Teach First and IDACI

Teach First is an educational charity that targets educational disadvantage by coordinating teacher training placements in deprived schools. Participants gain qualified teacher status through a paid two year training programme. The government’s charity register lists Teach First as having spent over £45 million on charitable activity over the last year and according to the organisations website almost 7000 teachers have been recruited, teaching “more than 1 million pupils in low income communities across the breadth of England and Wales.” Impact assessments note improved GCSE results and improvements in school performance as a result. So how does Teach First select its partner schools?

According to this IFS study from 2013:

The current eligibility criterion for schools used by Teach First is whether at least 50% of pupils at the school live in neighbourhoods classified as being in the lowest three deciles of IDACI.

IDACI, the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index, is a supplementary index to the Indices of Deprivation – the data is freely available at gov.uk (file 3) – and measures the proportion of all children aged 0 to 15 living in income deprived families.