The Sutton Trust is mentioned in The Economist article on the London Challenge model

The Blue School, a state secondary in Somerset, does not have much in common with its counterparts in London. It is set in immaculate playing fields, a ten minute stroll from the centre of Wells, the smallest city in the country. Visiting colleagues in other parts of the county is often “a day’s journey with emergency rations”, jokes Steve Jackson, the head teacher. Compared with schools in the metropolis, those in Somerset get lower funding, find it harder to convince ambitious teachers to move to the area and send fewer children to university, partly because there are no local ones. Yet when head teachers and the local authority sought to improve school standards, they turned to the capital. They are not alone in doing so. “London caught everyone’s eye,” notes one adviser to the Scottish government.

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The result was “a really big virtuous circle” which is unlikely to be fully replicated elsewhere, says Jonathan Simons of Policy Exchange, a think-tank. But the government since has sought to apply at least some of what went on in London to other parts of the country. Michael Gove and Nicky Morgan, the education secretaries between 2010 and 2016, concentrated on getting all children to meet basic literacy and numeracy standards. Academies are now found everywhere in England. Teach First has expanded. And, as Conor Ryan of the Sutton Trust, an education charity, notes, the government’s new focus on pushing schools to join “chains” of academies is partly based on the benefits of collaboration that became evident in London.

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