Our ground-breaking intervention The Right Angle has been highlighted in a Government report as demonstrating best practice in building relationships to secure the most impactful outcomes for vulnerable young people.

The report, evaluating the Department for Education’s Alternative Provision Innovation Fund, which funded the initial pilot of The Right Angle, makes special mention of the partnerships created by the project with its stakeholders: “Best practice showed that forming close relationships between The Right Angle and AP [Alternative Provision] Providers reduced scheduling challenges, ensuring that YP working on reduced timetables were still able to receive support.”

The report continues: “Challenges associated with engaging young people to take up the offer of counselling were addressed by producing a communications package, including postcards with myth-busters and FAQs about counselling and the process that would help to mitigate any concerns around the therapeutic offer. These were given to, and talked through, with YP and families, as well as AP staff, to increase the engagement with the counselling support.”

The Right Angle is delivered through a partnership between Tutor Trust and TLC: Talk, Listen, Change, a North West-based relationships charity.  The intervention is targeted at Looked After Children and those in Alternative Provision, offering academic support through tuition plus therapeutic counselling, to address social, emotional and mental health issues.  This two-pronged approach has resulted in a highly impactful programme of holistic support for young people whose academic achievements are recognised as being much lower than those of their peers in mainstream education settings. 

The APIF was announced in DfE’s 2018 paper: Creating opportunity for all, which set out a vision for the development of a high-quality AP sector. The APIF aimed to test what works in securing better outcomes for children in AP and to extend the evidence base for the sector. The APIF awarded £4m to nine projects – one of which was The Right Angle – across two academic years, starting in September 2018 and with a focus on three themes: 1. Supporting Young People (YP) to reintegrate into suitable mainstream or special school placements; 2. Supporting YP to make good academic progress in AP and successful transitions from AP to education, training and employment; and 3. Enabling YP to achieve better educational outcomes by increasing parent and carer engagement.

Whilst the evaluation report does not provide a summative account of the outcomes from the APIF projects, due to restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown, it instead focuses on the period September 2018 to March 2020, recognising projects’ achievements at that point in time and to provide learning for the wider sector.

Michelle Hill, Chief Executive Officer of TLC, said:

We are really proud of The Right Angle project and our ongoing partnership with the Tutor Trust. We are so pleased that the combination of counselling and tutoring for young people makes a real difference and are excited about how our project will continue to develop in the future.”

Abigail Shapiro, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Tutor Trust said:

The Right Angle goes from strength-to-strength and continues to make a huge difference to some of the most vulnerable young people.  The findings of this report clearly show how important it is to build strong relationships – with the AP providers, the young people and their parents and carers – so that the project can deliver the best outcomes for the students.”