Portfolio company Springpod, managed by Investment Manager Hannah Williamson have now reached a major milestone of over 500,000 young people using the service to take control of their future. Springpod’s mission is to enable every young person to experience a university course or career before they apply. Springpod partners with outstanding universities and employers to create interactive, experiential learning programmes which empower the next generation, giving them equal access to opportunity.

The team believe that accessibility remains absolutely crucial and serving the most under-resourced young people is the key focus for them into 2024 as they push towards their next goal, to serve 1 million young people. They recently shared the post below coupled with a thought-provoking article about unconscious bias against working-class pupils…

‘Disadvantaged’ or ‘under-resourced’?

In the conversation around social mobility there’s a growing concern that the term ‘disadvantaged’ leads us into binary thinking about which young people are or are not ‘advantaged’ in some way and implies there is something to fix about those children deemed to be ‘disadvantaged’.

Lee Elliot Major OBE, professor of social mobility, suggests the term ‘under-resourced’ instead. We’ve felt at Springpod for a long time that there’s undeniable talent dormant in young people and their circumstances can inhibit them reaching their full potential. ‘Under-resourced’ is a nice way to frame this problem as it rightly suggests that more adequate support for children from these backgrounds is what’s needed to empower them rather than some sort of artificial correction.

Consider an exam question about going to the theatre. There will be inferences made by children who have experienced this, perhaps about a reasonable audience size or cost per ticket, which are out of reach to those who haven’t. This means some will struggle more than others to answer the question through no fault of their own.

The Guardian article titled “Warning over unconscious bias against working-class pupils in English schools” makes for a really interesting read!