What are you leading?
The Brilliant Club is an award-winning and independently evaluated charity that exists to increase the number of pupils from under-represented backgrounds progressing to highly-selective universities in the UK. It does this by mobilising the PhD community to share its academic expertise with state schools. This year, The Brilliant Club will work with more than 10,000 pupils across England and Wales, making it the largest university access programme for secondary schools in the UK.
Since establishing The Brilliant Club in 2012, Jonny and Simon have grown a system-level organisation that is now active across the UK, working with over 30 leading universities and over 500 schools. This year, it will mobilise 600 PhD researchers to deliver programmes of university-style tutorials in those schools to over 10,000 young people. As well as operating at a national scale, The Brilliant Club also has credible evidence of impact. The average for low-income school leavers progressing to a highly-selective university is 11%. An evaluation by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) found that the average for The Brilliant Club is 58%. Further, the evaluation found that The Brilliant Club has a statistically significant impact on the likelihood a pupil will progress to a highly-selective university, compared to a control group.
Over the past few years, Simon and Jonny have received significant interest from education leaders, PhD researchers and school teachers from around the world who are interested in the possibility of replicating The Brilliant Club’s proven model in other countries. In response to this, Simon and Jonny have set up a new social enterprise called AccessEd to support the growth of Brilliant Club-style programmes across the world. AccessEd is now running pilot programmes in the USA and South Africa, and is actively looking for partners in new countries.
How did your experiences as a fellow inspire or prepare you for what you’re doing now?
Jonny: Simon and I founded The Brilliant Club as a result of our experiences teaching in low-income communities, through the Teach First programme. As classroom teachers we recognised the barriers that students from under-represented backgrounds face in accessing university, and started an after-school project called The Brilliant Club at London Academy, Edgware. That grassroots project sought to utilise our experience of working in schools serving challenging communities, alongside the expertise and passion of PhD students, who we recruited to deliver programmes of academic enrichment to high potential pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds
Simon: It goes without saying that The Brilliant Club and AccessEd would not exist without Teach First. It was through Teach First that Jonny and I met and forged a partnership.Our experience of teaching in inner-city London schools gave us the understanding of the university access gap and the motivation to address it. When we made the decision to leave the classroom and establish The Brilliant Club, Teach First offered significant operational support, most importantly office space in Central London for our first two years.
We were also able to leverage the Teach First school network to make the initial connections we needed to pilot the programme. Carly Mitchell, an 05 alumna, was working as an Assistant Headteacher and let us pilot our idea for PhD researchers delivering university-style tutorials in her school in North London. A significant number of our team are Teach First alumni, a number are in leadership positions within the charity. We also continue to work in a formal partnership with Teach First. Through this partnership they provide us with significant support in developing new school partnerships and in operational areas such as offering coaches to our staff.