Challenging educational inequality

For the past seven years the Intergenerational Mentoring Network (IMN) has been developing and delivering different school and community- based interventions to support the educational attainment of children and young people. IMN uses a process of research and development to ensure that projects are locally led, well informed and can react to the needs of local communities and partners.

Working Together for Educational Equality is a website that draws together the work of IMN and its partners all of whom are committed to reducing the impact of inequality on the educational experiences of children and young people.  We want to illustrate innovative ways of achieving change and enable other organisations and communities to learn from these experiences.

Moving forward – what we want to achieve

The work presented here shows how research informed, innovative approaches can achieve impact. However such work is often fragile, isolated, short-term and crucially is not part of an overall vision of community change. Our ambition is to build on the experience and learning from our projects to work with communities over a sustained period. This will allow the development of work that is focused on community change through partnerships that support innovation and offer cumulative, sustained impact on the educational attainment of local children and young people.

To progress this work we need to secure long-term funding that will enable us to continue to build relationships with partner organisations and local people. Together we will support the transformation of local communities into ones where the educational experiences and outcomes for children and young people are not limited by poverty or social class.

Please see below examples of our different projects. There is great potential for these different forms of work to be built upon, woven together and added to with new ideas.