Our Future, Our Way – Looking Back, Looking Forwards

Dr Natalie Day, Director of Strategic Development at The Brilliant Club and Ella-Rosa Twyman, UK Student Recruitment Officer – South East and East Midlands, The University of Sheffield

In 2024, The Brilliant Club was approached by Elaine Brown, Deputy Head Pastoral at London Academy of Excellence Tottenham (LAET). Inspired by the experiences of her students on Child Protection Plans (CPP), as well as their immense resilience, Elaine was keen to explore a collaboration to widen university access for students on a CPP.

In 2025, almost 50,000 children in England were on a CPP – students who record average Attainment 8 scores of 16.9 , and see persistent absence rates as high as 63% (14% for the general population) . By age 22, just 16% progress to higher education (HE) . Whilst care-experienced students are rightfully receiving growing HE support, children on a CPP face very similar educational barriers, yet remain almost entirely absent from HE access interventions.

In January 2025, The Brilliant Club and the University of Sheffield – together with LAET, social work charity Frontline, and Imperial College London – were granted funding from the Office for Students’ Equality of Opportunity Innovation in Higher Education Fund. The project committed to carrying out much-needed research to better understand the educational experiences of children on a CPP, the barriers they face as they explore future pathways, and the kinds of activities that might support them on their journeys. Based on this research, the project partnership would design a programme of activity, piloted in 2025/26, and scaled up in 2026/27, in schools in South Yorkshire and London.

Looking Back

After a desk-based literature review, we carried out a qualitative research and insights phase, to centre the voices of young adults with lived experience and their supporters – social workers, designated safeguarding leads (DSLs), Virtual Schools staff and HE practitioners. Several key insights emerged:

• Many children on a CPP live with ongoing trauma they must manage alongside their learning and may also worry about disclosure/identification of their Child Protection status, for fear of judgement. Children may feel excluded from decisions about their own lives in the face of multi-agency involvement.
• Persistent absence and other disruption impact attainment, and cause students to miss out on information, advice and guidance (IAG) to support positive future plans. Education was not always seen by young people as being prioritised by the agencies involved in their lives, and some young adults reflected that schools and professionals hold lower expectations for children on a CPP.
• Young people often internalise these expectations, seeing university as unattainable or not for “people like me”. It was, therefore, seen as hugely important to have consistent, trusted adults who believe in and advocate for them – such “champions” were felt to have a transformative impact, providing the emotional support and advocacy needed to thrive.

The full report can be found here and our podcast discussion here.

Informed by what was shared, the model below was designed collaboratively with a University of Sheffield student with lived experience, and then shared with young people for feedback in an iterative process:

In response to the insights, we included:

• Mixed cohorts. While children on a CPP are the focus of the funding, including a broader group of students was recommended to reduce stigma and ensure viable group sizes, while benefitting other students facing similar barriers.
• One carefully-selected, trained, trusted deliverer. It was clear from our research that activity should be delivered by relatable adults who can provide consistency and build trust. In our model, these are the Academic Guides, who receive training from Frontline in trauma-informed practice to support their work.
• Careful scheduling. To avoid the stigma associated with being taken out of classes mid-way through a lesson, sessions map exactly onto lesson time. Time is built in for ‘homework’ within the sessions themselves, limiting additional burden and avoiding the assumption that students have the conditions to do extra work at home.
• Ownership embedded. Students have ‘a say’ over elements of the programme – for example, the format and focus of their final assignment and the components of their Celebration Event.

The programme launched in January, with four schools in South Yorkshire and two in London, each enrolling cohorts of ~7 students. 28% of the overall cohort was on a CPP or had been in the last three years.

Students worked through a course on young people’s rights in their communities, culminating in an assignment titled “Making my local area child-friendly: Rights, Reality, and Recommendations”. Students selected their preferred assignment medium, ranging from presentations and speeches to letters or visual outputs. Students also experienced two university visits – to the University of Sheffield or Imperial College London.

As with any pilot programme, there were challenges to overcome, to ensure the most impactful experience for students. Having the right school staff involved from the start was important – ensuring SLT were aware of the project and bought into the need, involving DSLs for their in-depth knowledge of the students, but also ideally having a supporting member of staff who could help with the logistics. Academic Guide selection also proved crucial – the cohorts with the strongest outcomes were those with Guides who were able to build strong rapport and support students to develop confidence and overcome challenges.

From the data and our own research, we anticipated challenges around attendance and engagement in the sessions – however attendance was 85% for the overall cohort and 91% for children on a CPP. Academic Guides also scored each tutorial out of ten for engagement, and the average score was 7. Similarly, having students produce work within sessions rather than as homework proved the right decision, avoiding additional stress on students and producing very high assignment completion rates – 97% for the cohort as a whole, and 100% for students on a CPP.

During the pilot, we gathered quantitative and qualitative data from participating students, as well as insights from teachers and Academic Guides. Alongside the strong programme engagement:

• The cohort made positive progress between their baseline and final assignments with scores increasing by 7% in subject knowledge, 5% in critical thinking and 7% in communication.
• Students also made positive progress in key outcomes related to ‘University Self-efficacy’ and ‘Confidence and the Future’, with almost ¼ feeling more confident making decisions about their future education (40% for students on a CPP) and 29% being more likely to agree with the statement “University is for people like me”.

We did see negative progress against some statements, which has prompted learning and reflections for Year Two – included a revision of the mentoring elements of the programme to better support students’ confidence and self-advocacy, and increasing the salience of IAG around HE and other future pathways within the session content. Qualitative feedback from teachers and Guides has fed into a review of all the course materials to prioritise accessibility and interactivity, and we have refreshed our approach to Guide recruitment, training and support, reflecting the importance of their role to the project’s success.

Looking Forwards

Robust evaluation remains a key priority – we are committed to gathering the best possible data and to openly communicating the learnings. A key limitation at this point is sample size – overall, we received 34 responses to both the pre- and post- survey, which means that every response has an outsize impact. This is even more acute when looking at smaller subsets of students – e.g. those in London or those on a CPP. Robustness will improve with the addition of the second cohort – to enable this we are reaching out to a wider pool of schools in South Yorkshire and London, to ensure we engage those with the highest rates of children on a CPP, and are growing the cohort size, hoping to engage six schools in South Yorkshire and five in London – around 75 students in total.

A major priority is securing the legacy of the project through awareness-building and influencing work. To date, we have had open dialogue with the Office for Students about the needs of this student group, and hope to continue to discuss their inclusion in their list of student characteristics for consideration in Access and Participation Plans. Similarly, the work has been warmly received at events like the NEON Summer Symposium, where HE colleagues have reflected honestly on implications for their own practice. Finally, UCAS have been open to discussions about where the project might fit within their own Fair Access work – for many of the supporters involved to date, recognition on UCAS applications would go a long way to supporting students on a CPP – and students with social worker involvement more generally – to make the next steps on their educational journeys.

Year Two delivery will begin in January and run until May. The project will culminate in a conference at the University of Sheffield in June 2027. To find out more about the project, or to register interest in attending the project conference, please email ourway@thebrilliantclub.org. We hope this work will help to answer the question: as we rightfully champion care-experienced students in HE outreach, why are young people on Child Protection Plans not part of the same conversation?

1. Release home – Children in need – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK
2. Release home – Outcomes for children in need, including children looked after by local authorities in England – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK
3. 2025-03-Pathways-higher-education-people-experience-children-social-care_TASO_REES.pdf
4. Ibid.