Susannah Hardyman MBE, CEO of Impetus, on why we've never properly acknowledged how we let down young people during COVID
“We really let down children and young people during COVID and we have not fully acknowledged that as a country or owned it.”
Susannah Hardyman MBE is CEO of Impetus - Backing the best, the organisation that finds the best education and youth employment charities and helps them scale. Before taking the helm in January 2025, she founded Action Tutoring from her kitchen in 2011 with a simple hunch: bright young people might tutor for free if matched with pupils who couldn't afford it. A decade later, the charity was delivering to 7,000 pupils a year with nearly 2,000 volunteer tutors, and Susannah found herself advising government on the National Tutoring Programme. In this conversation, she reflects on what that whirlwind period taught her about implementation, why the NTP's scrapping was a tragedy, and what still keeps her awake about the attainment gap.
🎙️ Episode highlights
Susannah describes leadership as being an orchestra conductor: holding everything in time, keeping eyes on every section, and trying to create something beautiful and bigger than the sum of its parts.
She explains why kindness is an underrated value in leadership, and how treating people with generosity tends to come back in loyalty and trust.
Susannah reflects on the missed opportunities of the National Tutoring Programme, including the loss of focus on pupil premium pupils and the dilution of group sizes from three to six.
She shares her controversial opinion: we let down young people during COVID and still haven't owned it, dismissing a generation as "snowflakes" rather than acknowledging what they lost.
Susannah reveals what made school a happy place for her wasn't curriculum or pedagogy, but deep friendships and a stable maths teacher who followed her all the way through.
She offers advice for anyone in education: get experience with children and young people first, visit lots of different schools, and don't be afraid to switch careers into teaching.