Summer Schools: Toolkit technical report

This technical report reviews the evidence on the effect of summer education programmes, described as Summer Schools in the Toolkit, on disadvantaged and at-risk young people’s violence and offending outcomes, and related education outcomes. This technical report is based on the systematic review by Muir et al. (2024). This review considers summer education programmes alongside summer employment programmes as the two summer programme types have various commonalities and may seek to achieve similar outcomes. This technical report focusses only on elements of the review pertaining to summer education programmes.

Muir et al. (2024; p. 24) describe summer education programmes as ‘an out-of-school-time programme that takes place during the summer months in whole or in part, where content is majority administered through education-focused instruction’, with the summer months defined as the period in which the long vacation takes place between academic years or after the final academic year before moving into economic activity.

Summer education programmes tend to provide a combination of: additional instruction on core subjects (e.g. English, mathematics); academic classes including in order to enhance specialist subject knowledge (e.g., STEM-related); homework help; coaching and mentoring; arts and recreation electives; and social and enrichment activities.

A rationale behind summer employment programmes identified in the literature is that they divert or distract those who have been involved in or are at risk of offending away from harmful or unproductive activities. Through providing alternative uses for the time over summer that otherwise would be unallocated, the assumption is that this reduces the risk of that time being used for criminal or anti-social activity. This may be applicable to summer education programmes, which also provide an alternative to using time for criminal or anti-social activity over the summer period (Muir et al., 2024).

Of the 68 studies included in the full summer programmes review, 49 evaluated 36 different summer education programmes. 28 of these studies evaluated summer education programmes that took place in the UK, of which 6 were eligible for meta-analysis. The review included qualitative evaluations not linked to an included impact evaluation that evaluated a UK-based summer education programme.

Overall, summer education programmes find a range of small to substantial desirable impacts on secondary education attendance rates, the likelihood of being chronically absent and the likelihood of having a suspension. The observed effect sizes of g = 0.26, OR = 0.76 and OR = 0.21, each provided by only one study, respectively correspond to an increase in secondary education attendance rates of 1.4% and reductions in chronic absence and suspensions of 22.9% and 78.8% respectively.