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 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:

University 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.

Independent State School Partnerships - In 1998, the Trust launched the Independent State School Partnerships fund with the Department for Education, which led to hundreds of projects between private and maintained schools. Today the Independent Schools Council estimates that 85% of all independent schools have partnerships with state schools, ranging from local partnerships to more ambitious national schemes, that benefit tens of thousands of pupils each year.

School Admissions - The Trust’s research was some of the first to highlight how few poorer students gain access to the highest performing schools. This work strengthened the admissions framework, as well as influencing subsequent national admissions codes, allowing schools to implement admissions ballots and to prioritise poorer pupils.

Research

Since inception, the Trust has published over 250 research studies, which have shed important light on issues of social mobility and educational inequality and kept them at the top of the national conversation:

The Importance of Teaching - The Trust’s work has shown the crucial importance of great teaching and leadership in improving social mobility. As well as commissioning the Teaching and Learning Toolkit – the ‘go-to’ place for education evidence, subsequently developed by the Education Endowment Foundation, the Trust also published ‘What Makes Great Teaching?’, its most downloaded report to date.

Early Years - The Trust’s research has shone a light on the importance of a child’s early years and how low-income youngsters are as much as 11 months behind their peers when they start school. In 2018 they revealed the extent of closures of Sure Start centres and in 2021 they made the case for extending the 30 hours offer to lowerincome families. The Trust is working with UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO) and the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies, on the COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities (COSMO) study, a major national longitudinal study examining the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the life chances of a generation of young people.

The next phase in the Trust’s story is set to be its most active yet. The disruptions visited on us all by the pandemic of 2020 were especially acutely felt in the areas of education and social mobility. The Trust’s aim is to expand its programmes to support even more young people, exert still greater influence on government policy and to commission a whole new roster of agenda-setting research. It also has ambitious plans to build its funding model. The Sutton Trust’s expertise and influence offers significant leverage to foundations and individuals who believe social mobility matters and want to make a contribution.

www.suttontrust.com

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