Shine: Support and Help in Education

SHINE: Support and Help in Education is a grant-making charity devoted to eradicating educational disadvantage for children from low-income backgrounds, ensuring all young people fulfil their academic potential regardless of socio-economic barriers. Rooted in values of ambition, measurable impact, accountability, and collaborative partnerships, their philosophy empowers teachers as key agents of change through deep co-creation, rigorous evaluation, and scaling of evidence-based interventions. They drive funding decisions by prioritizing teacher-led solutions that address root causes of attainment gaps, fostering equity, professional expertise, and knowledge exchange for systemic improvement in deprived communities.

They prioritize core educational outcomes for children aged 0-19 from low-income families in deprived areas, focusing on pupils aged 4-18 at risk of falling behind in literacy, numeracy, verbal communication, school readiness, primary-secondary transitions, parental engagement, and holistic wellbeing. Supported activities include front-line school-led interventions co-designed by educators, such as early primary Story Time Maths blending storytelling with numeracy skills, parental engagement programs like Let Teachers SHINE enhancing family-school partnerships, transition support for vulnerable pupils preventing disengagement, teacher networks developing innovative literacy and maths resources, and education social enterprises delivering targeted catch-up tuition, speech therapy integration, and wellbeing initiatives addressing emotional barriers to learning. They champion preventative early interventions, community-embedded tutoring, peer mentoring in schools, and scalable models closing attainment gaps through data-driven teacher innovation.

They exclude capital projects, infrastructure, equipment purchases, and non-scalable activities, focusing solely on project-based educational interventions. Distinctive for championing exclusively teacher-driven solutions in low-income northern English communities facing acute deprivation, they prioritize disadvantaged children and young people in high-need schools, valuing organizations with lived community insight, robust impact measurement, and commitment to disseminating learning for broader replication, differentiating from generic youth work by centering professional educator expertise and northern-specific educational inequities.