’re eligible and apply via

• Find out more here and please share the opportunity with schools

Role Opportunity: Book Trust

Research and Impact Officer

• This is a full-time, permanent Research and Impact Officer role with BookTrust

• Salary is advertised as £27,000–£32,000 and based hybrid from either Leeds or London, with office days each month.

• The post focuses on using research to strengthen the work of the Book Trust with primary and secondary schools.

• The successful candidate would turn evidence from different sources into clear insights that inform organisational decisions, programme development and wider impact for children and families.

• Closing date:  Friday 03 July

• Visit here to find out more and apply

Funding Opportunity: Children in Need

Energy essentials

• Last week I mentioned how Children in Need continue to lead a significant impact across the lives of millions of children and across many communities.

• This latest funding is in addition to the grants mentioned last week

• They announced that the Emergency Essentials programme has reopened for applications.

• Through the programme, grants are available to support children and young people in the UK experiencing a crisis or emergency.

• The grants support families with children up to the age of 17 who are living with financial, health and social difficulties by providing items that meet children’s most basic needs.

• Find out more about the grant here

Last chance!

Can I have 3-minutes from you?

• I’m inviting everybody to take 3-minutes to complete this survey for me so that I can continue to offer this in a way which is free and impactful

• Everybody that enters is in with a chance of winning a copy of Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools (a winner will be draw on Monday 06 July

I have never intended for this tiny area of the internet to become particularly political. There are plenty of economists, policymakers and far more seasoned Westminster watchers who can provide a more informed analysis of political personalities, trends and electoral arithmetic than I can. However, I also accept that it is impossible to write regularly about poverty and inequality without entering political territory, because the conditions in which poverty grows or recedes are shaped by political decisions about income, housing, welfare childcare and many other public services.

So, amidst the considerable white noise created by Keir Starmer’s resignation as Prime Minister yesterday, I find myself thinking less about who might be next and more about what happens next to the issues that matter to the children, families and communities many of us serve. To be transparent about my own political position here, I remain open-minded about whether a change of Prime Minister was necessary and can understand arguments both for and against the legacy Starmer will leave behind. Yet, despite being a relatively optimistic chap, I find myself questioning how much practical difference another change in national leadership might make to the much bigger issue of ‘poverty’ sitting in and beyond the rooms in Downing Street.

I’m less preoccupied with whether the next person is the right man or woman for the job than I am with whether the policies, resources, structures and systems are in place to understand and dismantle child poverty. I am interested in whether the commitments already made will survive a transition of leadership, whether they will be implemented with haste and whether child poverty will remain a central national priority rather than becoming a Post-it note in a handover folder marked ‘FAO of the new PM’. For the children and families experiencing poverty now, ‘later’ carries a cost.

Leadership matters, but how much?

(Source: BBC News, 2026)

Of course, leadership matters! There is a vast body of evidence showing that leadership can influence organisational culture, staff development, decision-making and outcomes across education, health, charities, business and public services. However, there is also a substantial body of evidence warning us that leadership is not a generic collection of behaviours that can be transferred seamlessly from one context to another.

Effective and impactful leadership requires expertise in the work being led, alongside sufficiently developed mental models of the problems being navigated. It requires judgement, relationships, contextual understanding and an ability to recognise the complex interactions within an organisation or system. This is why some generic leadership exercises and professional development programmes will often be unimpactful or just risk annoying people. The idea that we can train somebody to be a ‘good leader’ in almost any context through a sequential set of modules on vision, communication, resilience and difficult conversations is increasingly difficult to defend.

For transparency, much of my own leadership experience has been within education, charity and place-based roles in areas of high need, and so this inevitably shapes both the evidence I have been exposed to, chosen to read and how I interpret it. Nevertheless, I think research across different sectors points towards several reasonably consistent characteristics of effective leadership in areas facing significant challenge. This is, at best, a summary of some of what I’ve found helpful….

• Effective leaders tend to diagnose before they act, rather than importing generic solutions or assuming that every organisational difficulty requires a new initiative. They seek to understand the problem, its causes, the local context and the interaction between different parts of the system before deciding what action is appropriate (Hawkins and James, 2018; Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins, 2019).

• Knowledge and expertise matter but effective leaders do not apply either mechanically. They understand the core work of their office or organisation, recognise the principles underlying effective practice and use adaptive judgement to decide when an established approach should be applied, altered or abandoned altogether (Sternberg, 2005; Goodall and Bäker, 2015).

• Effective leaders seek clarity and protect a specific (and limited) number of priorities. In pressured environments, leadership is partly an exercise in helping others to make sense of complexity, while protecting teams from an endless stream of competing demands and short-lived priorities. If everything is a priority then nothing really is (Leithwood et al., 2010; Leithwood, Sun and Pollock, 2017).

• Perhaps most importantly, effective leadership builds collective capacity rather than dependence on a heroic individual. Responsibility is distributed to where the relevant knowledge, capability and relationships sit, while leaders work across professional and organisational boundaries to leave people more capable of responding to the next challenge themselves. Put bluntly, there is no scope for superhero or ego drives of leadership (Day et al 2014; West et al 2014).

But all of this requires a culture in which people can raise concerns, question assumptions and acknowledge uncertainty without humiliation or blame. Sometimes this is referred to as belonging, but I think it is more nuanced and complex than this term is sometimes used. At its best, it makes purposeful challenge, honest feedback and shared accountability more possible, because people are less likely to conceal emerging problems or pretend that everything is fine (Edmondson, 1999; O’Donovan and McAuliffe, 2020). Also worth stressing that good or effective leadership also treats implementation as a process of learning, feedback and adaptation rather than a launch event (or incoming PM speech!). Leaders pay attention to how work is being experienced by staff, communities and service users, and they judge progress through changing behaviour, practice and outcomes rather than through attendance figures, positive feedback forms or the slickness of the original announcement (Arthur et al., 2003; Sharples, Albers and Fraser, 2018).

My point is that we should be cautious about assuming that a new leader will automatically bring new impact, especially when we have not properly considered the expertise, knowledge and approach that the role requires. Leadership has to always be bigger than the personality or portfolio of one person, however senior or visible that individual may be.

Is being dull really a leadership diagnosis?

During a recent Radio 5 Live interview, I recoiled as listeners called Nicky Campbell to explain why they believed Keir Starmer needed to leave as PM and why the country needed a different leader. What followed was a succession of personal observations about the outgoing Prime Minister lacking animation, charisma and excitement. I do not expect members of the public phoning a radio programme to arrive with a carefully researched framework for UK leadership, but I do wonder whether our public and private conversations might ask more meaningful questions than whether a leader appears sufficiently dynamic.

Character and communication undoubtedly matter, and I think they long have in leadership discussions. Integrity, judgement and the ability to bring people with you are all part of leadership. However, personality is not policy, and charisma is certainly not an implementation plan in my experience of educational or charity leadership. The rapid turnover of PMs in recent years makes it difficult to believe that our difficulties can be explained only by repeatedly selecting the wrong individual. To put that into perspective for a moment…

• Past five years: The UK will have had 5 Prime Ministers (Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer and the incoming one…

• Past decade: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak Keir Starmer and the incoming one….

• Since the conventional beginning of the office in 1721: 58 individuals, from Robert Walpole to Keir Starmer. Walpole is generally treated as the first Prime Minister, although the role evolved gradually and the title was not formally recognised until 1905.

Perhaps the last decade instability tells us something about the wider political system, the expectations attached to national leadership and our tendency to place structural problems on the shoulders of one person or office before expressing surprise when that person cannot resolve them. Rather than asking only whether we have finally found the right leader, we might need to ask what kind of knowledge, capability and character the role now demands, what conditions are necessary for that person to lead effectively and what we actually expect them to accomplish. I’d like to think that we have a stronger blueprint for that since the 1700s….

For me, a sustained commitment to and reduction in child poverty should sit close to the top of that list of things needed. I’m not the only one surely.

What is our collective hymn?

Many readers of a certain age may remember the primary school hall banger One More Step, I still recall singing alongside my school pals “And it’s from the old I travel to the new, keep me travelling along with you.”

There is something understandably attractive about the new. A new leader arrives untainted by previous decisions, carrying fresh energy, fresh language and the possibility of a reset. Even those of us who are naturally cautious about change can appreciate the appeal of beginning again, especially when the present feels difficult or disappointing. I have witnessed similar patterns in education. Poor outcomes and weakened organisational performance can quickly become attached to the legacy of a previous or existing Headteacher, while the appointment of a new leader is presented as the moment a school will begin travelling towards improvement. The uniform might be changed, the behaviour policy rewritten and laminated, the vision statement revised, and a new dawn announced with enthusiasm. The past is criticised partly to make the present appear more hopeful, while visible changes provide reassurance that something different is happening.

Some of these changes may be sensible, and there are undoubtedly circumstances in which new leadership is both necessary and beneficial. However, schools and communities are more complicated than the assumption that replacing the person at the top will automatically alter the conditions beneath them. I have previously written about the cautionary tale of the Super Head. A study by the Centre for High Performance followed 160 academies over five years and found that, while high-profile turnaround leaders could sometimes produce short-term improvements in examination outcomes, their departure could also leave schools facing falling performance and significant financial difficulties.

(Source: CHP; 2016)

Much like an incoming leader speech or new manifesto launch, these interventions sometimes created an impressive initial spectacle while failing to build the capacity required for sustained improvement. The hero head myth suggests that school improvement depends largely on will, personality and the successful transplantation of strategies used elsewhere. A sufficiently dynamic person can supposedly arrive, bypass complexity and fix the school or community. From my own experience of leading and working in complex contexts, I have come to see this as a fundamental misunderstanding of leadership and of place. It also explains why leaders can rarely lift a model from one school or community and expect it to work seamlessly in another.

School improvement and community transformation seldom follow a predictable, linear route. Sir David Carter and Laura McInerney explore this particularly well in Leading Academy Trusts: Why Some Fail, but Most Don’t, showing how organisational improvement is shaped by history, context, people, capacity and the quality of implementation. If there were a simple and ready-to-use blueprint for turning around a struggling school or community, every organisation would be applying it and government departments would be able to make improvement look remarkably straightforward. That is not the reality most of us recognise.

As Hawkins and James argue, schools and other settings are complex systems rather than machines in which a faulty component can be replaced to produce a predictable outcome. In these environments or offices, one decision can have several intended and unintended consequences, while the effect of an action depends on relationships, history, capacity and local conditions. You do not entirely control a school, a community or a country; you navigate it. That navigation requires deep knowledge, humility and a willingness to learn when the original diagnosis proves incomplete. A new leader is not going to travel from the old to the new without it.

Have we forgotten anything?

In my experience, a change of leadership can create institutional and organisational amnesia. Incoming leaders understandably want to establish their own authority, bring in trusted colleagues and articulate a clear set of priorities. However, this can mean that existing work is paused, repackaged or moved towards the periphery while everybody waits to understand what the new person wants.

But these delays are not experienced equally. Families with savings, secure housing, reliable transport and strong support networks may be able to absorb a period of political uncertainty in communities right. Yet families already making daily choices between food, heating, travel and hidden school costs have far less room to manoeuvre. Across the communities I serve, poverty is neither abstract nor marginal. It can mean a child sleeping without a suitable bed, a parent or carer missing a meal so that their children can eat, a family unable to afford the transport costs attached to an opportunity, or a young person quietly excluding themselves from an activity because they know money is tight at home.

It is also important to remember that many children growing up in poverty live in working households. In the communities I directly serve in the Tees Valley, around 65% of children in poverty are from working families. This is not a simple story about parental ambition, effort or responsibility. It reflects a combination of low income, insecure employment, housing costs, childcare, limited transport, uneven access to services and the geography of opportunity. As I wrote in this piece with the Sutton Trust, these nuances are are not about talent either. They are about uneven investment, economic opportunity, transport, access to apprenticeships, early years provision and social infrastructure. The index research from Sutton Trust validates what our children experience daily, opportunity is not equally distributed.

The outgoing government has made significant commitments around child poverty, and those commitments should not be casually discarded simply because the person at the top has changed. Whatever one thinks of Starmer’s political record or legacy, the next PM will inherit responsibility not merely for the language of tackling poverty but for the implementation of policies intended to reduce it. Publication is not implementation, and an announcement does not become impact simply because it is accompanied by a press release and a photograph. A strategy improves children’s lives only when responsibilities are clear, resources reach the right places, different parts of the system work together and progress is examined honestly over time.

Critics might reasonably argue that a government cannot spend a year analysing every problem before taking action, I get this. They may also suggest that I am slightly bonkers for wanting as much attention given to an implementation plan and accountability framework for child poverty as will inevitably be given to the presentation of the next PM and their successful appointment tour. However, families and children experiencing poverty do not have the luxury of waiting while a new leader creates a personal brand, reorganises government and considers which existing commitments they want to retain. Every day in which poverty is treated as peripheral has consequences for people already struggling.

I suspect the working families experiencing poverty in the communities I know are less concerned about whether the next PM appears more charismatic than the previous one and more concerned about whether wages will cover their costs, whether rent and childcare are affordable, whether public services are accessible and whether their children will have opportunities that currently feel beyond reach.

Can we be a bit more human?

(Source: Reuters, 2026)

My final reflection is simply a reminder that leadership remains a human response. Watching Starmer’s resignation speech left me feeling a bit sad. Whatever people think about his political decisions or record in office, we were watching a person express pride in having served while acknowledging that his time as Prime Minister had come to an end. He thanked his wife and spoke about wanting to commit more time to being a husband and father. I can relate to those responsibilities, despite never having had to carry the weight of the UK on my shoulders.

Education is also no stranger to high pressure and, at times, unpleasant forms of accountability. Leaders are expected to raise standards, improve outcomes, support staff, manage limited resources and safeguard children against a vast number of social and systemic inequalities. They are often asked to carry responsibility for problems they did not create and do not possess the power to solve alone. No human being is sufficiently expert, invulnerable or perfect to deliver everything expected from leadership. In the rush to talk about strength, charisma, animation and political instinct, it is worth remembering that history has provided plenty of leaders who possessed some of those characteristics but lacked integrity and humanity.

I appreciate that humanity cannot substitute for effective policy, although policy without humanity can quickly lose sight of the people it is intended to serve. By all means, take me to our new leader. Just do not ask me to believe that a new face behind the lectern is, by itself, a child poverty strategy. Our next Prime Minister will matter, but what matters more is whether the government they lead have and can use the knowledge, commitment and collective capacity to turn promises into changes that children and families can actually see and feel. Otherwise, we may be here again quicker than we realise.

Further links and references

• Arthur et al (2003) ‘Effectiveness of training in organizations: a meta-analysis of design and evaluation features’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(2), pp. 234–245

• Carter and McInerney (2020) Leading Academy Trusts: Why Some Fail, but Most Don’t. Woodbridge: John Catt.

• Day et al (2014) ‘Advances in leader and leadership development: a review of 25 years of research and theory’, The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), pp. 63–82.

• Edmondson (1999) ‘Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), pp. 350–384

• EEF (2026) Putting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementation. London: Education Endowment Foundation.

• Goodall and Bäker (2015) ‘A theory exploring how expert leaders influence performance in knowledge-intensive organizations’ (in Welpe et al Incentives and Performance: Governance of Research Organizations. Cham: Springer International Publishing)

• GOV UK (2026) Past Prime Ministers: Available here

• Harris (2025) ‘What if opportunity never knocks?’, The Sutton Trust

• Hawkins and James (2018) ‘Developing a perspective on schools as complex, evolving, loosely linking systems’, Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 46(5), pp. 729-745

• Hill et al (2016) ‘How to turn around a failing school’, Harvard Business Review,

• Sutton Trust (2026) The Opportunity Index: The Geography of Opportunity and Social Mobility in England. London

• Leithwood et al (2008) ‘Seven strong claims about successful school leadership’, School Leadership & Management, 28(1), pp. 27–42

• Leithwood et al (2020) ‘Seven strong claims about successful school leadership revisited’, School Leadership & Management, 40(1), pp. 5–22

• O’Donovan and McAuliffe (2020) ‘A systematic review of factors that enable psychological safety in healthcare teams’, International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 32(4), pp. 240–250

• Sternberg, R.J. (2005) ‘A model of educational leadership: wisdom, intelligence, and creativity, synthesized’, International Journal of Leadership in Education

• West et al (2014) Developing Collective Leadership for Health Care. London: The King’s Fund.

Social media ban a ‘step in the right direction’

Education leaders welcome restrictions but caution the government that it is only a “step in the right direction” to safeguard children online.

£132.5m boost for after-school clubs ahead of social media restrictions

The government says expanded music, sport, debating and engineering activities will offer children enriching alternatives to spending time online.

Children’s enjoyment of reading rises for the first time since 2021

National Literacy Trust research found that both reading enjoyment and daily reading increased in 2026, although levels remain below those recorded five years ago.

Smacking children could lead to lower GCSE grades, study finds

A UCL study of 19,000 UK children found that physical punishment offers no benefits and is associated with harmful educational and behavioural outcomes.

National awards celebrate 99 people and partnerships making a difference

The Pearson National Teaching Award winners include teachers, schools and partnerships, including Tees Valley Education’s PLACE work.

💡Research & insights

Adolescent flourishing in a digitally connected world:

A qualitative systematic review and meta-synthesis

[Gordon et al; Educational Research Review, 2026]

Access the insights here

• This feels like an aptly timed review given the ongoing coverage about social media bans. Much of the current conversations is being framed as a choice between allowing children to use social media or banning them from it altogether. This review gives broader evidence I think.

• Researchers have explored evidence about digital parenting and the different ways parents and carers support, guide and regulate children’s use of digital technology.

• What I find insightful is that the review does not treat digital wellbeing as simply the number of hours a child spends online. It also considers the quality of children’s experiences, including digital literacy, online safety, connection, learning and exposure to harm.

• Digital parenting was associated with slightly fewer negative digital outcomes. These included experiences such as cyberbullying, problematic use and exposure to inappropriate or harmful material.

• Co-use had the strongest association with fewer negative outcomes. Using and exploring digital spaces alongside a child appeared more strongly related to protection than relying solely on rules and restrictions.

• Positive mediation appeared most helpful for positive digital wellbeing. Conversations, explanations and support for children’s autonomy were more closely associated with skills and beneficial digital experiences than restriction.

• Preventing access does not automatically build the knowledge, confidence or judgement children will eventually need.

• Parental involvement may shape the nature and consequences of children’s digital experiences without substantially changing the total amount of time they spend online.

• My personal takeaway here is not that boundaries are unnecessary (not sure if we need another blog about social media bans, so I’ve left it). Children need protection, proportionate rules and age-appropriate safeguards.

• Restriction works best as part of a relationship, rather than as a replacement for one. Clearly schools, charities and home environments have a big role here.

Growing apart:

The evolution of the disadvantage gap

[Hunt et al; Education Policy Institute, 2026]

Access the insights here

• Latest study from EPI and Education Endowment Foundation is well worth a digest; it explores how educational inequalities develop from the early years through to post-16 education.

• Main headline is that 44% of the attainment gap seen at GCSE is already present by the end of primary school.

Rather than this being linked to specific phases or milestones, shows how inequalities accumulate across childhood and why waiting until secondary school to intervene is likely to be too late. Particular points to mention include…

• Prior attainment is the largest contributor to the GCSE disadvantage gap. Lower attainment at age 11 accounts for the equivalent of 6.8 months of the gap at Key Stage 4.

• Differences emerge well before the end of primary school. Attainment at age seven continues to contribute to later inequalities, even after pupils’ Key Stage 2 results are considered.

(Source: EPI, 2026)

• Early literacy, mathematics and communication are vital. By age 11, parts of the 10.1-month disadvantage gap can be traced to differences already evident at age five in literacy, mathematics, communication and language.

• Absence becomes increasingly significant as pupils grow older. It accounts for around 21% of the gap at Key Stage 2 and 34% by Key Stage 4.

• Strong primary attainment may provide some protection. Pupils who achieve well during primary school appear less likely to fall as far behind later, strengthening the case for sustained investment in early years and primary education.

• Regular readers will know I routinely challenge the idea of obsession with gaps or too much emphasis on gap closing ideas/intervention. This evidence helps to show that secondary schools can not close persistent attainment gaps through last-minute intervention alone.

• The findings on absence are especially important. Attendance is not simply an administrative issue or a matter of parental motivation. It is often shaped by health, housing, transport, poverty, SEND, mental health and access to family support. We need to stop seeing this as an issue for families only.

• The research therefore supports a wider view of educational inequality. Schools matter enormously, but many of the factors shaping attainment develop beyond the school gates.

Young carers

The forgotten young people in the NEET conversation

[Lacey et al; UCL, Carers Trust et al, 2026]

Access the insights here

• Useful research recently landed from UCL et al, well worth a read if you’re trying to further understand some of the recent dialogue around NEET/Milburn review

• Lacey et al indicate how young people with caring responsibilities are more than twice as likely as their peers to be persistently NEET (not in employment, education, or training) for a period of two years or more.

(Source: UCL, 2026)

• The data also highlights significant inequalities in progression through further and higher education, showing young carers are:

• 40% less likely to complete a further education (FE) qualification

• 31% less likely to attend higher education (HE)

• 37% less likely to achieve a degree-level qualification

• Too often, insufficient support for young carers is not enabling them to balance schooling with caring. These barriers are having direct consequences on young carers’ life chances.

• The study, based on long-term UK population data tracking more than 2,450 young people aged 16 to 25, provides some of the most cohesive evidence to date that young carers are being left behind.

• Carers Trust, UCL, and City St George’s, University of London are calling on the Government to treat young carers as a priority group within efforts to reduce youth unemployment and improve participation in education and training.

• Please share this widely with your networks and, if your in schools, it’s worth again re-looking at young carers data in light of these findings.

Poverty-informed transition:

20 practical ideas and insights for schools & other settings

[Harris; SecEd, 2026]

Access the insights here

• Tenuous Hogwarts links arriving on this blog platform….

• Transition to year 7 can be a challenging time for students, especially those who are facing multiple inequalities. In this piece, I take a practical look at poverty-informed transition support, including 20 ideas to adapt.

• 20 might feel like a lot, but I’ve included lots of ideas so schools and other settings can adapt and choose what fits their context best.

• Understanding transition as a process rather than a single event is important. While induction days and welcome activities play an important role, the evidence suggests that the most significant changes in engagement occur over time, particularly in the first year of secondary school (Jerrim, 2025).

• For pupils experiencing poverty or disadvantage, this period can act as a pressure point in which multiple factors converge.

• These may include increased organisational demands, changes in travel and routines, and heightened social pressures.

• What might appear as minor challenges, such as forgetting equipment or struggling to navigate the school site, can accumulate, leading to greater challenges.

• Hope this proves useful for you or your setting (you may even find some of this helpful if you’re a parent or carer of a child facing barriers to learning)

🪴Opportunities

Support for sixth form students: Sutton Trust Online

• Get your students free support from leading social mobility charity the Sutton Trust to help them apply for and succeed in university or an apprenticeship

• Students in Year 12 or equivalent can now apply for Sutton Trust Online (STO).

• STO is packed with resources and interactive activities, including webinars from universities, opportunities to speak to current uni-students and apprentices, and expert personal statement support based on what universities are looking for.

• This is a self-paced and low-pressure programme designed to fit around study and other commitments. Programme completers will become Sutton Trust Alumni, gaining access to exclusive opportunities for years to come.

• Students can check if they’re eligible and apply via

• Find out more here and please share the opportunity with schools

Role Opportunity: Zarach

Policy and Advocacy Manager

• My friends at Zarach (the children’s bed charity) are on a mission to end bed poverty and this role opportunity is a great way to support them!

• As the team grow, they are looking to recruit a Policy & Advocacy Manager to join the Communications team.

• The ideal candidate will need to be in commuting distance to our Leeds warehouse, meaning you can travel regularly to meet with the team.

• This is a hybrid role based between the Leeds warehouse and home, and regular travel to other locations will be required to attend meetings, conferences and other such activities related to policy and advocacy.

• Please send your CV and letter to recruitment@zarach.org by no later than 5 PM on 03 July 2026.

• Visit here for more details about this wonderful opportunity!

Funding Opportunity: Children in Need

Funding for projects to support children and young people facing disadvantage

• Children in Need continue to lead a significant impact across the lives of millions of children and across many communities.

• The Core Costs funding stream has no application deadline, you can apply at any time. The first step in applying is to speak with your local team

• Use the EOI form to tell them a bit more about your organisation, and the work you want to fund. You’ll be able to access the EOI form in your online account when the funding stream is open

• If Children in Need would like to support the work outlined in your EOI form, they will send you a full application form to complete

• Find out what they fund to help you understand what we fund in your nation or region. Well worth exploring this if you don’t already!

Wait! Before you go…

Can I have 3-minutes from you?

• I’m inviting everybody to take 3-minutes to complete this survey for me so that I can continue to offer this in a way which is free and impactful

• Everybody that enters is in with a chance of winning a copy of Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools (a winner will be draw on Monday 06 July

As a long-time fan of Sci-Fi, this academic term feels like a good one…

Half term almost guarantees that somewhere in our house there will be an 80s Sci-Fi film humming away in the background, usually while I insist to my family that the Back to the Future trilogy is still superior to anything that has come since. Of course, the annual delight of May the 4th worth a mention too. If your school or organisation has not yet embraced Star Wars Day as a legitimate cultural event worthy of pupil and staff wellbeing then it needs to add it to next years academic calendar…

My ‘geekiness’ went into slight hyperdrive recently when I learned that a North East community is trialling Amazon deliveries by drone this month. Darlington is currently testing whether residents will use hi-tech drones to have parcels flown directly to their homes. Listening to people on the news ordering random household items simply for the joy of watching a flying robot descend into their garden felt wonderfully futuristic. The sort of thing that a younger Sean, sat watching Back to the Future, would have assumed only existed in a different time-space continuum.

But buried within all the excitement is a small caveat that to ‘currently’ qualify for these deliveries you need a garden or a yard. While the future may well be arriving for everybody, it is going to arrive by drone rather quicker and slicker for some more than others. Again, my mind goes more to those with less…

Parcels of privilege

Product placement incoming…. if you had told younger me that one day I would be able to order a copy of a book I had co-written and watch it arrive by drone technology into my own garden, I genuinely would not have believed you. The smile on my face at writing a book but also having it delivered by futuristic tech is here, but my adulthood also brings with it an uncomfortable awareness that my smile is now a privileged one too. The green grass in my garden, the fact I have a garden at all. Reliable broadband, stable electricity, devices that update properly and broadband that can take the hit of my teenager daughters listening endlessly to streaming music from their own devices. Enough financial breathing room to buy things online that I do not really need. The reality being that none of these experiences are universal.

Increasingly, I find myself aware that the digital future many of us are celebrating or consuming risks widening inequalities in ways we are still only beginning to understand. I’m clearly not alone in this. Artificial Advantage?, a report from the Sutton Trust (2025), concluded that inequalities are also developing within state systems of education. Schools with the most affluent intakes were more likely to report having had formal (26% vs 18%) and informal (54% vs 41%) training than those with the least affluent intakes. Overall, nearly a quarter (24%) of state school teachers said they were not at all confident using AI tools, compared to 15% in private schools. Even day-to-day use of said resources and technology differs.

(Source: Sutton Trust, 2025)

Recently, my daughter and wife attempted to secure Olivia Rodrigo tickets online. My wife joined the virtual queue early, opened multiple tabs, refreshed browsers, kept an eye on emails for verification links and spent much of the day balancing her job alongside the increasingly hopeless pursuit of concert tickets. At one point she was over 22,000th in the queue. Hours later, having edged closer to the front, she eventually received the inevitable message informing her that tickets had sold out. Within minutes, they had reappeared online at vastly inflated resale prices.

Millions of families have lived versions of this and I am not looking for sympathy (but perhaps a couple of tickets?). What struck me afterwards was how much invisible and digital infrastructure is required simply to participate and belong in these moments of modern life. Stable broadband, updated devices, functional banking apps, reliable mobile data all working seamlessly (most of the time!) behind the scenes to ensure that my family can belong in and participate in modern living. Then there is also the digital literacy to navigate queues, codes and online systems quickly enough to compete. Flexible enough working conditions to keep checking throughout the day.

We are not living lives of luxury in every corner as a family, but we clearly have a level of digital privilege that many families will not. The more I reflect on this, the more I wonder whether digital access is increasingly becoming one of the defining lines between those who can participate fully in modern life and those who are unable to pull the plug on day-to-day barriers that the rest of us perhaps barely notice.

Digital divisions

Recent research from Child of the North and Centre for Young Lives on digital futures speaks uncomfortably to this virtual and physical reality. The report highlights how a significant proportion of children and young people in the UK lack access to both digital skills and resources.

• 42% of young people (approximately 6 million children) do not have access to either home broadband or a laptop/desktop computer.

• During the COVID-19 pandemic, one in five children lacked access to a suitable device for home study.

• 1 million people have either cut back or cancelled their internet packages due to financial constraints. 12% of the population in the North East of England are classified as internet non-users, compared to 7% in London.

But access is only one component part of this issue…

• 48% of boys and 42% of girls surveyed had seen harmful content online in the previous month.

• Projections suggest that 5 million workers will be under-skilled in basic digital capabilities by 2030, while 75% of young people feel they lack the necessary skills to thrive. Almost half of young people are teaching themselves digital skills.

• Participation in IT subjects at GCSE level has dropped by 40% since 2015.

• Digital skills shortages are already estimated to cost the UK £65bn each year.

Researchers warn in the report that this digital divide has significant implications for educational outcomes, social inclusion and future employment prospects. What concerns me is that many of the inequalities seen here are also subtle. They do not always present themselves visibly and clearly. Sometimes they in the background like AdWare or software glitches through systems designed with good intentions but limited understanding of how people actually navigate hardship.

I remember a parent once sharing with me during a focus group discussion about school systems how difficult cashless systems had become for them. Like many schools, the setting had moved towards digital payment systems for lunches and trips. On paper, there were obvious advantages such as faster processes, less chance of children losing money, fewer safeguarding concerns and operational efficiency.

The parent also described how every Sunday evening they would withdraw cash and place money into brown envelopes labelled for each day of the week. Their system created discipline and predictability for this particular family. If Tuesday’s envelope was opened too early, then they knew Friday and the weekend would become difficult. Physical cash helped them manage survival routines and they wanted their children to learn that same structure too, believing it to be a life skill. For context this was a full-time working family. Another parent spoke about struggling to use online systems because their phone screen was cracked and unreliable. Something many of us would view as a minor inconvenience had become a daily barrier to engaging with school processes, no matter how well intentioned they were.

These examples may seem comparatively small against the backdrop of wider system and digital inequalities, but they reveal something important about how poverty operates with its own algorithms. Empathetic and poverty-informed schools and organisations have never simply been about designing systems around what works for the majority or the privileged. The schools making the biggest difference in tackling inequality are often the ones paying close attention to what systems feel like for those with the least flexibility, least security and least room for error. These educators, leaders and support staff spend time reading, understanding and responding to the algorithms of what it feels like to face poverty and hardship daily.

Designing digital living standards

The Child of the North researchers make a compelling argument for establishing what is referred to in the report as “Minimum Digital Living Standards”, ensuring families have access to functioning devices, reliable broadband and essential digital skills. It also calls for greater investment in digital professional development for educators and for more place-based approaches to digital inclusion that recognise communities experience these challenges differently. It is vital that those working in digital and policy worlds understand this.

But, there is also work that can take place in the day-to-day of real world social and civic settings to develop this. Digital divides do not look identical everywhere; rural communities navigate different challenges to urban ones. Families in temporary accommodation experience digital instability differently to those in secure housing. Schools serving communities facing deep hardship often become the places trying to bridge or even close gaps they did not create.

This is not intended as an exhaustive list, but here are some reflective questions worth asking around access to tech as part of inclusive education strategies:

Online parents’ evenings

• What assumptions are currently being made about the technology available within the home for parents and carers to access these?

• What is attendance or participation data telling us about engagement patterns for families facing poverty-related barriers?

• What support or blended approaches might intentionally need to sit alongside these systems to ensure equitable access?

Cashless systems

• To what extent can families still use physical cash where needed?

• What assumptions are made about access to reliable devices, apps and internet connections to navigate and complete these transactions?

• Have we actually asked families about their experiences of using these systems?

School communications

• Do we still ensure a blended approach of physical and digital communication?

• Do we know which families may require paper copies or more personalised approaches? (e.g. EAL, other languages, large print etc)

• What story does internal data tell us about unopened emails, bounce-backs or app engagement?

Digital learning

• To what extent do we assume children can complete online learning tasks independently at home?

• Do all children have equitable access to the devices and connectivity increasingly required for modern learning?

Even the day-to-day algorithm of pausing to think about the imagery, narratives and tone of communications can be a useful consideration for schools and other settings. This goes far beyond merely considering equality and diversity across images and communications. The language, tone and imagery we use can create algorithms of who is seen, what is heard and what our organisation thinks about it.

Virtual realities

I recently saw a brilliant post from colleagues at Children North East challenging the polished perfection so often presented online around parenting and family life. Their message sharply and simply acknowledges that life with children is often messy, exhausting and complex. It was good to see a reminder in social media of all places.

I think honesty and humility like this is important because digital spaces do not simply communicate information; they have a habit of conveying values, membership and who feels seen. Children NE have clearly considered the tone and imagery that should sit behind the stories they want to share, but also the stories that they hear from families that they continue to serve. This one stood out to me:

(Source: Children North East, 2026)

Here is a reflective exercise for schools, charities and organisations. Download or skim glimpse a week’s worth of your communications, newsletters or social media posts. Not through the lens of branding or engagement figures, but through the lens of the communities you serve. As a team or individually, it could be useful to think about:

• To what extent do communications reflect the realities families are navigating?

• Which children and families are consistently visible and centred?

• To what extent do we unintentionally favour the most articulate, polished or “presentation ready” young people? (I appreciate pupils facing poverty can be this, but also recognise that barriers sometimes mean they do not!)

• What language is used around disadvantage, hardship or support?

• Does the organisation portray itself as a heroic fixer of all things, or part of a broader ecosystem of support and partnership?

• To what extent do communications acknowledge systems and structures, rather than locating the “problem” solely within individuals and families?

There is a difference between championing support and unintentionally celebrating the existence of need itself. Through our PLACE work at Tees Valley Education, this is a tension that we constantly revisit and reflect upon. I certainly would not state that we always get it right, but I do think there is an important distinction between proudly sharing work that supports communities while also continuing to ask difficult questions about why those inequalities exist in the first place.

Championing might involve acknowledging that many communities are struggling because of unequal systems, while also showing how organisations are working in partnership to provide support and push for broader change. However, celebration, if we are not careful and deliberate, can sometimes drift into placing organisational provision front and centre without any acknowledgement of why those needs exist at all. This is really important to consider in the context of poverty-informed and place-based work. It quietly shift narrative towards seeing inequalities as problems belonging to individuals rather than symptoms of wider systemic issues.

The Child of the North report repeatedly returns to the importance of ensuring children are not passive recipients of technology, but active participants capable of navigating digital spaces critically, creatively and responsibly. I think that idea feels especially important right now as conversations around AI intensify. There is understandable excitement about what AI (and possibly parcel drones!) might enable within classrooms and communities. But perhaps the greatest risk is forgetting that technology itself is never neutral. It reflects the values, assumptions and priorities of the people designing, deploying and delivering it.

The future, to an extent, is already here. AI will continue to evolve, digital systems will become increasingly embedded within education, employment and everyday life. But I think everybody, especially educators, should not fall into the trap of speaking about this future as though it is simply happening to us. We are still the ones writing it (to make a tenuous link to a line from the Terminator franchise)

“The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves,"

Sarah Connor: Terminator 2 - Judgement Day

Technology and AI remains a tool. No matter how advanced these systems become, I believe that nothing replaces the need for humanity in how we design schools, services and support with communities. As we continue pushing innovation and responses, we need to do so with those facing the greatest barriers firmly at the forefront of our thinking and design algorithms. Schools, charities and community organisations will remain some of the most important places where that equitable future can still be intentionally designed. Sometimes in our attempt to ‘do’ more or ‘be’ more, there is a risk that we might lose sight of those with less.

If the future is apparently arriving via AI, tech and drones, then we probably need to stop standing around admiring the robots and start asking who gets programmed out. A poverty-informed future means intentionally centring equity, humanity and inclusion before inequality gets further hardwired into the system. You don’t need to be a sci-fi geek or poverty-researcher to spot this, but perhaps it helps. Drones are optional in my opinion, but equity isn’t.

Push to make hidden childcare costs visible

The Education Secretary is asking the CMA to investigate whether parents are being hit with unfair extra childcare costs when using government-funded childcare.

Student loan inquiry opens degree doubts

MPs are probing England’s student loan system as recent research suggests one in three people now think a university degree is not worth the time or money

PE premium dropped in switch to school sport partnerships

The £320 million schools PE and sport premium will be replaced by a new partnerships network from spring 2027.

Scotland warned child poverty plan could breach the law

Charities say the Scottish Government’s latest child poverty plan may be open to legal challenge, arguing it does not go far enough to meet legally binding 2030 targets.

Pay-as-you-can dining puts dignity on the menu

A restaurant in Stroud is showing how good food, shared tables and flexible pricing can bring people together without turning community support into charity.

💡Research & insights

Adolescent Internalizing Symptoms, School Experiences, and Attendance:

Sex-Specific Within-Person Pathways

[Cheng et al; University of Manchester, 2026]

Access the insights here

• This is from a large-scale study based on the University of Manchester’s #BeeWell programme; worth looking at as it tracked more than 25,000 Year 8, 9 and 10 pupils across 154 secondary schools in England.

• The study explores the relationship between pupils’ mental wellbeing, attendance, relationships with staff and sense of belonging in school.

• Pupils who felt more connected to school and had stronger relationships with staff experienced fewer emotional difficulties over time, including things like worry and low mood. This won’t surprise many of us working in this space.

• These pupils also tended to have better attendance, suggesting that belonging and relationships may play an important thread on these topics.

• When pupils’ emotional difficulties increased, this predicted later declines in their sense of belonging and relationships with staff.

• For some pupils, particularly girls, worsening mental health also predicted increased absence from school.

• One of the most important findings is that the study found no evidence that simply improving attendance leads to better mental health. This is important when considering interventions and emphasising values of attendance.

• Perhaps attendance may better understood as a signal of underlying difficulties, rather than a straightforward driver of wellbeing.

• I’d recommend a read as it challenges the idea that attendance should and can be improved by ‘high expectation’ style approaches and compliance.

• It reinforces the point that what happens once pupils are inside the school gates matters just as much as getting them there.

Tackling poverty & disadvantage in schools

What we’ve learned from one year of an award winning book

[Harris & Morley; Bloomsbury, 2026]

Access the insights here

• It feels rather un-british to celebrate winning an award, especially one for a book that is designed to understand and tackle poverty.

• However, as many readers and educators keep reminding us… this is a book written by many and one which is having an impact across many schools

• With this in mind, we’ve noted five distinct threads from the book which are continuing to gain traction and support, especially amongst educators

• The blog will also be useful to anybody considering writing their own book on similar issues or offering support to schools and other settings

• We are truly thankful for the support and to the ERA for awarding the book as the best education book of the year. A reminder that all royalties from the book go towards supporting low-income communities through our PLACE work too!

Why oblique approaches to school improvement work

Reflections on school improvement and educational outcomes

[Smith; 2026]

Access the insights here

(Source: RGS Newcastle; Physics Partnership challenge)

• John Smith, Director of Partnerships at RGS Newcastle, is no stranger to this blog.

• He’s also one of the award-winning authors of Tackling Poverty and Disadvantage in Schools mentioned above, so I’m often on the look out for his latest blogs!

• This latest feature from John in SecEd is one of the most compelling and coherent things I have read on school improvement

• In it, John argues that school improvement is often too mechanistic. Schools can become so focused on exam results, interventions and direct outcomes that they miss the wider conditions that help children and young people flourish.

• He draw’s on John Kay’s idea of ‘obliquity’ the notion that complex goals are often best achieved indirectly.

• Applied to schools, this means the best route to better attendance or attainment might sometimes be sport, music, drama, relationships, belonging, character, confidence or purpose.

• John’s blog also warns against copying “what works” too simplistically from one school to another. Context matters, and successful approaches often rely on hidden or indirect factors that are hard to replicate exactly.

• It is a helpful counterweight to narrow conversations about school improvement, where outcomes are too often seen as a solution to topics like disadvantage.

• The line that really stuck with me was this… academic outcomes are the consequence of a good education, not the purpose.

Looking ahead:

CPAG briefing on the schools white paper 2026

[Child Poverty Action Group; 2026]

Access the insights here

• CPAG’s latest briefing responds to the government’s schools white paper, Every child achieving and thriving, and asks whether its proposed reforms go far enough for children and families living in poverty.

• It welcomes elements of the white paper, particularly where it signals a more child-centred education system and greater attention to children too often pushed to the margins.

• However, CPAG’s central argument is that the government will not reduce educational disadvantage unless it tackles child poverty more directly.

• It’s a helpful primer for indicating that school reform alone cannot close the poverty-related attainment gap if families continue to face inadequate income, insecure living conditions and the daily pressures of not having enough money.

• It explores what a genuinely inclusive education system would need to look like for children in poverty, including action both inside and outside the school gates.

• The big message is that schools matter enormously, but they cannot compensate for poverty on their own.

• It gives leaders a clear framework for thinking about poverty-informed education beyond narrow attainment-gap language.

Room to Grow:

School-based nurseries and the disadvantage gap

[Montacute et al; Sutton Trust, 2026]

Access the insights here

• This recent report from Sutton Trust looks at the government’s school-based nursery programme and asks whether it can genuinely improve access to high-quality early education, especially for children from low-income families.

• The report is based on a rapid evidence review, a survey of more than 1,300 primary school senior leaders, and case studies of school-based nursery practice.

• The report finds that school-based provision already has real strengths. Existing maintained nursery classes and school-based settings are more likely to serve children facing disadvantage and children with SEND.

• However, Montacute et al caution that simply creating more places is not enough if provision is not age-appropriate, well-staffed and properly connected to wider early years expertise.

• The report also finds limited appetite among schools without nursery provision to open one. Among schools without an early years setting, only around one in five said they had plans or were likely to set one up. The majority said it was unlikely.

• Schools face several barriers to setting up new early years provision. The most common responses were no suitable indoor space (51%), high start-up costs (50%) and financial viability (46%). Of those citing financial viability, 73% cited the cost of staff to child needed, 67% ongoing staff costs, and 65% capital costs of converting a space in the school.

(Source: Sutton Trust, 2026)

• Appetite for further expansion does exist, but is limited. Out of those who do not already have a setting, 1 in 5 either said that their school already has plans in place or it is likely that they will set one up. The majority said it is not likely that they will set one up. Even if all those who said it was likely followed through, this would leave the programme significantly short of the targeted 3,000 settings.

• The report recommends that government continues the programme but sharpens its focus on areas of disadvantage, clarifies whether the main aim is childcare expansion or high-quality early education and collects better datasets.

• It is timely because school-based nurseries are being positioned as a major part of the government’s early years and childcare agenda.

• It asks the right poverty-informed question in terms of who will actually benefit if provision expands, and will the children facing the greatest barriers be reached?

• For regular readers of this Substack, a key takeaway is that school-based nurseries can be useful, but only if they are designed as part of a wider early years ecosystem rather than another policy pushed onto schools without the right funding, expertise or local strategy.

🪴Opportunities

Support for sixth form students: Sutton Trust Online

• Get your students free support from leading social mobility charity the Sutton Trust to help them apply for and succeed in university or an apprenticeship

• Students in Year 12 or equivalent can now apply for Sutton Trust Online (STO).

• STO is packed with resources and interactive activities, including webinars from universities, opportunities to speak to current uni-students and apprentices, and expert personal statement support based on what universities are looking for.

• This is a self-paced and low-pressure programme designed to fit around study and other commitments. Programme completers will become Sutton Trust Alumni, gaining access to exclusive opportunities for years to come.

• Students can check if they’re eligible and apply via

• Find out more here and please share the opportunity with schools

Event Opportunity: Teaching through topics (webinar)

Climate risk, resilience and belonging

• This webinar on 16 June with the British Red Cross and SecEd will explore practical approaches for teaching climate change risk and resilience via citizenship and across the curriculum

• This webinar will be hosted by Paul K Ainsworth, a school improvement advisor and author. Paul is a regular feature on this Substack and the author of the popular No Silver Bullets books.

• His guests will include Anisa Hay and Clare Stevenson, Education Content Developers working on the British Red Cross Humankind programme. The panel will also include secondary school citizenship and climate education experts.

• You can register for free to watch this webinar live or on catch-up

Funding Opportunity: AJ Bell Futures Foundation

Funding for projects to support people facing disadvantage

• The A J Bell Trust is a UK-wide charitable trust supporting work with disadvantaged young people, social mobility and the relief of hardship.

• Typical grants are listed as between £10,000 and £100,000, making this a medium-to-large funding opportunity rather than a small project grant.

• The trust’s focus areas include children and young people, education and training, disability, poverty and deprivation, and sport/physical activity.

• Find out more about the funding opportunities here

CPD Opportunity: Elevare Civic Education Group

Group Head of Strategy, Research and Impact

• Elevare Civic Education Group is recruiting a Group Head of Strategy, Research and Impact, with a salary of up to £75,000 and a closing date of 29 June 2026.

• The successful candidate will help turn national education and skills priorities into mission-led opportunities for the organisation.

• It would likely suit someone who enjoys joining the dots between evidence, civic mission, system leadership and practical organisational improvement.

• For readers interested in poverty-informed or place-based work, it may be especially interesting because the job is about turning insight into action and showing impact across communities.

• Find out more about the role here

Wait! Before you go…

Can I have 3-minutes from you?

• I’m inviting everybody to take 3-minutes to complete this survey for me so that I can continue to offer this in a way which is free and impactful

• Everybody that enters is in with a chance of winning a copy of Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools (a winner will be draw on Monday 06 July

It’s a privilege to hand over the Substack baton once again!

One of the intentions behind this ‘Poverty Guy’ space is to do more than share my own thinking. I wanted it to help surface some of the work, ideas and people who are sharpening capacity for change. One key thing I’ve learned, working in and alongside complex school contexts, is that inequality and educational disadvantage are far too complex to navigate in isolation. We make better sense of these topics, and respond more effectively, when we learn with and from others.

Across my career, I’ve been fortunate to work alongside individuals who have sharpened not only my thinking, but my practice. As the Biblical proverb reminds, “as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” Jonathan Ferstenberg is one of those people that I have had the pleasure of having as a colleague and these days as a friend.

I first worked with Jonathan when I was a classroom teacher. His presence, whether in a lesson or a conversation, has a way of deepening your curiosity about your own practice. Even a catch-up coffee with him will have you being more curious about the big topics of life! I remember a particularly duff lesson he observed from the back of my classroom some years ago. What followed wasn’t a checklist of what went wrong, but a thoughtful dialogue that helped me reflect and sharpen my curiosity. I left that conversation not only clearer about my practice, but more curious about how to improve it. Jonathan has a sharp expertise in teaching and learning, but perhaps more importantly, a rare ability to help others grow through that same curiosity.

We’ve stayed in touch over the years, often finding ourselves returning to conversations about coaching, what it is, what it isn’t, and how it might be used more intentionally to understand and tackle inequality in schools and communities. So, I’m delighted that Jonathan has agreed to contribute a guest piece on this very topic!

Take a moment to engage with his thinking. If, like me, you’re interested in growing as a leader, I’d strongly encourage you to connect with him.

If you are like other school leaders I know, there are likely several reasons why you may have found it difficult to create your ideal school strategy for understanding and tackling educational disadvantage.

Children and young people facing multiple inequalities often present with multi-faceted needs, including gaps in foundational knowledge, entrenched mental health concerns, or less parental support for their school work. Sean has written plenty about this on this Substack; if you search his blogs you will find many of the same issues you see in your own school. Addressing these complex issues therefore means that your busy academic, pastoral, and personal development leaders must find the time and headspace to work together. The strategy they make must fit seamlessly within your whole-school strategies, some of which may be new or still embedding.

You may also feel you don’t yet know enough about how to further navigate or tackle complex disadvantage or, more likely, you may have received plenty of CPD but are unsure about what to apply and where. There is also a chance your own desire to support these students, combined with the external accountabilities, can create a lot of pressure for you and your team. I see lots of school leaders, classroom teachers and support staff navigating these pressures in my work with schools everyday. So, know that you are not alone. It might even be why you’re choosing to read this guest blog!

Coaching to lead

Disadvantage is complex and so is leadership. I often find in my work with school leaders and educators that they might already know more than they realise. But this can be hard for them to see when tackling deep-seated inequalities and other complex issues in schools and communities. Sometimes leadership coaching can be an ideal way for you to pull together what you already know, build on the good work you are already doing, and add some manageable improvements that will make the biggest difference.

Leadership coaching is widely used in organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors. There is a plethora of research and evidence written about this, some of which I have signposted at the end of this article. Leadership coaching is largely anchored in the belief that the ‘client’ is resourceful and usually has more answers than they realise. The coach creates thinking space; they listen carefully and uses skilful questioning to help a leader reflect on their vision, consider what is working well and what they want to change, design strategies, identify barriers, and manage risks. Clients often find they achieve more in an hour with a skilled coach than they would have achieved in several hours on their own. Of course, the quality and knowledge of the coach matters here too. This is far from simply a chat or conversation.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to coaching, but a semi-structured session might include some of the following:

Start with what you are doing or trying

I might start by asking you about the strengths and weaknesses of your current strategy for supporting students facing disadvantage and whether there is anything new you are thinking or trying. This can help to ground the discussion in concrete realities, while also showing me how you think.

Identify and discuss barriers, even if they are complex

Your coach would likely ask you about the barriers faced by students experiencing disadvantage and how important each barrier is in your context. For example, if you say that attendance is an issue, a curious coach might ask what information you collect on the reasons for absence, how you triangulate that with pastoral data, what systems are in place to ensure that the right staff are responding to students’ or families’ needs, and whether you can see trends in the data which tell you what parts of the system are having more or less impact. The goal is to find the root cause of the problem and why your systems are not yet addressing it.

Towards testing solutions and next steps

Once you know this and have spent time being more curious about it, your coach can help you generate solutions or actionable next steps. The right questions will help you draw on what you already know. You might, for example, decide to develop a more relational approach to behaviour for all your students or an improved literacy and vocabulary programme so that all your students can enjoy success in school. If a client just needs a bit of prompting to get their ideas out, I might say something like, “There are three options that leaders in your position often consider:….Do you want to explore any of those or do you think there is something else that might be better?” I find that clients often come up with a solution that is better for their context than any of the ideas I suggested. If you are really stuck, your coach might help you consider how you find out precisely what you need to know.

Reality testing

As you develop solutions your coach might do what we refer to as ‘reality testing’.

I often ask, “On a scale of 1-10, how far will that go towards solving the problem?” If you are happy with the solution, your coach should help you design a plan for implementing it, including resources and a timescale. As that takes shape, I’ll often ask,

• What are the risks of this strategy?

• What can you do now to stop those risks from happening?

• What do you expect to happen?

I have found that most leaders do an excellent job of analysing costs, benefits and risks. By the end of this process, you should have devised a clear, evidence-informed, time-bound strategy for supporting your disadvantaged students. Your coach will likely follow up in the next few sessions to see how it is going and to ask whether you need to make adjustments.

This type of leadership coaching is also good for the leaders themselves. Being part of a school leadership team is demanding and the rates of attrition are high, particularly for leaders in areas of disadvantage. Plenty of research indicates that leadership coaching promotes wellbeing and creates reflective, resourceful leaders who have a higher degree of self-confidence and a more embedded leadership identity.

Addressing the impacts of disadvantage on children and young people is a complex problem that requires thoughtful solutions that fit within a whole school development plan. This is something that applies to organisations and sectors beyond education too. While there are ‘no silver bullets’, leadership coaching is a shiny example of how to ensure that leaders and other colleagues can make greater sense of the complexity of inequality in communities and develop actionable strategies for tackling it. Children and young people are worth so much investment, but so are you and your team. A good series of leadership coaching sessions will sharpen your impact and influence.

About the author

Jonathan Ferstenberg is a school improvement partner, trainer and leadership coach and runs Bespoke School and Leadership Development. He is former Director of School Improvement and Headteacher with over 25 years of experience, including supporting improvements and coaching leaders and teachers at school and trust level. He has worked in some of the most disadvantaged areas in the UK

You can also reach Jonathan direct by emailing:

jonathan@bespoke-development.com

Further reading and links

• Ciarán Collins, Regina Murphy and Martin Brown, The power of coaching in the professional learning and development of school leaders: an ecological framework and critical insights from a systematic review (Frontiers in Education, July 2025) https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2025.1601455/full.

• Bob Garvey and Paul Stokes, Coaching and Mentoring, Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 2022)

• Jenny Rogers, Coaching Skills: A Handbook, 2nd ed. (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008)

New international SEND alliance to share reform lessons

Countries will meet across three summits over the next year to compare SEND approaches and agree practical action plans.

Cost of living pushes more teachers to leave pension

Nearly 60,000 teachers have opted out of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme since 2020, with unions warning the trend reflects growing financial strain across the workforce.

Education economics centre to help evidence-informed policymaking

UCL and partners launch a new £3m DfE-backed centre to sharpen understanding of the social and economic returns from education and skills investment.

Investors mistake privilege for competence, study suggests

Recent research suggests privately educated CEOs are seen as a “safer bet” by investors, despite no evidence that their firms perform better.

Volunteer-led health centre tackles inequalities in place

A community health centre in the Midlands says its volunteer-led model has supported tens of thousands of patients while saving the NHS around £6m.

💡Research & insights

Rich Dad Poor Dad?

CEO Private School Background and Firm Risk

[Bi et al; European Financial Management, 2026]

Access the insights here

• I found this a hard read, it is a fascinating study but it compounds what many of us will no doubt already think through the work of Sutton Trust et al

• The study from Bi et al (2026) took place across US firms and indicates companies led by CEOs who attended private high schools show lower stock market volatility, but that socioeconomic background can act as a status signal, with investors perceiving privately educated CEOs as more competent!!

• Firms led by CEOs who attended private school had around 5% lower stock market volatility on average.

• The study found no meaningful evidence that privately educated CEOs delivered stronger results than state-educated peers. Important for those of us working in policy spaces and aiming to shift ideas/myths on this.

• Bi et al found no evidence that privately educated CEOs made safer corporate decisions or behaved more cautiously.

• The effect seems to be about perception, not substance. Investors may treat elite educational background as a signal of competence, stability or credibility, particularly when they have limited information.

• As more evidence emerges about a CEO’s actual performance, the effect of their private-school background becomes less important. Again, this is important when we consider the value of understanding barriers/lived experience.

• The effect also fades in firms with more analyst scrutiny or greater institutional investment, suggesting that stronger information reduces reliance on background-based assumptions.

• It is a useful read because it shows how perceptions of competence are not always neutral. Even in financial markets, where decisions are often assumed to be highly rational and evidence-led, social background still shape how people are judged, especially those from less privileged backgrounds.

Joined-up policy making:

Lessons from the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy 1998-2010

[Wallace & Hadley; Institute for Government, 2026]

Access the insights here

• A useful case study here for those of us working around place-based work but also across health/education sectors.

• The case study explores England’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, launched in 1999, as an example of what joined-up, long-term policymaking can achieve.

• The strategy was developed at a time when the UK’s teenage birth rate was unusually high compared with similar countries, and when teenage pregnancy was closely linked to wider patterns of poverty, school absence, care experience, poor mental health, NEET risk and intergenerational disadvantage.

  

  (Source: Wallace & Hadley, 2026)

• Wallace and Hadley (2026) note that the strategy was not down to a single intervention. Instead, it combined clear national leadership, robust use of data, local delivery networks, better relationships and sex education, improved access to contraception, support for young parents, and cross-sector collaboration.

• Interestingly, they argue this wasn’t just because of professionals but also to teenagers and parents themselves, exposing gaps in knowledge, confidence, access and support.

• The outcomes were significant. Between 1998 and 2020, the under-18 conception rate in England fell by 72%, with the target of halving the rate met nationally in 2014.

• For me, the most useful part of the report is its emphasis on implementation. A review found that the areas making the most progress had senior local sponsorship, strong local partnerships, trusted youth-focused sexual health services, effective relationships/sex education and many other factors.

• A useful read because it shows what joined-up government looks like when it is treated as a serious delivery challenge and across collaboration with others.

The Year 7 Moment:

Engagement in and beyond Maths in Key Stage 3

[Axiom; 2026]

Access the insights here

• An interesting summary of pupil engagement from the team at Axiom Maths.

• Their research tracked high-attaining pupils (those scoring above 110 in their SATs) from more advantaged (ABC1) and less advantaged (C2DE) socioeconomic backgrounds, measuring attitudes and perceptions from the end of Year 6 through to the end of Year 7.

• It chimes with other research indicating that Year 7 is a hinge point where maths identity is formed, and self-belief can solidify or slip away.

• The gap between pupils from different socioeconomic backgrounds widens quickly. But these changes are predictable to a point.

• At the end of primary school, high-attaining disadvantaged pupils (C2DE) are more likely to say that their maths lessons are fun than advantaged pupils (ABC1).

• But this flips a year later. By the end of Year 7, just 22% of C2DE pupils find maths lessons fun compared to 52% of ABC1 pupils. Advantaged pupils tend to recover by Term 3 but the outcome flat lines for disadvantaged pupils.

(Source: Axiom, 2026)

• C2DE pupils arrive in Year 7 more enthusiastic about maths than their peers. Secondary school reverses this entirely. By the end of Year 7, they find maths less enjoyable, less interesting, and more stressful.

• By Year 7 Term 3, lessons feel more predictable. The proportion of pupils saying lessons “stay the same” more than doubles from 10% at the start of the year to 21%. Whilst this of course reflects the realities of the school year and end-of-year assessments, this is nonetheless a change that pupils react to.

• Meanwhile pupils’ perception of productive behaviours declines such as listening (43% to 37%) and working together (37% to 29%) and disruptive behaviours increase such as pupils talking when they shouldn’t be (40% to 44%) and interrupting the teacher (25% to 30%).

• The data indicates that while curriculum and teaching approaches are consistent across groups, experience in the classroom differs significantly.

• High-achieving C2DE pupils report more disruption and experience less maths discussions and debates as they move through the year relative to ABC1 pupils (28% vs 41% by Term 3).

• I’d recommend a full digest of the helpful summary in the link

10 key findings about the outcomes of initially high-achieving children from disadvantaged backgrounds

[Jerrim & Carvajal; FFT, 2026]

Access the insights here

• This blog from Jerrim and Carvajal (2026) is well worth a read. Some of the headlines in it are harrowing, but well worth knowing in your context.

• FFT Education Datalab piece brings together ten key findings from a Nuffield Foundation-funded project looking at children from disadvantaged backgrounds who show high levels of achievement early in their education.

• The central message is simply that being a high attainer early on does not protect children from the effects of poverty and disadvantage.

• Five-year-olds from low-income families with strong early cognitive scores are still far less likely to achieve top GCSE grades than similarly high-achieving peers from richer families. The gap is estimated at 21 percentage points in English and 26 percentage points in maths. (But I caveat getting too obsessed with attainment gaps here!)

• The findings go beyond attainment. High-achieving disadvantaged pupils are more likely to experience absence, exclusion and mental health challenges as they move through secondary school.

• This one really stood out to me! In Year 10, almost 10 in every 1,000 high-achieving disadvantaged children make contact with hospital services related to self-harm. This is roughly double the rate for low-achieving children from socio-economically advantaged backgrounds.

(Source: FFT, 2026)

• There are also important findings about progression and opportunity. Even when high-achieving disadvantaged pupils go to university, they are much more likely to live at home than their advantaged peers, which may affect access to the wider opportunities of higher education.

From my archives:

Beyond classrooms and clinics (Feat. Dr Guddi Singh)

[Harris & Singh; 2025]

Access the insights here

• This guest blog from Dr Guddi Singh peaked my readership ratings last year!

• Dr Guddi Singh is on a mission. She wants to find out what influences the health and wellbeing of our children and whether it's time for a new approach.

• Her blog explores the ways in which education and healthcare often work in silos, and how this doesn’t help to better understand and tackle inequalities.

• Guddi draws on work from schools and health settings across the North of England and offers practical insight into what collaboration should look like.

• Plenty of links to other free resources in the blog, including Guddi’s incredible BBC documentary which explores these themes in greater depth.

• Give this a read if you missed it last year!

🪴Opportunities

Can I have 3-minutes?

Shape the future of this Substack and win a copy of the book

• I am humbled by the amount of readers accessing and using this resource

• A big thank you for your ongoing support and engagement

• I’m inviting everybody to take 3-minutes to complete this survey for me so that I can continue to offer this in a way which is free and impactful

• Everybody that enters is in with a chance of winning a copy of Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools (a winner will be draw on Monday 06 July

Event Opportunity: National Festival of Education

Shaping national conversations about equity, pedagogy and poverty

• A reminder that I’ll be speaking at this years Festival of Education!

• The 16th instalment of one of the UK’s most exciting and inspiring education events will take place in July 2026.

• Founded by Wellington College in 2010, the Festival of Education gathers educators from across the UK and beyond for two days of invaluable professional development, discussions, and networking.

• Find out more about my session here (3 July 2026)

• Find out more about the festival and secure your place

Funding Opportunity: AD Charitable Trust

Funding for projects to support people facing disadvantage

• The AD Trust provides grants to UK charities working with disadvantaged people, with a particular emphasis on self-help, building confidence and opportunity.

• The Trust appears especially interested in smaller charities or programmes where its support can make a practical difference.

• Grants can be used for specific projects, resources, capital costs, recurrent costs and, importantly, core costs.

• Applications are relatively straightforward at the first stage. Charities are asked to submit an email or letter outlining the project, intended evaluation, detailed costs, existing sources of finance, and any other funding applications made. Annual accounts should also be included.

• Grants available: £5,000 to £30,000

• Applications can be submitted at any time, but funding decisions are usually made in December, with grants paid then.

• Find out more about this and other funding opportunities here

CPD Opportunity: Room to Grow

Free to access Sutton Trust webinar

• This event follows on from the publication of the Room to Grow: School-based nursery places and the disadvantage gap report.

• The report investigates the implementation, challenges and effectiveness of school-based nursery provision in improving access to high quality early childhood education and childcare.

• This webinar focuses on and shares the best practises, findings and recommendations for school based nurseries.

• Date: Thursday 18 June Time: (4pm-5pm)

• Zoom registration: Room to Grow webinar
  

☕🫖You pour the brew, I’ll provide the content

In these ‘Cuppa with a Change Maker’ blogs, I’ll feature a guest that is passionate about social justice and tackling educational inequality.

There are some conversations that remind you that a commitment to social justice is not always found in shiny slogans or national strategies; sometimes it can be heard in the relational work of simply helping children with less to navigate everyday. For example, like helping a child learn to read and enjoy books.

Reading is one of those things that can become almost invisible to those of us who use it every day. We read road signs, menus, timetables, job adverts, emails, instructions and books without always noticing the privilege of being able to do so. Yet for too many children and adults with less, reading remains a barrier.

That is why I was so keen to speak with Emma Bell, Chief Executive of Chapter One UK. I first met Emma through my work alongside the Fair Education Alliance. She brings a career shaped by human rights, health and work with vulnerable families. What links it all is a deep commitment to helping families with less thrive more. In this feature, Emma talks about reading not simply as an education issue, but a social justice issue.

I think this is such an important read because it challenges a lazy assumption that children’s reading is either a school problem or a parental problem. Emma invites businesses, volunteers, schools and wider society to play a part in helping children build both the will and the skill to read. Which seems rather fitting in Volunteers Week!

Over to you Emma :)

Hello, I’m Emma and I have the privilege of serving as Chief Executive of Chapter One. I enjoy a good story, and here is one I’d like to share with you today…

Throughout my career, I have always been drawn to work that supports vulnerable families, children and young people. I started out in the NHS, then worked in human rights in different parts of the world, before going on to lead a series of organisations, including an organisation supporting people that had experienced domestic violence.

A thread running through all of that work has always been the same, helping vulnerable families with less to thrive more. I have always been drawn to wanting to support and work alongside those navigating complex inequalities. Whilst the work isn’t without challenge or complexity, it feels deeply important in today’s world and amongst the many injustices we know are faced by others, especially those navigating financial barriers to learning or poverty-related barriers to living.

My story into reading came partly through serendipity. I ended up living in America, where I came across Chapter One’s sister organisation in the United States. I came to understand the model, began working with them, and now I lead Chapter One here in the UK. So, let me share with you why the work of Chapter One got under my skin and why I think it is an important part of understanding and tackling inequalities.

Reading justice

(Source: Chapter One UK)

At its heart, Chapter One’s work is driven by a simple but important conviction that reading is one of the most fundamental life skills we have. For me, and all of my colleagues at Chapter One, that makes it a social justice issue.

There are too many people, both children and adults, who do not have the opportunity to benefit from everything reading can offer. Research continues to demonstrate that for many children and young people, reading is not a readily available activity. Research from the National Literacy Trust showed that, in 2025, 9 in 10 (89.7%) children and young people aged 5 to 18 said they had a book of their own at home, meaning 1 in 10 (10.3%) did not have their own book. 1 in 8 (12.4%) 8- to 18-year-olds who received free school meals (FSMs) told researchers that they did not have a book of their own.

For too many children and young people, reading enjoyment levels also vary too much and this can be influenced by where they live. However, we know that inequality and poverty are a big part of this narrative. Again, research from the National Literacy Trust helps to illustrate some of this story.

(Source: National Literacy Trust, 2025)

Yet, we all know that reading opens doors to learning, employment, confidence, independence, imagination and participation in society. Without it, the world can become much harder to navigate. That is why our focus is on children in primary school who are struggling on their reading journey. We work particularly with communities facing poverty-related barriers and disadvantage.

There is a wealth of evidence showing significant inequalities in reading and early language development before children even arrive at school. Children from different backgrounds, and in different parts of the country, can have very different levels of adult support, reading exposure and language-rich interaction around them.

So, by the time children enter Reception at the age of five, gaps are already visible. Sadly, those gaps can continue to widen as children move through primary school. For us, that is not just a literacy issue but a social justice issue.

We intentionally use the phrase “children facing disadvantage” rather than simply describing children as “disadvantaged”. This approach will not be without challenge and the term disadvantage is a complex one. But we do this to avoid deficit thinking and recognise children’s agency, potential and possibility. Many children face structural challenges, but that does not mean their outcomes are predetermined. The task is to support children to navigate those challenges, not to define them by them.

Opening my own story

(Source: Chapter One UK)

I am a passionate reader myself. I have always understood reading as a fundamental life skill, but over time I came to understand it more clearly as a social justice issue too.

I met many adults who struggled with reading and saw just how challenging everyday life could be as a result. I was in awe of how they navigated the world, because words are simply everywhere. They are on documents, surveys, buses, phones, medicines, job applications, school letters and public notices. To manage all of that without being able to read confidently is an extraordinary act of resilience and one which demands our attention. It really opened up my own eyes to the challenges of it too.

I then had my own children, and that refreshed my understanding of the fact that learning to read is actually really complex! It is also full of betrayal!

Children start learning phonics and are told that certain sounds match certain letters. Then, a few weeks later, many discover that this was only part of the picture. Suddenly, the same letters can make different sounds, and different letters can make the same sounds. For some children, that journey can feel confusing, frustrating and disempowering. This will often be the case with children facing poverty-related barriers to learning or access too.

This is why I feel so strongly that children need multiple adults around them who can help carry them through the reading journey. It is brilliant when children have family and friends who can do that, but not every child has access to this reality. We also need to be careful here that we don’t blame parents, carers or families for this. For adults navigating limited literacy skills and holding down multiple jobs and challenges, it is simply too much to expect all of these skills to grow in the home environment.

That is where I became deeply invested in supporting both the will and the skill to read. Children need the technical skills, but they also need encouragement, confidence, identity and relationships. They need adults who will show up, read with them, and help them believe that reading can belong to them too. This is an important part of both our mission but also our response at Chapter One. So, if you love books and want to help others, then this next segment may be particularly important for you!

Reading volunteers and more

(Source: Chapter One UK)

At Chapter One, we provide a range of programmes designed to help children develop both the will and the skill to read. This is a vital part of our work, but I want to share these as examples of how social justice translates to the page of practice!

Our biggest and longest-standing programme is our Online Reading Volunteers Programme. This brings together thousands of adult volunteers, many from the business and industry sectors, who give half an hour a week to read with a child who is struggling. That 30-minutes goes a very long way!

The model works because it is simple, sustained and flexible. Volunteers can connect from wherever they are working, using an online platform, and support a child in one of the 13, soon to be 14, areas where we work. For schools, the programme is deliberately light touch. It is integrated into classroom life and resources are provided. There are no onerous expectations around taking children to special rooms or setting up complicated systems. For us, careful and sustainable implementation is a really important part of getting this right in busy school environments. It is also popular with businesses, because many adults want to do something meaningful and sustained for a child, but find it difficult to fit volunteering around work.

Our second programme is our Early Literacy Intervention. This focuses on the very early reading experience. Most children learn to read using phonics and an established school scheme, but not every child gets on with the scheme in the same way or at the same pace.

Teachers are doing an incredibly difficult job, but it can be hard to provide daily one-to-one support when a child begins to fall behind. Our model pairs a technology platform with specially trained early literacy interventionists, who go into schools and provide short, focused, one-to-one sessions every day. The aim is to help children keep up before gaps become more entrenched.

Our third programme is more recent and focuses on older primary children who can read but are choosing not to. Schools told us they had children in Year 4 and Year 5 who technically knew how to read, but were not reading. As a result, the gap between them and peers who were regular readers was growing. So, we developed a highly bespoke book club model, rooted in evidence around choice, motivation and reading identity.

This is not an adult-style book club where everyone is given the same book and sent away to read it. It is much more discursive. Children choose from a variety of texts, bring other texts into the conversation, and are encouraged to develop opinions and preferences. Many children tell us they had never really thought reading could be fun. For them, reading was homework. It was something done to them or required of them.

In our book clubs, something changes. An adult says: “Tell me what you think.” And if a child does not like a book, that is okay. We can put it down and find another one. Figuring out what you do not like can be almost as important as figuring out what you do like. For a child who may feel disempowered by the system, that sense of choice can really matter.

More broadly, our mission is to bring wider society into the world of reading. We cannot, as a nation, say that the decline in children reading for pleasure is all a school problem. Nor can we say it is all a parent problem. It is a shared challenge, and we need a much wider coalition of people and organisations to respond to it.

There is real potential in the business and industry sector here. The UK has strong structures around social value, including expectations that businesses bidding for public contracts demonstrate impact in communities. If we can harness that, and support adults within those businesses to offer sustained reading support to children, then we have something very powerful. It builds social value into the ordinary structures of business. That gives me hope.

Rewriting stories

(Source: Chapter One UK)

We have strong data showing improvements in children meeting age-related expectations after receiving our support. We also see progress in confidence, motivation and enjoyment. Alongside the quantitative data, we have powerful qualitative evidence from children, schools and volunteers. But for me personally, the most hopeful thing is the wider mission and ideas behind this work.

We all have a role to play in rewriting our nation’s current reading ‘story’. Adults outside the family and school setting can be a powerful force in supporting children’s reading. They can help children practise, enjoy reading, build confidence and see themselves as readers. This is important because reading carries a dividend; it supports children to live happier, healthier lives full of opportunity. When a child becomes a reader, they gain more than a skill. They gain access to knowledge, imagination, independence, inspiration and, ultimately, to hope.

Further links

You can find out more about Chapter One’s work here. Please do reach out to me directly by replying to this email if you would like an introduction.

Chapter One Online Reading Volunteers Programme

Chapter One Early Literacy Intervention Programme

Chapter One Book Clubs

Chapter One Impact Report 2024-25

🫖 Fancy a cuppa?

Could you be one of my next guests?

Here's a link that will take you to a quick form about the blog series. I'll be running 1-2 a month, so I would love to add prospective authors to the schedule.

Please do pass the link on to other change makers you might know of.

Ideas for content might include:

• Particular project making a difference to the lived realities of hardship for others

• Innovative approaches to understanding and/or tackling inequalities

• Signposts of further support, free resources etc on a specific issue

• Ideas or examples do not have to be school based

I’m happy to promote approaches, strategies and ideas, but avoid using the blog as a sales pitch for a particular product or traded offer please! (By all means signpost an offer if you think it helps)

School suspensions hit pupils facing disadvantage the most

Recent figures show disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND remain far more likely to be suspended, raising ongoing questions about inclusion and unmet needs.

SEND reforms will target ‘shameful’ transitions

Government advisers say too many young people with SEND are being failed during post-16 transition, with new measures explored and a £4 billion reform package.

FSM tracker could help unlock funding for children missing out

An upgraded free school meals eligibility tool could help tackle the estimated 250,000 children currently missing out on FSM support and Pupil Premium funding linked to it.

“Unrecognisable” Higher Maths exam sparks challenge from pupils

Pupils said the paper left many feeling upset and hopeless after facing questions and wording they felt unprepared for despite months of revision.

“A chance to just be children” the festival making a real difference

The Young Carers Festival gives young people with caring responsibilities the rare opportunity to rest, make friends and feel understood by others who “just get it”.

💡Research & insights

The Good Life?

The relationship between social mobility and happiness

[Latham & Lillywhite; Sutton Trust, 2026]

Access the insights here

• A really thought-provoking new report asks what makes a good life and who gets access to it. This is vital reading for anybody working in education. Given the value of this report, I’ve given it more coverage here than you’d usually get in a summary from me, but I think you’ll agree it is well worth it!

• Latham and Lillywhite (2026) argue that social mobility is about far more than income, qualifications or career status.

• Happiness, wellbeing, belonging, relationships, stability and community all matter too. It also notes where people start in life still shapes these outcomes later.

• What I find particularly important is the report’s challenge to narrow definitions of success. It pushes back against the idea that opportunity is simply about getting a better-paid job somewhere else. Instead, it argues that people should be able to thrive within their communities, with strong local opportunities, relationships and quality of life.

(Source: Sutton Trust, 2026)

• People’s social background significantly impacts their happiness and life satisfaction as an adult. There is a ‘happiness gap’ between people born into different socio-economic circumstances. Those from professional households who maintain that status through their lives are a third (33%) more likely to experience high wellbeing than those who remain in routine occupations.

• Social mobility closes most of this gap. Those who are upwardly mobile are substantially more happy than those who remain in routine occupations. This boost in happiness is explained by a combination of higher incomes and financial stability, better health, as well as higher chances of being in employment, accessing higher education and owning your home. Remaining in a routine occupation is also associated with higher levels of emotional and mental distress.

• However, the upwardly mobile are still not quite as happy as those born into a professional household who maintain this status as adults. This remaining gap is explained by differences in income, employment and home ownership.

• Downwardly mobile people from higher socio-economic backgrounds tend to be ‘protected’ from some of the negative aspects of lower socio-economic status on wellbeing. In part this may be because they actively made choices to work in lower status occupations. They may also have benefited from previous financial security enabling such decisions.

• In general, longer-range mobility (moving from bottom to top or vice versa) had a stronger influence on wellbeing than shorter-range mobility (people who move to an adjacent occupational status e.g. routine to intermediate).

• The impact of mobility on wellbeing becomes stronger with age. Gaps in happiness between different social mobility trajectories widen for older age groups.

• People with a university degree had higher wellbeing. Degree holders consistently have higher wellbeing than non-degree holders even after accounting for patterns of wellbeing across social mobility trajectories.

• Those who were upwardly mobile were more than twice as likely to have moved away from the region they grew up in than those who remained in routine occupations. In general, those who moved region had higher wellbeing than those who didn’t, although this was likely associated with the income boost from moving.

• New survey data shows that self-perceptions of social mobility also matter to wellbeing. Those who thought themselves upwardly mobile had the highest levels of wellbeing, and those who saw themselves as downwardly mobile had the lowest. However, almost half (49%) of the group reporting upward mobility grew up in professional homes. This shows the enduring power of social mobility narratives.

• A sense of belonging to the local community is strongly linked to wellbeing. Those with a very strong sense of belonging were more than 13 times more likely to have high wellbeing than those with very weak belonging. Those who moved region and those who were upwardly mobile were just as likely to have this sense of belonging than those who hadn’t moved region and weren’t socially mobile.

• Social mobility is not a singular phenomenon and our case studies demonstrate that people experience it in very different ways. While for many those experiences are positive, others may face challenges including needing to move away from home to be successful, overcoming class stereotypes and expectations, higher stress or strain on relationships and issues with work-life balance. Wellbeing is also informed by personal outlooks as well as health, family relationships, friendship and culture.

• The potential for young people to experience the benefits often associated with upward social mobility is being undermined by the current cost of living, as well as the housing crisis. Even interviewees who felt they had higher social status or professions than their parents pointed to the fact that they could not afford to buy their own homes or enjoy the kind of economic freedom that their parents had had.

• Please also note the policy recommendations in the report, especially those of us working in policy spaces and alongside groups pushing for change.

How Poverty Fell

Working paper series

[Armentano et al; National Bureau of Economic Research, 2026]

Access the insights here

• An insightful paper for those of us interested in how to better understand and tackle the persistent problems of poverty locally and globally.

• Between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people worldwide living in extreme poverty fell sharply, dropping from around 36% to 9%. As always, I caution with only relying on poverty measures to make sense of this though.

(Source: Armentano et al, 2026)

• Research exploring this change across five countries responsible for most of the global reduction suggests that poverty declined across generations collectively, rather than being driven by one particular age group or cohort.

• The findings also challenge the idea of poverty as a fixed, lifelong condition, showing instead that many households move in and out of poverty over time.

• While factors such as migration, shifts in employment sectors, occupational change, and increased participation of women in the workforce contributed to some families no longer having poverty, most households who moved out of poverty did so without experiencing any single major transition,

• It’s an interesting paper highlighting the complex and varied nature of poverty reduction. Freely available too!

Profiles of hope:

How clusters of hope relate to school variables

[Dixson et al; Learning & Individual Differences Journal, 2026]

Access the insights here

• An interesting study which explored how different types and levels of hope shape young people’s experiences of school and wellbeing.

• Researchers identified four distinct “hope profiles” among adolescents, high hopers, high agency thinkers, high pathway thinkers, and low hopers.

• Young people with higher levels of hope, particularly those who believed strongly in their ability to achieve goals and find ways forward, reported more positive outcomes across a range of psychological and educational measures, including self-esteem, academic confidence, motivation and perceived achievement.

• By contrast, lower levels of hope were linked to poorer outcomes and increased risk factors.

(Source: Dixson et al, 2026)

• What I found of interest (given how much I argue against the ‘aspiration myth’ in my work with schools) was that hope was closely linked to how pupils viewed their future life chances.

• Students with stronger hope profiles were more likely to believe they had opportunities ahead of them and felt more invested in school.

• Researchers also found that stress tended to move in the opposite direction to hope, the lower the hope, the higher the stress.

• It suggests that hope is not simply an emotion, but a meaningful protective factor that can influence how young people engage with school, navigate challenges, and view their futures. Something many of us know already I’m sure!

The influence of the social security system on educational and vocational decision-making at age 16

[DWP; Social Security Advisory Committee, 2026]

Access the insights here

• This recent report from the Social Security Advisory Committee examines how the UK benefits system is unintentionally shaping the decisions young people make at age 16

• Researchers have also explored how the benefits system is financially penalising lower-income families when young people choose apprenticeships over full-time education.

• While government positions apprenticeships, A-levels and vocational routes as equally valuable post-16 pathways, the social security system does not treat them equally in practice.

• It indicates how families can lose access to Child Benefit and parts of Universal Credit when a young person starts an apprenticeship, even though apprenticeships are officially recognised educational pathways under Raising the Participation Age legislation.

• Researchers warn in the report that this creates a financial disincentive for some families, particularly those already facing disadvantage.

• Researchers also suggests that single-parent households, families with disabled young people, young carers, care leavers and low-income households can be hit hardest, with some families losing substantial weekly income if a child moves into an apprenticeship. In some cases, households may actually become financially worse off despite the apprentice receiving a wage.

• A key concern running through the report is that educational and career decisions may increasingly be driven by short-term financial survival rather than long-term aspirations or suitability for the young person. This is something we have argued at Tees Valley Education for some years and why we invest heavily in our Classroom to Careers approach (ensuring careers learning at a very early age!)

• The authors have done a decent job here of showing that the benefits system has failed to keep pace with wider education reforms and the move towards compulsory participation in education or training until age 18.

• There are some hard hitting scenarios and case studies presented in the report which I’d recommend a read of. For example:

(Source: DWP; Social Security Advisory Committee, 2026)

🪴Opportunities

Event Opportunity: National Festival of Education

Shaping national conversations about equity, pedagogy and poverty

• A reminder that I’ll be speaking at this years Festival of Education!

• The 16th instalment of one of the UK’s most exciting and inspiring education events will take place in July 2026.

• Founded by Wellington College in 2010, the Festival of Education gathers educators from across the UK and beyond for two days of invaluable professional development, discussions, and networking.

• Find out more about my session here (3 July 2026)

• Find out more about the festival and secure your place

Funding Opportunity:

Support children and young people from armed forces families

• The Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust, a grant-giving charity supporting projects that help improve the lives of Armed Forces families, has announced that it is offering grants of between £5,000 and £80,000 to support early years education for children from Armed Forces families.

• The funding is being made available through the Armed Forces Families Fund: Early Years Programme.

• The grants can be used to:

  • Increase capacity at the setting to allow more service children to attend

  • Provide better learning environments for service children

  • Provide appropriate training and development of staff to support service children

• Closing date: 15 July

• Find out more about this and other funding opportunities here

CPD & Resources Opportunity: AYLA young leaders award

Grow and develop young leaders across schools

(Source: AYLA, 2026)

• Rooted in the Church of England Vision for Education, the Archbishops’ Young Leaders Award programme is helping children and young people develop leadership, character, pupil voice and social action.

• The programmes help to develop character, reminding pupils that leadership is not about status, but about courage, hope, service and making a difference within their communities.

• There are a range of FREE webinars that will showcase the impact already being seen across primary and secondary schools.

• Primary phase webinars: 17 June; 01 July and 13 August

• Secondary phase webinars: 24 June; 02 July and 12 August

• For further information contact victoriajones@churchofengland.org

• More resources and booking information also available here