Green shoots of hope? Increased optimism about future study and work in England's Opportunity Areas

IPR Policy Brief September 2025 Green shoots of hope? Increased optimism about future study and work in England’s Opportunity Areas Dr Jo Davies, Professor Matt Dickson, Professor Michael Donnelly, Professor Ceri Brown, Professor Nadia Siddiqui, Professor Nick Pearce, Professor Rich Harris, Dr Elle Young and Dr Chris Cunningham The UK government’s Opportunity Areas programme, which ran from 2017 to 2022, targeted 12 social mobility ‘cold spots’ across England. Since 2024, researchers from the universities of Bath, Bristol and Durham have been conducting a £1.5 million evaluation of this intervention. This evaluation examines the effects that the programme had on these geographic places and how future area-based interventions can be best designed and implemented. This first policy brief uses nationally representative survey data to look at how the intervention affected young people’s hopes and confidence for their future lives in terms of education and work. 2IPR Policy Brief: Green shoots of hope? Increased optimism about future study and work in England’s Opportunity Areas Key points ‒ Nationally, over the last 15 years, there has been a downward trend in optimism in young people (King’s Trust, 2025).1 There is a further important regional dimension to this trend, with young people in London more confident about their futures than those living outside the capital (Stavrou, 2025).2 This is likely due to their higher educational outcomes and greater job prospects and access to opportunities (Holt-White, Cullinane and Montacute, 2025).3 ‒ Our research gives some cause for hope. Using Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis – a statistical technique that enables the causal impact of a policy to be estimated – it shows that young people in areas that received support as part of the Opportunity Areas (OA) programme have bucked the national downward trend and exhibit increased optimism for future study and work since the programme’s introduction. This is especially true of their perceived likelihood of gaining training or a university place and of successfully finishing these. For both of these measures, we observe an increase of around 15 percentage points (pp) on average (on a self-assessed scale from 0-100%) in the OAs relative to the similarly disadvantaged comparison (non-OA programme) areas. ‒ As the national downward trend in optimism is particularly marked in the comparison areas (CAs), this study/work optimism boost is particularly pertinent, suggesting that the programme may have played an important mitigating role. ‒ The strongest optimism boost is observed in post-industrial and coastal areas targeted by the OA programme. As with the broader OA trends, these increases are particularly apparent for young people’s perceived likelihood of gaining training or a university place (average 17 pp increase for those in coastal OAs and 15 pp increase for post-industrial OAs relative to similar non-programme areas) and of successfully finishing these (average 18 pp increase in coastal OAs, 17 pp increase for post-industrial OAs). There is also a notable increase in their perceived likelihood of finding a suitable job (15 pp for individuals in coastal OAs, 10 pp for those in post-industrial OAs). ‒ The data we draw on come from the UK Household Longitudinal Study ‘Understanding Society’, the largest longitudinal household panel study of its kind with a nationally representative sample of approximately 40,000 households. Our research focuses only on responses from the period 20092024 for individuals aged 16-21. 1 King’s Trust (2025). The King’s Trust TK Maxx Youth Index 2025. Available here: https://www. kingstrust.org.uk/about-us/news-views/youthindex2025 2 Stavrou, A (2025). Young people outside London fear they’ll ‘never succeed’ as regional optimism hits new low. The Independent, 27 February. Available here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ home-news/kings-trust-youth-index-survey-london-portsmouth-young-people-b2697782.html 3 Holt-White E, Cullinane C and Montacute R (2025). The Opportunity Index. Report for the Sutton Trust. Available here: https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/the-opportunity-index/ 3IPR Policy Brief: Green shoots of hope? Increased optimism about future study and work in England’s Opportunity Areas ‒ The data we use provide only a measure of young people’s expectations, so at this point we cannot say whether the increased optimism observed among young people in OAs is related to increased life chances. Future research within the From the Centre to the Periphery project will seek to explore the associations between this increased optimism and later outcomes. We will also seek to build greater understanding of the factors driving this optimism boost, generating important insights for raising young people’s optimism elsewhere. ‒ The increased study/work optimism observed in young people living in OAs suggests that place-based interventions can play an important role in building young people’s confidence about their futures. ‒ The especially marked divides in optimism between young people living in OAs and those in the similarly disadvantaged comparison areas, however, underscore the need for future social mobility initiatives to reach disadvantaged young people across all areas, not just those in selected OAs. This could be achieved by greater use of Free School Meal (FSM)- focused interventions. ‒ The more subdued study/work optimism in rural OAs and the particularly pronounced downward trend in optimism in the comparison areas further highlight the pressing need to address the structural barriers to opportunity for young people living in more peripheral places, including poor infrastructure and more limited education and employment prospects. Introduction There is no doubt that addressing the major geographic divides that have long mired the UK remains one of the biggest public policy challenges of our time. Over recent decades, successive governments have repeatedly poured money into new policy programmes aimed at growing local economies. These programmes have had limited, if any, success. Since 2024, researchers from the universities of Bath, Bristol and Durham have been carrying out a major evaluation of the Opportunity Areas programme, a £108 million place-based intervention that was designed to tackle geographic divides in education and skills in England. Announced in 2016, it ran from 2017 to 2022 and focused on improving young people’s outcomes in 12 social mobility ‘cold spots’, a mix of post-industrial, rural and coastal areas across the country. Area-based initiatives of this kind have a long history in the UK, from Harold Wilson’s Education Priority Areas in the 1960s, to New Labour’s swathe of programmes during the 1990s. But there is a long-standing policy debate 4IPR Policy Brief: Green shoots of hope? Increased optimism about future study and work in England’s Opportunity Areas about the relative merits of place-based (targeting particular places) versus people-based (targeting particular groups across all places) initiatives. For the first time, we use a quasi-experimental methodology to assess the impact of the Opportunity Areas programme, seeking to isolate the effects of the intervention from other mitigating factors and produce findings on the causal effect of the policy. In doing so, we will build an evidence base on what works in area-based interventions and how future policy programmes should be designed, delivered and developed. Like any other intervention, its impact can be considered across multiple possible outcomes – for example, educational attainment, school attendance, social mobility, earnings, health, and crime. In this first of a series of policy briefs, we use nationally representative survey data to consider how the intervention affected young people’s hopes for the future and their perceived confidence in doing well educationally and in the world of work. Policy context Over the last 15 years, optimism among UK youth for their futures has been in decline. Moreover, there is an important regional dimension to this trend, with the 2025 edition of the King’s Trust’s Youth Index4 – an annual research report measuring the attitudes and expectations of young people aged 16-25 in the UK – indicating that optimism in the regions has hit a new low. Comparably, young people in London are more optimistic about their financial futures, job prospects and mental health than the national average (Stavrou, 2025).5 The UK is one of the most spatially unbalanced advanced economies in the world, with striking regional disparities between London and the South East and the rest of the country with regard to job opportunities and earnings. For example, the average annual wage in London is almost £20,000 higher, and in the South East nearly £13,000 higher, than in the UK’s lowest-paid localities such as Burnley, Huddersfield and Middlesbrough (Centre for Cities, 2025).6 4 King’s Trust (2025). The King’s Trust TK Maxx Youth Index 2025. Available here: https://www. kingstrust.org.uk/about-us/news-views/youthindex2025 5 Stavrou A (2025). Young people outside London fear they’ll ‘never succeed’ as regional optimism hits new low. The Independent, 27 February. Available here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ home-news/kings-trust-youth-index-survey-london-portsmouth-young-people-b2697782.html 6 Centre for Cities (2025). Cities Outlook 2025. Available here: https://www.centreforcities.org/ publication/cities-outlook-2025/ 5IPR Policy Brief: Green shoots of hope? Increased optimism about future study and work in England’s Opportunity Areas There are similarly stark geographic gaps in education. For example, nearly 60% of workers and job seekers in London hold degree-level qualifications (in several boroughs the figure is over 70%), compared with fewer than 30% of people in coastal towns like Blackpool, post-industrial places such as Doncaster and rural localities like North East Lincolnshire.7 These spatial disparities in education and employment are likely to play significant roles in the lower levels of optimism observed among young people living outside London. The Opportunity Areas programme was one government intervention aimed at tackling these geographic imbalances, and our From the Centre to the Periphery project is a three-year mixed-methods evaluation of the programme’s impacts. This policy brief focuses on our analysis of Understanding Society data for the period 2009-2024 (pre and post the introduction of the intervention) and explores our findings of increased optimism for future study and work among young people living in OAs (in stark contrast to findings of decreases nationally and especially in areas with similarly entrenched deprivation). This suggests that the programme may have had an important role in mitigating against similar decreases in optimism in the OAs. Methodology This research draws on data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study ‘Understanding Society’ from the period 2009-2024 for individuals aged 16-21. It compared responses to questions measuring young people’s expectations from individuals living in the 12 opportunity areas (OAs) with those observed nationwide and among individuals living in 19 similar social mobility cold spots. When designing the OA programme, the Department for Education (DfE) created a longlist of 32 areas, selecting those in the weakest performing sextiles of both the Social Mobility Commission’s Social Mobility Index (SMI) and the DfE’s own Achieving Excellence Areas (AEA) index. This list was later narrowed down by the DfE and 13 Local Authority Districts (LADs)8 were selected as OAs, targeting a mix of coastal, post-industrial and rural areas spread throughout England. The 19 areas we compare against in this brief, referred to as ‘comparison areas’ (CAs), are those from the DfE longlist that were not selected to be OAs. As they are areas with similarly 7 Office for National Statistics (2023): Workforce qualification levels across England and Wales data: Census 2021. Available here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/ educationandchildcare/datasets/workforcequalificationlevelsacrossenglandandwalesdatacensus2021 8 One opportunity area, Fenland and East Cambridgeshire, contained two LADs. 6IPR Policy Brief: Green shoots of hope? Increased optimism about future study and work in England’s Opportunity Areas entrenched deprivation to those targeted by the OA programme, they offer a good point of comparison – the trends we observe there are likely to be reflective of those we would expect to see in the OAs had they not been in receipt of the intervention. This policy brief focuses on our analysis of responses to four questions: ‒ How likely is it that you will gain training or a university place in your preferred field? ‒ How likely is it that you will successfully finish your training or university studies? ‒ How likely is it that you will find a job in your field? ‒ How likely is it that you will be successful and get ahead? These questions form part of the ‘Young Adults’ module of the Understanding Society main survey and are asked of individuals aged 1621. For each of these questions, individuals are asked to rank how likely it is that the event in question will happen on a scale from 0% to 100%, where 0% means ‘No chance of happening’ and 100% means ‘Totally likely to happen’. These questions are included in the ‘Young Adults’ module every two years, so within our responses some individuals have answered these questions more than once. Most individuals in our sample have answered them only once (approximately 50%) or twice (approximately 30%). Table 1. Understanding Society questions and numbers of observations Questions(A-D) Total obs. OA obs. CA obs. Totalobs. across OAs&CAs Obs. nationwide (excl.OAs) A - How likely is it that you will gain training or a university place in your preferred field? 14,552 801 714 1,515 13,751 B - How likely is it that you will successfully finish your training or university studies? 16,419 898 779 1,677 15,521 C - How likely is it that you will find a job in your field? 16,702 908 800 1,708 15,794 D - How likely is it that you will be successful and get ahead? 17,387 944 854 1,798 16,443 7IPR Policy Brief: Green shoots of hope? Increased optimism about future study and work in England’s Opportunity Areas Given the focus of the Opportunity Areas programme on post-industrial, coastal and rural areas, responses by place type were also explored within our OA/CA comparisons. Table 2. Number of observations by question (A-D) and place type Question Placetype A B C D OA - Rural 85 95 95 106 CA - Rural 170 173 176 198 OA - Coastal 107 120 125 131 CA - Coastal 119 136 130 145 OA - Post-industrial 609 683 688 707 CA - Post-industrial 425 470 494 511 Total 1,515 1,677 1,708 1,798 The maps on the following page show the place type and locations of the 12 OAs and 19 CAs. The analyses we present use a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach, a statistical method that enables estimation of the causal effect of a policy – in our case an area becoming an OA – on respondents’ answers to the four likelihood questions (A-D). We do this by comparing the changes in responses between those living in OAs and those living in our CAs before (2009-2016) and after (2017-2024) the implementation of the Opportunity Areas programme. The key idea is that the change observed in the CAs is a good approximation of the change we would have seen in the OAs without the programme, so the difference in the observed differences over time between the areas should isolate the effect of the programme. 8IPR Policy Brief: Green shoots of hope? Increased optimism about future study and work in England’s Opportunity Areas Opportunity areas map Comparison areas map Maps made with QGIS. Coastal = blue, rural = green, post-industrial = yellow. Opportunity areas mitigated the national downward trend Comparing young people’s responses to the four future likelihood questions (A-D) for the period 2009-2016 (before implementation of the OA programme) and 2017-2024 (after implementation of the programme) identified a consistent trend. Optimism for three of the four expectations rose on average across young people living in OAs in the postimplementation period compared with a notable decrease in optimism on average for all expectations in the same time period for those living in the 19 CAs. Question D, ‘being successful/getting ahead’, was the exception to the trend for OAs, where it remained stable. The optimism boost in OAs was especially true of young people’s perceived likelihood of gaining training or a university place and of successfully finishing these. For both of these measures, we observed a nine percentage 9IPR Policy Brief: Green shoots of hope? Increased optimism about future study and work in England’s Opportunity Areas point increase on average in the OAs, which coupled with the observed five to six pp falls in the CAs gave policy effect estimates of around 15 pp for these outcomes. Both these outcomes have a standard deviation of just over 30 pp and so these estimated effects of the programme represent an effect size of approximately half a standard deviation, which is a large effect. Mean likelihood scores for individuals living in opportunity areas and comparison areas pre and post the introduction of the OA programme Conducting the same comparisons on a national scale (OAs versus the rest of England) also revealed lower optimism on average for each of the measures in the second period for those living outside OAs. This suggests that the fall in optimism seen in the 19 CAs is reflective of a broader trend across the country. Indeed, this nationwide pessimism trend is mirrored in other data sources looking at young people’s attitudes and expectations. For example, in the annual King’s Trust Youth Index, in which a sample of young people (4,285 in 2025 index)9 are asked to provide happiness and confidence ratings in nine domains, we observe a three point drop in the average overall index score across the post-OA implementation period 9 King’s Trust (2025). The King’s Trust TK Maxx Youth Index 2025. Available here: https://www. kingstrust.org.uk/about-us/news-views/youthindex2025 0 20 40 60 80 100 Comparison area Opportunity area Perceived likelihood of gaining training/uni place Pre Post 0 20 40 60 80 100 Comparison area Opportunity area Perceived likelihood of successfully finishing studies Pre Post 0 20 40 60 80 100 Comparison area Opportunity area Perceived likelihood of finding a suitable job Pre Post 0 20 40 60 80 100 Comparison area Opportunity area Perceived likelihood of being successful Pre Post