Our Mission
A Pathway to Success
Our mission at Yellow Brick Rd is simple. It is to remove the barriers to accessing a good education faced by disadvantaged pupils, by providing a pathway to success via high quality tuition.
The Big Issue:
Disadvantaged pupil outcomes are below those of their peers.
Following the pandemic the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils (as defined by the government) and their peers widened, wiping out a decade-worth of gains that had been made by the introduction of Pupil Premium funding for schools.
The attainment gap is stark.
According to Government figures, published on 11 September 2024, the ‘disadvantage gap index’ was at its widest since the 2010 to 2011 school year. It showed that 25.2% of disadvantaged pupils and 52.4% of all other pupils got a grade 5 or above in their GCSE’s.
In response to this dramatic gap the Government provided schools with funding to allow disadvantaged pupils to receive one-to-one tuition. Unfortunately, Government funding has now stopped but the gap remains.
The Solution: One- to-One Tuition
At Yellow Brick Rd we believe this trend can be reversed and so do many others. The CEO of the Education Endowment Fund (EEF), Professor Becky, Francis commenting on the Educational Policy Institute Annual 2023* said:
“Today’s report confirms that the link between family income and educational achievement has been further entrenched by the pandemic. Weakening this may seem like a near-impossible challenge, but we mustn’t forget that it can be done. Thanks to the hard-won efforts of schools, colleges, and nurseries, we saw almost a decade of progress on closing the gap before 2019.”
“If anything, today’s findings reaffirm just how important great teaching and learning opportunities are for disadvantaged children and young people.”
Our Short, Medium and Long-Term Vision
In the short-to-medium term, we would like to grow our offer of funding for one-to-one tuition to schools across the United Kingdom. Our aim in this expansion would still be to close the attainment gap but would widen to include reducing regional variations in academic outcomes.
In the medium-to-long term, we would like to supplement our support to include a mentoring programme and help for pupils who are most at risk from being excluded from the education system. These pupils come from some of the hardest to reach and dysfunctional families.