King’s College London

About the work

King’s College London is one of England’s oldest universities, founded in 1829, and a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities. Its campuses sit along the Thames in central and south London, from the Strand and Waterloo to Guy’s, St Thomas’ and Denmark Hill. It teaches tens of thousands of students across the arts, humanities, sciences, health and social sciences. Alongside teaching and research, King’s works with schools, communities and partners across London on social change, including tackling inequality in education.

Our work with King’s centres on Gender Action, a schools award programme that King’s co-founded with the Institute of Physics, the UCL Institute of Education and the University Council of Modern Languages. Gender Action helps nurseries, schools and colleges take a whole-school approach to challenging gender stereotypes, which so often steer young people away from subjects and careers they’d enjoy.

In 2019, the Institute of Physics and King’s commissioned us to evaluate the London pilot of Gender Action, funded by the Mayor of London. We gathered feedback from more than 1,500 teachers, pupils and parents, analysed the plans of participating schools, and tracked engagement across 305 schools. Our findings showed where schools were changing their practice, from careers guidance to classroom activity, and fed into the programme’s national roll-out.

King’s then built Gender Action into its own teaching, launching an undergraduate module in 2020 in which students design and deliver projects with schools. Its Faculty of Natural, Mathematical and Engineering Sciences brought us in to run Theory of Change workshops so students could plan and measure the difference their projects would make. The first cohort’s projects improved so noticeably that King’s asked us back the following year. For the 2021 to 2022 cohort, the workshop moved to the start of the course, with one-to-one follow-up sessions for each project.