How can we help young people with a social worker to thrive in education?

Despite substantial investment in trying to narrow attainment gaps, they continue to persist – family background, and ethnicity, are two strong predictors of educational attainment, of access to the professions, and ultimately of social status later in life. Gaps in attainment between rich and poor students persist even within the same school.

In 2011, the government established the Education Endowment Foundation, with an endowment of £125m, to fund high-quality research into how the attainment gap between rich and poor students might be closed. Since then they’ve funded more than 150 randomised control trials – one of the best ways to identify whether a new intervention is having an effect. These studies have made a considerable difference, producing 18 promising interventions so far that have been shown to have substantial positive impacts on the grades of young people. These interventions have been evaluated for both whole cohorts, and for young people eligible for free school meals.