Our vision

Education is key for reducing inequality, improving children’s long-term outcomes and life chances. However, current attainment gaps rooted in social inequalities are widening and becoming entrenched.

Reversing this trend requires innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary approaches, providing policymakers and practitioners with stronger evidence about what works, for whom, and how effective approaches can be sustained and scaled.

We bring a distinctive capability in understanding and reducing educational inequalities across the life course, combining interdisciplinary research, strong regional and national partnerships, policy-facing evidence, and rigorous evaluation to address this challenge.

Bringing together research across education, psychology, linguistics, health, social care, business, and social policy, and encompassing early years through to further education, across formal and informal settings, we investigate how inequalities can best be reduced. With our partners, we work to mobilise the very best research evidence.

RITE provides a coordinated platform for turning complementary disciplinary strengths into evidence, partnerships, and policy influence. We are building a nationally significant programme of research on educational inequality, developing major funding bids around early identification, language and literacy, evidence-based practice, and system-level change.