Our Head of University Access and Digital, Jonny Tyndall, outlines the learnings from seven years of running our pre-16 university programme, Sutton Scholars.
The attainment gap between more and less advantaged students grows throughout a young person’s time a school and has been a persistent issue in education in the UK. Our sister charity, the Education Endowment Foundation, was established to find out what works when it comes to improving attainment for students from less well-off backgrounds, undertaking numerous trials of interventions and publishing the Teaching and Learning Toolkit.
Recently this focus on attainment-raising for pre-16 students has also been taken up by the Office for Students (OFS) which has been encouraging universities to prioritise this as part of their Access and Participation Plans. Having recently finished delivering a multiyear programme for under 16s with university partners which had improving attainment as a key aim, we wanted to share our learnings.
