Education That Pays Twice: One School's Payment, Another Child's Future

A couple of months ago, we got an email. Confirmation that Training Cave had been approved as a quality assured alternative provision by our local authority. I was in the gym when I saw it. Properly happy and relieved, in a way that surprised me a bit.

It's funny what your mind goes to first. Not the email itself, but every late night that led up to it — sat at the kitchen table long after everyone else had gone to bed, researching, planning, typing up policy after policy. Five years of that, on and off, since we started working with one local school with a handful of kids and no idea whether any of this would actually work. What I do remember from those early days is the teachers' faces the first time they saw those kids actually engage. Genuinely surprised. Like they weren't expecting it to work either.

The bit nobody sees

Here's what that approval actually took: almost a year of work that has nothing to do with boxing. Compliance. Safeguarding policies. Our organisational structure. Getting our facility up to a standard that satisfies people whose entire job is to find the gaps.

The frustrating part was being told, over and over, throughout that whole year, that we were exactly right for this. And still having to prove it, form by form. There were a lot of nights on the laptop until one in the morning. My wife noticed I was doing too much before I'd really admit it to myself. I kept going anyway, because I believed in it, even with no concrete evidence at any point along the way that it was actually going to land.

None of that is glamorous. None of it makes for a good video. But it's the reason a school or a local authority can hand us one of their young people and trust what happens next. That trust isn't given because we're good at boxing. It's given because Training Cave did the boring, unseen, unglamorous work of proving we can be trusted with a child.

I think that's true of most things worth building. The part people see — a kid landing a combination on the pads, a session full of energy and noise — is maybe 10% of the story. The other 90% is paperwork, standards, and showing up to be checked.

What the pathway actually looks like

So what does a young person walking through Training Cave's doors actually get, once that trust is in place?

It starts at 9 years old, with non-contact boxing, physical education, and wellbeing sessions. At that age it's not about performance. It's about building fitness, confidence, and structure — often for kids who've had very little of any of those three.

As they move into their teens, it progresses. Entry Level AQA qualifications. Sports leadership. Real, recognised achievement sitting alongside the boxing, the health, the fitness. This is where it stops being "just a boxing programme" and starts being something a young person can point to and say — I did that, and it counts.

By the time they reach post-16, they're on further education and employment-ready courses. They leave us not just more resilient — though they are that too — but with actual qualifications and an actual next step. Something to walk into, rather than a gap to fall through.

And running underneath every single stage of that journey, whether they're 9 or 19, are the same core skills. Communication. Leadership. Problem solving. Teamwork.

Boxing is the tool. Those skills — and a genuine pathway forward — are the outcome.

The turn most people don't expect

Here's the part I think is really important for people to understand, because it's the part that makes Training Cave different from just "a boxing gym that does good things."

This is paid work. Schools fund these placements. That's not something Training Cave is shy about — it's how a social enterprise has to operate if it wants to still exist in five years' time.

But because Training Cave is a social enterprise, that income doesn't just sit with us. It loops back round.

The money from an education placement helps fund a place in our community programmes. Or a spot on a holiday camp. Or support for a young person who's been referred to us from a genuinely disadvantaged background — someone whose family couldn't fund a placement like this in a million years.

So the school that's paying us for an education placement is, without even realising it, helping make sure another child in the local area also gets an opportunity. Just in a different way, through a different door.

That's the whole model. Commercial and education income sustaining the community side. The community side reaching the young people who need us most — the ones who'd never end up on a funded placement, who'd never be referred through official channels, who just need somewhere to go.

One doesn't work without the other. The school placements aren't just a revenue line — they're what makes the free community sessions possible. And the community work isn't charity bolted onto a business — it's the actual point, funded by the business.

The bigger picture

There's a piece of national context that's been sitting with me lately. The government commissioned Alan Milburn to review what's happening to young people and work, and the early findings are hard to read. Around a million 16 to 24 year olds in the UK are currently NEET — not in education, employment or training. Six in ten of them have never had a job at all. And the review talks about a "lost generation" risk, caused largely by nobody — school, college, council, employment support — actually joining up.

One line from that review has stuck with me more than any other: for every £25 currently spent on benefits for this group, only £1 is spent on employment support. We wait until someone has already fallen through, and then we spend a fortune trying to catch them, rather than spending a fraction of that stopping them falling in the first place.

That's the gap Training Cave sits in, whether we set out to or not. We reach kids as young as five or six — years before anyone's filling in a NEET statistic about them — and we stay with them through the exact years, early teens especially, where things tend to come apart. Family adversity, undiagnosed additional needs, a bit of bad luck with the wrong environment at the wrong time. We're already there.

It's not just Milburn, either. The Department for Education's 2026 white paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, commits every school to a new "enrichment entitlement" — sport, civic engagement, wider life skills — and to routine, targeted support for pupils at risk of becoming NEET. What we've built over five years turns out to be a ready-made way for schools to meet that, without finding new budget or capacity they don't have.

Last year we reached 1,744 students across more than 20 schools, colleges and PRUs. We're seeing an average 252% rise in self-belief among the young people who come through our doors, and 315 AQA Wellbeing Awards completed. Numbers like that can feel abstract until you remember each one is a kid who was, by every measure the system uses, not doing well.

And for the young people who do reach us already NEET, Training Cave runs an accredited employment-readiness programme built for exactly that gap. I think of one young autistic man who came through it, found the interview practice brutally hard, passed anyway, and is now coaching other neurodivergent young people through the same programme. I think of another lad who went from that course into a paid IT job with a civil engineering firm — and, almost as an aside, learned to travel independently on public transport for the first time in his life. Different young man, different route in — a funded programme at 16 that turned into community outreach work, then college, then university, then a sports psychology degree.

None of those are the same story. That's rather the point. What they share is that nobody handed them off to the next thing. We stayed present through it.

The review is also honest that a short course alone doesn't fix everything — one young man with SEND passed our programme but the interview practice made painfully clear how hard the open job market might be for him. That's not a failure of the programme. It's the case for staying involved longer, not walking away once the certificate's issued.

Why this matters beyond us

I talk to parents regularly whose kids are struggling with mainstream education — not badly behaved, not written off, just not thriving in a system built for a different kind of learner. I talk to schools who are looking for something different for pupils who need it, something that helps them get through their education journey rather than just survive it.

Those conversations are the reason the compliance year happened at all. Every policy we wrote, every safeguarding process we tightened, every standard we hit — it was all in service of being able to say yes to more of those conversations, properly, with the trust of the people making the referral.

Five years from one school to quality assured alternative provision status isn't a fast story. It's not a viral one either. But it's a true one, and it's the kind of true that took patience — the kind you only get by doing the unseen work long enough that eventually, someone sends you the email.

If you're a school, a parent, or a local authority looking for something different for a young person — Training Cave is always happy to chat.