Think For The Future & Impetus

Part of the Engage Fund: a partnership with The Henry Smith Charity

We are excited about our partnership with Impetus who will act as critical friends: challenging our processes and systems and ultimately ensuring we are operating in a way that allows us to deliver the greatest impact at the greatest scale

– The Tutor Trust Cherie White, CEO at Think For The Future

The need: Disengagement from education is a problem that many schools and young people face across the UK. This can be caused by both extreme, disruptive behaviour and exclusions as well as poor mental health and wellbeing.

Every year 8,000 children are permanently excluded from school and an even greater number are moved out of mainstream school into alternative provision (AP) This is important because both school exclusion and being educated in AP correlate with poorer life outcomes: less than 5% of students in AP pass their English and Math's GCSE, half are NEET (not in education, employment, or training) 6 months after leaving AP, it’s been linked to an exacerbation in poor mental health and 1 in 4 prisoners report being permanently excluded from school (1).

Disengagement from education is much wider than permanent exclusions - in many ways these cases are just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. Looking at the data into the causes of permanent exclusions, we can see that over a third of exclusions are caused by ‘persistent disruptive behaviour’ (2). Disruption to learning in the classroom has huge knock-on effects on the welfare of teaching staff (3) and also negatively impacts the learning of other students.

Our charity partner: TFTF positions highly trained Behaviour and Resilience Mentors into partner schools for between 1-5 days per week to work with targeted groups of students who are disengaged from education. Their Mentors are positive external role models for students and are experts at building powerful relationships and using TFTF’s social and emotional curriculum, to equip students with the skills and mindset they need to transform their in-school engagement.

Our impact: Impetus is excited to support TFTF to scale their work, helping them to reach 18,000 students at risk of exclusion per year across deprived areas of the Midlands and North of England by 2023. Their growth will include the development of Management Provision for their ‘Inclusion Centre Management Provision’ which enable schools to keep their most at-risk students on-site at their mainstream school accessing a high quality learning environment rather than excluding them. This is in addition to growing their already strong team of staff and mentors.

Impetus will also provide capacity building support with the honing of TFTF’s theory of change, data collection and analysis, and support with refining their growth strategy so that more young people can benefit from their support.

1-  IntegratED Annual Report 2020|IntegratED

2-  Timpson Review of School Exclusion|publishing.service.gov.uk

3- Teacher well-being at work in schools and further education providers