The Ardian Foundation’s central aim has always been to increase social mobility by helping disadvantaged children and young people gain access to education, training and advice. We see educational opportunities as critical to improving social mobility, and during our first 10 years we have concen- trated on supporting charities addressing the educational challenges that young people face due to their background and circumstances. During 2020, mindful of the disproportionate impact that Covid-19 has had on the most disadvantaged households, we have broadened our approach in two important ways. EARLY CHILDHOOD “We think that supporting First, we have decided to increase the Founda- early childhood programs tion’s focus on early childhood because research will be a particularly shows that interventions at this stage can have effective way to promote a big effect in preventing poor outcomes later social mobility and equal in life. We therefore see this as a particularly opportunities.” effective way to promote social mobility and — Yann Bak equal opportunities. We already fund projects that support the education of young children, for example our work with Agir pour l’Ecole to develop new ways of teaching reading in early-years education. However, we now expect to devote almost half the Foundation’s budget to pro- grams aimed at early childhood within the next two years. This initiative is backed by continuing growth in the Foundation’s budget, which was €2.3 million in 2020 and will rise to €2.8 million in 2021. Our medium-term goal is to increase it to more than €4 million a year. NEW RESEARCH CHAIR AT THE PARIS SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS As well as committing to address the roots of inequality in access to education, the Foundation has created a chair in Education Policy and Social Mobility at the Paris School of Economics (PSE), which is ranked fifth in the world among university economics faculties. This research chair is being co-funded by La Direction de l’Evaluation, de la Prospective et de la Performance (DEPP), the arm of the French Ministry of Education in charge of measuring the quality of education policies and initiatives. The DEPP will give the PSE’s researchers privileged access to its extensive database for future projects. 2020 ACTIVITY REPORT 27