Growth Capital Partners is proud to support Impetus

Growth Capital Partners is proud to support Impetus, a charity making a difference for disadvantaged young people across the UK.

Impetus was the first charity in the UK to use a venture philanthropy approach. Impetus transforms the lives of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds by ensuring they get the right support to succeed in school, in work and in life. Partnering with high performing charities, Impetus harnesses private equity expertise with extensive pro bono networks to accelerate the growth of these charity partners and ensures greater impact and improved outcomes for the young people they support.

GCP have supported Impetus since 2018, including attending the Impetus Triathlon, volunteering with Impetus charities and providing pro bono support. In these challenging times we believe their work is more important than ever and will work with Impetus to support charitable schemes which closely align with our goals of helping young people to succeed whatever their background.

This summer, we are delighted to support Impetus’s work on The National Tutoring Programme (NTP), a collaboration between government, the Education Endowment Foundation, Impetus, Sutton Trust, Nesta, and Teach First. In June 2020 the Education Secretary announced the roll out of The National Tutoring Programme, a £350million scheme to provide catch up support to over a million primary and secondary pupils during school closures. The programme will address the attainment gap between poorer pupils and their better off peers, which is expected to widen as a result of school closures during Covid-19.

Despite the considerable efforts of schools to support home learning during lockdown, many pupils particularly from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds will have fallen significantly behind in their learning.

There is extensive high-quality evidence demonstrating the potential of one-to-one and small-group tuition, delivered in partnership with schools, as a cost-effective way to support pupils. However, access to tutoring is often limited to the schools and parents that can most afford it. Almost all the pupils that need intensive support the most will not be able to access it, with estimates indicating that 80% of disadvantaged students don’t have access to quality tuition.

The NTP aims to address this by providing schools with heavily subsided tuition and trained tutors to provide intensive catch up support to pupils. The pilot will support as many poorer children as possible to keep learning before schools reopen in September, as well as identify and address potential barriers to access and measure engagement through evaluation of the scheme.

This work is part of Impetus’s response to the Covid-19 crisis and we will continue to back Impetus, working side-by-side with them to meet the unique challenges we are facing.