Evaluation of Children’s University: effectiveness trial
12 March 2025
The Children’s University programme aims to improve pupils’ aspirations, attainment, and love of learning through participation in validated extracurricular activities, with intended impacts on learning, attainment, and non-attainment outcomes such as character, self-esteem, resilience, and life skills.
5,588 Year 5 children took part in a randomised controlled trial that evaluated the impact of participation in Children’s University activities. The evaluation started in 2021/22 and ended when children were in Year 6 in 2022/23. The evaluation was funded by the Education Endowment Foundation.
Key Findings
- Volunteer pupils in Children’s University schools made, on average, one month’s less progress in each of maths and reading than volunteer pupils in control schools. There is uncertainty around these results, and we cannot conclude that the effects are non-zero.
- These results are perhaps unsurprising as there was no evidence to support that Children’s University had an impact on the pupil’s non-cognitive outcomes that were measured (i.e. motivation to learn and identification with school), which were expected to lead to improved attainment.
- Intervention volunteer pupils eligible for free school meals made on average zero month’s progress in maths, and one month’s less progress in reading compared to their control counterparts. There is uncertainty around these results, and we cannot conclude that the effects are non-zero.
- Several key features of the programme were not fully implemented as intended, related in part to ongoing disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic. There were fewer graduations, and fewer that took place in civic venues or universities than expected, a limited number of out-of-school validated local destination activities, and challenges with recording activities on CU online. Implementation was not sufficiently distinct from usual extracurricular activity which may have affected the potential of the programme to achieve its intended outcomes.
- That said, the majority of intervention-volunteer pupils were proud of what they had learned and reported better teamwork skills, and staying positive; and school staff noted pupils’ sense of achievement.