About us
The Laurel Trust is a charity with a track record of supporting schools serving disadvantaged communities to make sustainable differences to children’s learning and life chances. We provide grant-funding and work together with schools and other agencies to put evidence informed research into practice.
Our approach is characterised by ethical leadership, moral integrity and a commitment to raise hopes and horizons for vulnerable children and their families.
In recent years we have supported imaginative and successful research projects nationwide in very diverse settings including areas of deprivation and disadvantage in cities, urban, rural and coastal areas.
See Locations Map on the right.
Cohort 6 Schools projects now published in Celebrating Research that gets Results volume 4
The most recent cohort of Laurel Trust Projects (Cohort 6) were successfully completed in the summer of 2025. Their final research reports reflect significant successes in improving outcomes and practice both for children/young people and for teachers. In several cases the positive impact extends to families and the community.
Studies of all these research projects have now been published in Volume 4 of The Laurel Trust's annual collection "Celebrating Research that gets Results" and can be accessed by clicking on this link.
Our Purpose
Our purpose is partnerships with schools, their communities and other agencies to widen opportunities and reduce disadvantage for all children and young people through securing improvements in the quality of teaching, learning and leadership.
Locations Map
Click here to see the spread of our research projects
Our Values
Underpinning all the work of the Laurel Trust are our inclusive values of:
EQUALITY, RESPECT and TRUST.
We expect the communities of schools that work with us to reflect and practise these values.
Impressive Response
The current round of action research supported by The Laurel Trust is now well underway. Our Consultant Director and Trustees have recently undertaken the first school visits, witnessing the high-quality work being led by practitioners across the country. These visits highlight a professional partnership between the Trust and the schools, grounded in a shared commitment to improving outcomes for all learners.
The theme for this cycle is Transition. Lead schools from regions from the South West to the North East of England have developed individual initiatives that support children and young people in circumstances that include the move across key stages and the transition back into a school environment after a period of absence. The work focuses on the need to ensures that everyone feels secure, confident and ready to learn after a period of change.
The research is being conducted across a diverse range of settings, including mainstream primary and secondary schools as well as special schools and colleges. The lead researchers and their teams are to be congratulated for the rigour of their inquiries and the valuable insights they are already uncovering. We look forward to sharing the findings from these various settings with the wider educational community in the future.
