From Policy to Practice: How Route Education Brings the DfE's 2025 Priorities to Life

At Route Education, we don’t just follow national priorities - we anticipate them. The Department for Education’s 2025 Areas of Research Interest read like a blueprint for the work we’re already delivering.

From school belonging and literacy catch-up to attendance and re-engagement, our programmes were designed with these exact challenges in mind. If you're a headteacher, MAT leader, SENCo or LA commissioner, these priorities shape your every decision. Here’s how Route Education helps translate them into real progress:

Attendance and Belonging

Young people won’t engage where they don’t feel safe, valued or seen. That’s why The Literacy Quest, our outdoor re-engagement journey, starts with sensory access, storytelling, and teamwork - not tracking or consequences.

Confidence in Core English Skills

So many of our learners are “bottom set coasters” or “year 7 and stuck.” Our small-group KS3 and KS4 English programmes use high-impact structures, sentence-level work and scaffolded challenge to rebuild both skills and self-belief.

Research-Informed Instruction

We don’t follow fads. Our curriculum is mapped to EEF best practice and built around consistent annotation habits, clear modelling, and gradual release of responsibility. Our pedagogy is rigorous - but always human.

Flexible, Scalable Delivery

With online and in-person delivery models, we respond to diverse contexts - whether that’s safeguarding-driven 1:1 tuition or cost-efficient small group work for hard-to-reach learners.

What’s Next?

We’re already aligning our impact measures to DfE headline priorities: attendance improvement, English progress, student wellbeing, and re-engagement in mainstream learning. And we’re just getting started.