IntoUniversity was founded in 2002, piloting our first learning centre in North Kensington with a simple belief that every young person, regardless of background, deserves the chance to fulfil their potential. Over two decades later, we now run 46 centres and extension projects across 29 towns and cities in the UK, working in partnership with 429 schools and over 2,025 volunteers. In the 2024–25 academic year alone we supported more than 61,000 young people, and late in 2025 we proudly welcomed our 250,000th student.
We work in some of the country’s most disadvantaged communities, social mobility “cold spots,” coastal towns, and areas where access to Higher Education remains most unequal. Our model is deliberately long-term and place-based. We open home-from-home learning centres and stay embedded in the same neighbourhoods for years, supporting children from as young as seven all the way through Primary school, Secondary school, university applications, and beyond. This isn’t short-term intervention but about building lasting local traditions of educational success where none existed before.
Our programmes span Academic Support, mentoring by university students and career professionals, FOCUS workshops that build knowledge of Higher Education and careers, and Student Opportunities that connect young people with employers, internships and insight days. Everything we do is grounded in evidence, and we regularly commission independent researchers to scrutinise our impact rather than simply take our word for it.
The barriers we work against are stark. Nationally, the most advantaged young people in England are four times more likely to enter Higher Education than the least advantaged and eleven times more likely to enter a top university. These gaps have only widened since the pandemic and disadvantaged students lost nearly twice as much learning during lockdown, school absence has risen sharply, and the current cost-of-living crisis is pushing many students to consider dropping out for financial reasons. Our own data shows a real dip in the difference we make to university progression in the last three years, a trend we’re tracking closely and are determined to reverse. Rather than retreat from difficulty, we’ve expanded further into it. We have targeted our growth towards coastal areas and cold spots where the need, and the challenge, is greatest. We know that in these places progress is slower and outcomes take longer to shift, but we’ve committed to being there for the long haul regardless.
The results speak for themselves. 60% of our 2025 school leavers progressed to Higher Education, more than double the 28% rate for students from similar backgrounds nationally. Among students eligible for Free School Meals, our students were nearly a third more likely to progress to university, and more than four times as likely to reach a top-third institution. Independent evaluation by FFT Education Datalab found that students who regularly attended our Academic Support programme made the equivalent of three months’ additional progress in Key Stage 2 Maths. Our students are also less likely to drop out once at university, and 92% of those who go on to study can expect a real financial return from their degree.
Beyond the numbers, we’ve built partnerships with universities including Southampton, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and secured funding from the Office for Students to pioneer new approaches, including a two-year metacognition project with Anglia Ruskin University, and an Adult and Family Learning pilot supporting parents and carers alongside their children in our Scotland centres. We’ve also begun grappling seriously with how AI is reshaping education, working to ensure it becomes a tool that closes gaps rather than widens them for the students we serve.
Most importantly, our alumni are living proof of what sustained support can do going on to become solicitors, portfolio managers, teachers, and, in many cases, returning as volunteer mentors themselves. Each of the 250,000 young people we’ve worked with has their own story, but together they represent something larger: evidence that background need not determine destiny, and that long-term, evidence-based, community-rooted support can genuinely change lives.
