Looking Back at 2025, and Looking Ahead to 2026

Cosmos Admin 15 Jan 2026

2026 has started in a similar way to 2025.

With space to pause, reflect on what we achieved over the past year, and begin shaping what the year ahead might hold.

Over the last 12 months, our focus has remained consistent. To offer as much value as possible to the education sector, while delivering thoughtful, high-quality work alongside the partners and practitioners we collaborate with. That has meant listening closely, responding to real challenges across the sector, and creating spaces where insight can lead to meaningful action.

Supporting the sector with insight you can trust

Throughout 2025, we continued to invest in sharing insight that helps educators stay informed and respond to change. Through the Cosmos Connects newsletter and podcast, we explored key themes shaping access, participation and student outcomes, creating regular touchpoints that blend research, lived experience and sector expertise.

Our Student Outcomes Podcast became a key space for honest and often challenging conversations about what really influences outcomes for young people. Featuring voices from across the sector, including a live episode with Jon Datta from The Sutton Trust, these discussions reflected our belief that progress starts with openness, nuance and shared learning.

YOUTUBE

SPOTIFY

From insight to action

In 2025, insight did not stop at conversation. Through our Beyond Guesswork workshops, we brought practitioners together to explore how data, insight and professional experience can be used more effectively to support students.

These sessions focused on helping teams feel more confident in their decision making, particularly when it comes to targeting, evaluation and understanding the often unseen influences on student choice.

In the workshops we broke of the four student mindsets identified in our national study of over 35,000 FE students and showcased real examples of how institutions/colleges have used this knowledge to improve targeting and engagement.

Alongside this, we stayed close to the sector by attending and contributing to conferences, panels and webinars, including the NEON Symposium and the Boys Impact Conference. These spaces continue to shape our thinking, grounding our work in the realities educators and students are navigating every day.

Exploring the unseen influences on educational choice

Another significant pieces of work we shared in 2025 was our white paper, The Invisible Barrier. This research explored how trauma can influence educational decision making, and why emotionally informed approaches matter when supporting progression to higher education.

The response to this work reinforced something we see time and again. That understanding student behaviour requires more than attainment data alone, and that emotionally informed, evidence-led approaches are critical if we want to design support that truly meets students where they are.

This insight has led to an exciting piece of research with various large universities across the UK to explore the hidden drivers of decision making. More on this soon.

A peek into 2026

Looking ahead, 2026 is shaping up to be a year of deeper exploration and collaboration.

As mentioned, we are embarking on a large-scale research project with university partners, focused on better understanding how hidden drivers influence educational decision making and what this means for access, progression and student support. This work will build on our existing research and continue our commitment to producing insight that informs real, strategic decisions across the sector.

We are also partnering with NERUPI to bring the sector a new CPD course designed to strengthen evaluation practice across Access and Participation Plan (APP) activity.

The course is focused on helping professional service staff, academic colleagues, and anybody else involved in supporting APP activities:

Build confidence in evaluation and data quality
Strengthen evaluation capacity across teams
Develop a shared understanding of APP evaluation

There is much more exciting projects taking shape behind the scenes, from new learning opportunities to further research and partnership work. For now, this is just a glimpse of what is ahead.

We look forward to sharing more as plans develop and as our collective learning continues into 2026. To keep up to date with all the latest news, resources and insight, sign up for the Cosmos Connects Newsletter!

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