In our education system, we do a huge amount to make a difference. Schools invest nearly £4 billion a year in different forms of educational support, and teachers report spending an average of 33 hours a week outside of teaching to prepare, plan and mark in order to make the biggest impact in their lessons.

Whether it’s after-school clubs, behaviour mentoring or academic tutoring, programmes of any kind can have a positive, negligible or negative impact on pupils’ lives – and it is not always easy to say what these are. It is often extremely challenging for schools to reliably assess the outcomes of interventions in their setting: only 3% of schools interviewed by ImpactEd were confident in their impact evaluation. In addition, our current education system is data and evidence obsessed, but not in the right places.

ImpactEd believes that teachers and pupils are ill-served with the current system:

• Evidence from The Sutton Trust suggests that the majority of pupils and teachers value life skills above academic grades, but there is a lack of meaningful UK evidence as to how these skills can be best developed in school contexts.
• Our education system is full of data and accountability, but our current focus on evidence of ‘what works’ ignores those actually changing lives day in and day out – the professional judgement and wisdom of teachers themselves.

This means that we don’t know whether many programmes have a positive, negligible or negative impact on pupils’ lives, and teachers themselves are often not empowered to focus their efforts in the most effective ways possible. ImpactEd call this problem the evaluation deficit.

ImpactEd’s model is built on an academic evidence base around some of the most important predictors of long-term life outcomes for young people, and their partnership process aims not just to help practitioners better evaluate particular initiatives, but to build school and organisational cultures that are laser-focused on how they can achieve maximum impact for children.

Big Change funded ImpactEd from launch to deliver a combination of a hands-on partnership process, working with practitioners to better identify the change they want to see and how they can understand success, and a digital platform that aims to make impact measurement quicker, easier and more effective. 

By enabling partners that would otherwise not be able to easily evaluate the impact of what they are putting in place, ImpactEd has made it possible for time-poor teachers, school leaders and those at the front line of making change to do so as effectively as possible. Through this work, they provide a route to ultimately changing the conversation about how schools use evidence and share insights across the education system.

ImpactEd has reached over 1,000 schools nationally and serves every region of England, working with special and alternative provision settings as well as mainstream.

85% of school partners felt that ImpactEd helped them gain a deeper understanding of pupil experience at their school. They are leading the way by making high-quality evaluation accessible for all organisations working with young people, not just schools, and have published numerous reports to share their expertise across the sector.

ImpactEd has expanded their business model and developed the ImpactEd group, with the addition of a consultancy practice and The Engagement Platform, a digital solution which measures school and teacher engagement, to support the development of sustainable working cultures. They were recently selected from more than 1,900 submissions as a winner of the global Tools Competition, one of the largest edtech competitions in the world, which recognises teams building or expanding learning tools to address pressing issues in education.

Owen Carter has led the development of ImpactEd since inception. He combines a passion for education and social justice with deep experience working collaboratively with schools. Prior to ImpactEd, he led a number of research and evaluation projects at education charity The Brilliant Club, and developed a digital platform for teacher professional development at Optimus Education. He’s a winner of the Teach First Innovation Award and part of PwC’s Tomorrow’s Business Leaders programme.

ImpactEd stemmed from Owen’s personal frustrations in seeing amazing programmes often not sustained due to a lack of appropriate evidence around effectiveness, while at the same time, money and energy was frequently invested in provision that may well have been genuinely detrimental to young people’s life chances.