More than numbers: the journey from evidence to impact at the Sutton Trust

“Our 2024/25 annual review outlines the highlights from all of our activity across the year, and gives insight into the full scope and impact of our work – including our efforts to support disadvantaged young people across the country. Our Director of Programmes, Katy Hampshire, looks beyond the headline figures to discuss our programmes work in more detail in this blog. Publishing an annual review is always a moment for pride and reflection, and this year’s review demonstrates the breadth and depth of our impact. It reflects the hard work and passion of our team and our partners and showcases the amazing young people we support. In 2024/25, we supported over 14,500 young people across our programmes, receiving nearly 30,000 applications. Those are numbers that reflect amazing ambition, real demand, and an ongoing gap in opportunity that our programmes exist to address. But I want to take a moment to dive deeper into what sits behind those numbers, and why our commitment to rigorous evaluation is not a reporting obligation but a core part of how we work. The Sutton Trust has always been an evidence-led organisation. It’s one of the things that drew me to work here. Our approach in programmes builds on and helps inform our sector-leading research. We then evaluate our programmes’ impact by bringing together self-reported survey data tracking progress from the start of a student’s journey through to programme completion. We add externally verified destinations data through tools including UCAS Outreach Evaluator and the Higher Education Access Tracker, and independent external evaluations at key points in a programme’s development. Key takeaways So, what does the evidence tell us? A few findings stand out. The programmes are measurably shifting the mindsets and aspirations of participants, helping them make informed decisions about their future. At the start of the programme for UK summer schools, 42% of students said they knew what studying at university would be like. By the end, that figure was 86%. And 88% of students finished the programme agreeing that “university is for people like me” – a shift in the sense of belonging that research consistently identifies as one of the most significant barriers for students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. For Pathways to the Professions students, 93% intend to apply to university or a degree apprenticeship after the programme, and 94% said their work experience placement left them feeling more motivated to achieve their career goals. Across all sector strands, significant majorities finish the programme feeling that a career in their chosen field is genuinely within reach. This rises to 85% in Medicine, 84% in Law, and 83% in Banking and Finance. These changes in knowledge and attitude lead to demonstrably improved outcomes in accessing highly competitive universities. Using data from UCAS we see that our programmes participants accept places at high-tariff universities at between 1.7 and 2.2 times the rate of UCAS comparator students who are matched on similar backgrounds and attainment. That represents uplifts from around a quarter of the UCAS group accepting offers to high-tariff universities to half of our participants. For our Sutton Trust Online programme, the external evaluation also found that this uplift increased with engagement with the platform: among highly engaged students, 53% were accepted to a high-tariff university, compared to 28% of the control group. Going beyond the benchmark But UCAS comparator data doesn’t account for motivation. That’s why we also commission a Propensity Score Matched comparator group. This is drawn from our own unsuccessful applicants: students who wanted to be on a programme, met our eligibility criteria, but did not secure a place. It’s as close to a genuine counterfactual as you can get outside a randomised controlled trial, and a standard very few widening participation providers are currently meeting. The results are telling. UK Summer School participants were significantly more likely to accept a high-tariff place than the matched group, 50% compared with 44%. For Pathways to Law: 53% versus 43%. For Pathways to Medicine: 47% versus 30%. These differences hold up against a genuinely demanding standard of comparison and are consistent across multiple programmes and years of data. Using longitudinal evidence to inform our approach Getting into a selective university is one milestone. What matters for social mobility is what happens after. Retention rates for UK Summer School participants stand at 96% after the first year, above the sector average. The proportion achieving a First or 2:1 was 88%, compared with 79% sector-wide. And UKSS graduates were significantly more likely to be working in high-skill occupations, at 80% compared with 70% of all graduates. This is a meaningful and lasting outcome for students from backgrounds where professional careers can feel out of reach. Growing our evidence base I want to be honest about where our evidence base is still developing. For newer programmes (including Access Apprenticeships and some Pathways strands) we need more data before forming robust control groups or drawing longitudinal conclusions. We are approaching these as we do all pilot delivery: evaluating carefully over two to three years, with independent scrutiny from organisations including ImpactEd and The Brilliant Club. The sector is rightly raising its expectations around evidence, and TASO and the Office for Students are driving higher standards. We want to be a contributor to that development, not merely a beneficiary of it. The stories behind the numbers Statistics tell part of the story. They don’t tell all of it. Behind every data point in this review is a young person who came to one of our programmes not quite sure they belonged — in a lecture theatre, a law firm, an engineering company — and left knowing they did. Their stories, in their own words, are what our evidence base is ultimately in service of. If you want to understand what our evidence base points to in human terms, please read more of our alumni stories . The post More than numbers: the journey from evidence to impact at the Sutton Trust appeared first on The Sutton Trust .

Summary generated from the RSS feed of Sutton Trust. All article rights belong to the original publisher. Click through to read the full piece on www.suttontrust.com.