Young people from lower income backgrounds are less likely to have a ‘social template’ for attending university, and are more likely to think that university “isn’t for people like me”.

To overcome this we ran a large-scale randomised controlled trial in which young people with good grades who were identified as unlikely to go to a selective university were written to by a current student with a similar background. This followed a study that showed that an in person role modelling session could have a positive impact on people’s interest in attending university, but was difficult to scale.

We found from our trial that 8.5% of people who didn’t receive a letter ended up attending a selective university, while 11.4% of people who received two letters did.

Following this finding, we’ve worked with the Department for Education, Exogeneity and TASO, to scale the project up, sending out 10,000 letters in 2025.