THE SUTTON TRUST
The Sutton Trust 25 years championing social mobility through education The Sutton Trust was founded by Sir Peter Lampl in 1997. Its work is dedicated to fighting for social mobility from birth to the workplace so that every young person has the chance to succeed in life. Now in its 25th anniversary year, we look at what it’s achieved through its unique combination of research, policy influence and programmes. “For a quarter of a century, we’ve been relentlessly tackling the problem of low social mobility. Today the Trust has relationships with over 3,000 schools and all of the major universities in the UK and the US, and is laser-focused on highlighting educational and social inequality wherever it occurs and then finding practical ways to address it. And we have a 25-year track record of practical intervention and policy influence to celebrate and use as a springboard into the future.” Sir Peter Lampl
Programmes
Since its very first Summer School at Oxford University, the Trust’s programmes have directly supported over 50,000 young people, giving them the opportunity to change their lives. Focused on bright students from low and middle-income backgrounds in state schools, its programmes now reach over 8,000 pupils each year, helping them access the most competitive universities, apprenticeships and jobs. The benefit to programme participants is clear – students taking part are four times more likely to receive an offer from a top university and for every £1 million invested by the Trust in programmes, £14 million is generated in value to students’ lifetime earnings. 92% of its graduates move from the lowest to the highest socio-economic groups after leaving university: Policy
The Sutton Trust put social
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mobility on the map. Since 1997, it has worked with every government and education secretary to make sure that social mobility stays at the top of their agendas. Many of its practical and evidence-based recommendations have been taken up by policymakers, influencing national change in all the areas in which it works: U niversity Access - By pioneering university summer schools in the UK in the late 1990s, the Sutton Trust established fair access to university as a key policy priority. The government drew on the Sutton Trust model to develop summer schools to encourage young people from poorer backgrounds into higher education. Now, over £800million each year is spent by universities on efforts to widen access to higher education, and all universities run a summer school or similar access initiative which have benefited 100,000s of young people to date.
