King’s College London: Attainment programmes

This is one of a series of case studies to accompany our Insight brief on schools, attainment and the role of higher education. It highlights an example of a successful partnership between schools, higher education providers and other organisations.

King’s College London Social Mobility and Widening Participation department has delivered attainment programmes for over six years. Supporting attainment in schools and boosting the attainment of its post-16 programme participants has been a strategic priority since 2018.

The challenge

From a young age, a gap in achievement opens between children from the most and least affluent backgrounds. By the end of primary school disadvantaged students have, on average, made 5.4 months less progress than their peers. They are also less likely to have reached a high level of attainment. At secondary school the achievement gap becomes even more pronounced. By the time students sit their GCSE exams, there is a gap equivalent to 19.3 months of progress between the most and least affluent. Disadvantaged pupils with high prior attainment progress more slowly at secondary school and are overtaken by pupils from high-income families with lower prior attainment.

A substantial number of King’s offer-holders from widening participation backgrounds do not meet the conditions of their offer. This is the case for participants on the K+ access programme. The largest concentration of K+ students missing their predicted grades is on the Healthcare and Sciences stream.

The approach

To address this challenge, King’s has developed targeted attainment raising activity at Key Stages 3, 4, and 5.

Since 2015, it has run the King’s Scholars programme for Years 7 to 9. King’s Scholars supports attainment by teaching metacognition. This approached comes from the Educational Endowment Fund’s research and guidance on metacognition. Over the course of a three-year period, participants learn and practice a range of metacognition techniques while engaging with activities on university and career pathways. King’s Scholars is delivered through long-term partnerships with local schools.

In 2020 King’s began piloting Scholars+, an attainment-raising programme for Year 10 and 11s in King’s Scholars schools. The programme is a blend of English and maths tutoring, study skills and wellbeing workshops, delivered after school and during school holidays. It is co-delivered with a tutoring partner, Team Up.

For Year 12s an attainment-raising strand was added to the K+ access programme. This concentrates on biology and chemistry, the subjects K+ students most frequently miss their predicted grades in. Learning sessions are delivered by experienced teachers on a Saturday.

Evaluation activity

Between 2017 and 2020, King’s Scholars was evaluated using a randomised control trial conducted by the Behavioural Insights Team (Type 3 of the OfS standards of evaluation). This tracked a cohort of 25 pupils in the 12 partner schools from Year 7 to the end of Year 9. In each school a control group of 25 pupils with the same widening participation characteristics and prior attainment were also tracked. The trial focused on attainment gains and pupil application of metacognition techniques.

The impact of Scholars+ on attainment is measured via a combination of individual-level data and school-level data (Type 2 of the OfS standards of evaluation). Attainment progress is tracked using baseline and post-treatment assessment.

K+ raising attainment evaluation is done via pre- and post-programme testing in each subject. As activity is scaled up King’s will seek to install more comprehensive causal evaluation, including quasi-experimental or randomised control trial methods as well as ongoing qualitative research.

The result

Disruption to data collection caused by the pandemic meant that analysis of outcomes based on quantitative data was not possible. It also fundamentally disrupted the King’s Scholars randomised control trial as it entered its final stages. However, qualitative research showed that participants apply the metacognitive skills they learn to their homework, exam revision, and schoolwork.

The first year of Scholars+ data shows that pupils made an average progress of 0.9 of a grade for maths, and 1.3 of a grade for English.

Participants on the K+ Raising Attainment strand improved by an average of five percentage points in biology attainment and 12 percentage points in chemistry attainment (as compared with the pre-intervention baseline). 

In each case King’s will be then following up to establish how participants did in Key Stage 4 and 5 exams. For K+ in particular this will include whether the numbers of students achieving the grade required in specific subjects increases. As activity is scaled up King’s will seek to install more comprehensive causal evaluation, including quasi-experimental or randomised control trial methods as well as ongoing qualitative research.