“to identify the behavioural, political and regulatory levers necessary to release billions of pounds of private, long-term investment capital to green the UK economy and tackle structural inequalities.“

I’ll come back to this macro economic question on the blog later, but one of the most compelling talks at the meeting took quite a micro approach to trying to address structural inequalities.

Jonathan Maguire of Tomorrow’s Company is running an inspirational project that is trying to reduce the number of children who leave school without any usable qualifications, and end up classified as ‘NEETs’—Not in Education, Employment or Training.

Massive problem

The UK data are shocking.

Overall, 18% of British schoolchildren—100,000 young people—leave school each year without any usable qualifications. (In the best-in-class Netherlands, the comparable figure is 4.4%).

The figure climbs to 37% for children from a low-income household (which from my notes, was a household with an income of less that £15,000 for two or more years.)

And it climbs again for children with special educational needs and disabilities [SEND], to 45%.

In other words, this is a massive problem, in terms of social mobility, lost opportunity, and lost individual lifetime income. Individually, when you spend some time as a NEET it scars your earning potential for life.

Coaching and mentoring

There’s also the effect of lost economic activity in the economy as a whole. If Britain closed the gap on the Netherlands, it would be £69 billion more productive—with the uplift this represents for tax revenues and so on.

What the project does is to work with these young people in a ‘Future Skills’ programme. This is a 10-week coaching and mentoring course—an hour a week—which works with 14 to 16 year olds who are at risk of being failed by school.

The way Jonathan Maguire described this programme is that they are delivering a “corporate coaching programme to 14 year olds,” although with examples that are more relevant to younger people.

They have run enough pilots and prototypes now to have a course that is well documented and can be run by people with experience of working with and mentoring young people. Schools, by the way, get the benefits of this model in a heartbeat.

Self-esteem and resilience

This is what the brochure says about their approach:

As well as designing our programme to deliver the essential skillsets, we focus equally on developing healthy, resilient mindsets too. Our unique approach enables students to develop self-confidence, self-esteem and mental resilience, with a particular emphasis on coping with and learning from failure.

We help them discover more about their own skills, interests and passions, and then give them the tools and techniques to become better leaders, team players, innovators, communicators, problem solvers and change-makers.

Apparently the kids enjoy this, and you can see why. It’s probably the first time in their lives that they have been taken seriously rather than being written off. I talked to Jonathan later, and he also said that they also treat them like young adults in the sessions—they don’t need to put their hands up if they need to go to the loo, for example.

Any novel programme like this needs its hero/heroine stories, and Maguire had a couple to share.

Sports prototype

They put the kids into five teams on the programme, and encourage entrepreneurial thinking. The first story was about a couple of students, close to exclusion from school, who had an idea for a sports prototype while kicking a rugby ball around in the park.

They’ve now sold the idea to a manufacturer who is making 10,000 to test it—they said it would have just have stayed as an idea without the confidence instilled by the course.

Not all of the ideas are so commercial. Maguire told a story about two kids who had developed a drone shaped like a Cornish pasty, although he wasn’t clear why they had hit on that shape.

Raising money

The other story was a bit more conventional. ‘Kevin’—possibly a pseudonym—was barely at school and about to be kicked out. He has severe learning difficulties. Even so, he was the first member of his family still to be in school in Year 9 (age 14).

Since he did the programme, he has a full attendance record, he has passed his GCSEs (a family first) and is now in the Sixth Form (another family first).

Each of these 10-week courses costs £8,000, at an average cost of £266 per pupil, with about 30 pupils per course.

The most depressing part of all of this story was about how difficult it was to raise money from businesses to support the programme. As he said, young people are the place to invest if you want to make a difference, but

I spend my days begging businesses to fund the programme.

Paying for itself

There’s not much data on the website about impact, but I was doing some sums in my head while he was talking. Given the scale of the educational problem, and the long term downward effects on income for those who end up categorised as NEET, there doesn’t need to be much impact at all to justify the cost of a course.

To spell this out, if one student in each cohort of 30 stays on and gets some qualifications, and ends up on the average wage instead of minimum wage, that entire cohort will have paid for itself in terms of public economic outcomes (in terms of higher tax and national insurance payments, and lower support payments), and in years rather than decades. In those terms, we’re talking peanuts.

(I’m just reducing this for the moment to a discussion of investment and social return, and for the moment parking the large moral and ethical arguments in favour of enabling social mobility and not reinforcing cycles of disadvantage. Clearly these arguments matter as well, but you don’t have to believe that they matter to justify the investment.)

Business returns

So one route to expanding this programme might be through a social impact bond of some kind, measured by the number of young people who get some qualifications rather than failing to do so. Somewhere between the City of London and some of our philanthropic foundations some of our brighter financial minds might be able to work something out.

But let’s face it: £8,000 isn’t very much in terms of a typical medium-to-large business’ community engagement programme. You can also see immediate business returns in terms of staff motivation and retention in getting some of your younger staff to get involved as mentors, given the cost of recruitment.

So perhaps this is an awareness issue. In which case, the brochure can be downloaded here. And in case you think it’s easy for me to sit here and spend other people’s money: I have already spoken to Jonathan Maguire about contributing personally to a programme in the north-east of England, where my parents come from.

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A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.