By Robin Chu, CEO and Founder of CoachBright

Brexit, Trump or even today the Paradise Papers - the last few years has seen the world divided between a them and us situation (even more so if we didn’t already feel like this).

A common theme of being ‘left behind’ and unfairness. A large part we believe, at CoachBright, comes from historically low educational outcomes for our disadvantaged pupils. Alan Milburn, Chairman of the Social Mobility Commission says: “there is something going badly wrong in schools when wealthy low-ability children overtake poor high-ability children.”. In their annual report, it reveals it will take 120 years before disadvantaged teenagers are as likely as their better off counterparts to get equivalent qualifications.

Clearly, not good enough and clearly more needs to be done - faster and better.

At CoachBright, we know a large part comes from poor attainment results and university outcomes for pupils from low-income backgrounds. We’re trying to play our part in tackling this.

We do this by training university students and senior pupils in schools as academic performance coaches. They work with a low-income pupil 1-1 or 1-2 to improve their subject grade, confidence and expectations so they know what work ethic is needed each day to achieve their goals. Over the last few years we have worked across the South West, London and Birmingham. In our Class of 2017, we have seen encouraging results in our Year 13 leavers. For reference:

70% have gone on to a top third university including Sheffield, Cambridge and UCL.
63% is the independent school national average
29% is the state school national average

Over the next few weeks, we have launched our social media campaign around #educationaljusticeUK. Our aim is to raise awareness of what works and what are the key issues surrounding social mobility, pupil premium and leadership around the issue.

If you’re interested in learning more please follow the hashtag, get in touch if you want to guest blog for us on the issue and save the date on Monday 4th December from 7:30pm for our live tweetchat!