Where the money goes: the real cost of a free place at summer school

Every place on our summer school is free, and none of them is costless. The cash cost of a place is dominated by two things: getting a young person across London to the building, and feeding them once they are there. At March 2026 fares, a peak return journey between Zone 6 and central London is £11.80 a day. The teaching, which looks like the expensive part, costs us nothing in cash, because it is given.

Travel across TfL Zones 1–6, lunch on all eight teaching days, every piece of equipment and material a student touches: none of it is paid for by the student or their family. That is a deliberate design decision, and it is the single most expensive one we make.

This article explains what a free place is made of, who pays for it, what is donated rather than bought, and what we would do with more. It also sets out, with links to the official guidance, how Gift Aid and payroll giving work, what “restricted” and “unrestricted” mean, how to check any charity before you give, and what the independent evidence says about whether outreach like ours is good value. We publish it because “free programme” quietly implies “costless programme”, and that implication does a disservice to the people funding it.

What is a free summer school place actually made of?

Bridging the Future is a registered charity in England and Wales, number 1201227. Our record, including our trustees, governing document and filed accounts, is public on the Charity Commission register. We would encourage anyone considering a significant gift to read it there rather than take our word for anything on this page.

We have no paid staff. Every organiser, teacher, demonstrator, mentor, moderator and trustee is a volunteer. That is not a virtue signal; it is a structural fact that determines the whole cost profile below, and it comes with real risks that we discuss further down.

The summer school runs for two weeks in August in the UCL Department of Physics & Astronomy, Monday to Thursday, 10:00 to 16:30. It has 30 places a year for young people aged 16 to 22 from refugee, asylum-seeking and forced-migrant backgrounds. If you want to know what happens inside those eight days, our hour-by-hour account of the fortnight is the companion to this piece.

The costs split into three categories that behave very differently: cash costs, donated-in-kind costs, and volunteered time.

What the cash budget goes on

Approximate share of the direct cash cost of running one summer school

• Student travel across TfL Zones 1–645%
• Lunch and refreshments, eight days30%
• Laboratory consumables and materials15%
• Printing, certificates, stationery5%
• Safeguarding, insurance, admin5%

Show the data as a table

What the cash budget goes on

Category	Value
Student travel across TfL Zones 1–6	45%
Lunch and refreshments, eight days	30%
Laboratory consumables and materials	15%
Printing, certificates, stationery	5%
Safeguarding, insurance, admin	5%

We publish those proportions as indicative rather than audited, and we would rather say so than present a planning estimate as a financial statement. The authoritative numbers are the ones we file.

Why is travel the biggest cost?

This surprises people, so it is worth setting out with real numbers.

London’s Tube and TfL rail fares rose on 1 March 2026. TfL’s own announcement confirmed that no single pay as you go Tube fare within Zones 1–6 rose by more than 20p, and that Travelcards and daily caps are frozen until March 2027. The zone-by-zone fares were published with the Mayor’s 2026 fares package, and the full tables, including daily caps, peak times and train operator fares, are in the annex to Mayoral Decision MD3464.

Our students arrive for a 10:00 start, which for anyone coming from the outer zones means travelling before 09:30, inside the morning peak. They leave at 16:30, inside the evening peak of 16:00 to 19:00. The off-peak exception in the evening applies only to journeys that end in Zone 1, so a student heading home to the suburbs pays the peak fare both ways.

Those are Tube and TfL rail fares from March 2026. Two things push the real figure higher for some students. Journeys on National Rail operators’ services are priced differently: the same peak Zone 1–6 journey on a train operator’s own service is £8.50 in the published tables. And many students also need a bus at one end, where fares were frozen until July 2026 and are worth checking on tfl.gov.uk at the point of travel.

Two things push it lower. Nobody pays more than the daily cap, although a simple return commute stays below it in every zone. And 16- and 17-year-olds with a 16+ Zip Oyster photocard pay half the adult pay as you go rate, which halves the eight-day Zone 6 figure to £47.20. As Wandsworth Council’s family information service explains, a parent or guardian must apply on the young person’s behalf and an administration fee is payable, which is its own small barrier for a young person whose paperwork is already complicated.

Eight days of travel against a week of asylum support

Adult peak pay as you go return to Zone 1, eight teaching days, March 2026 fares

• Eight days from Zone 6£94
• Eight days from Zone 5£85
• Eight days from Zone 4£77
• Eight days from Zone 2£58
• One week of asylum support, self-catered£49

  £49.18 per person

Show the data as a table

Eight days of travel against a week of asylum support

Category	Value
Eight days from Zone 6	£94
Eight days from Zone 5	£85
Eight days from Zone 4	£77
Eight days from Zone 2	£58
One week of asylum support, self-catered	£49

The asylum support comparison

Young people who are seeking asylum, or whose families are, may be living on asylum support. GOV.UK sets the rate at £49.18 a week for each person, or £9.95 a week where the accommodation provides meals. GOV.UK describes it as helping to pay for things like food, clothing and toiletries.

Put the two numbers side by side. Eight days of peak travel from Zone 6 costs almost twice a week’s self-catered allowance. For a young person in catered accommodation, it is more than nine weeks of their cash allowance. Budgets that tight are also why digital exclusion among asylum seekers is so closely tied to the question of who can take part in education at all.

An unfunded commute is not an inconvenience for that student. It is a decisive barrier, and it is a selective barrier: it filters out exactly the young people the programme exists for, while leaving in the ones who could probably have found another opportunity.

Why partial funding is worse than it sounds

Offering a contribution towards travel, rather than covering it, can look prudent. It is not.

A partial subsidy converts a fixed barrier into a smaller fixed barrier, which is still a barrier, and it introduces something worse: uncertainty. A young person deciding in July whether to commit their August needs the answer to “can I afford to attend every day?” to be yes. “Probably, mostly” is not an answer anyone can plan around, and it is the students in the tightest circumstances who drop out at that point.

Covering travel completely costs more per student and produces a materially different cohort. As the evidence section below shows, independent evaluators have found the same selection problem across the sector.

Where does the money come from?

Three sources, with very different characteristics.

Institutional support

A key contribution comes from University College London, both in cash (£8,500 in 2025) and in kind, through teaching space, laboratory access and equipment. UCL has been our partner since the programme began in 2018, and the in-kind element is worth considerably more than any cash figure would suggest. A real laboratory, with real instruments, is not something a volunteer-run charity could rent.

Support has also come from organisations working in physics education and research, including The Ogden Trust, whose chief executive attended one of our celebration events, and the London Centre for Nanotechnology, whose researchers are among our teaching volunteers.

Grants and trusts

Project grants can be the most reliable source per pound and the least reliable per year: a grant that funds one summer school carries no promise about the next. Grant funding is also often restricted to a named purpose, which matters more than it sounds, and which we explain below.

Individual donations

The smallest share by value and, increasingly, the most strategically important. Direct donations through this website fund places for students alongside the UCL funding, and they are the part of our income that does not depend on any single relationship.

Two families deserve naming, because they asked us to explain why they gave:

The Bhaskar family is committed to expanding educational opportunities for underprivileged children. Having supported several education-focused charities in India, we believe that access to learning is one of the most powerful ways to break cycles of poverty and create lasting change. Bridging the Future’s mission to help young refugees rebuild their lives through education resonates strongly with our family’s values and outlook and we are proud to support their work. The Bhaskar Family

We are also grateful to the Campagnola family for their continued support.

What does a donation actually buy?

We are wary of the “£X feeds a child for a day” style of fundraising copy, because it usually collapses under scrutiny. What follows is the honest version: the components of a place, with public prices alongside for scale rather than a marketing schedule.

We have deliberately not put our own budget figures against those rows. Costs move with fares, with group sizes and with what a given year’s workshops need, and a number published now would be wrong within a couple of years. The fares in the right-hand column are TfL’s adult fares, not our accounts, and young people with a 16+ Zip photocard travel at half that rate. The donation form lets you choose an amount and, if you want, tell us what you would like it to go towards.

How can you make a gift go further?

The same donation can be worth noticeably more or less to a charity depending on how it is made. None of what follows costs the donor extra, and some of it costs them less.

Gift Aid: the highest-return thirty seconds

If you are a UK taxpayer, GOV.UK explains that charities can claim an extra 25p for every £1 you give, and that it will not cost you any extra. HMRC pays it to the charity because you have already paid tax on the money. The charity must be recognised by HMRC to claim, and at the time of writing our register entry lists Bridging the Future as not recognised by HMRC for Gift Aid. What follows explains how the scheme works for eligible charities; check the register for our current position before counting on the extra 25p.

The conditions are straightforward. You make a Gift Aid declaration to the charity, which is a tick box on most donation forms. The tax can have been paid on income or on capital gains. And your donations across all charities should not be more than four times what you paid in tax in that tax year, which runs from 6 April to 5 April. If you pay less tax than the charities claim, HMRC may ask you to pay the difference, and you should tell charities if you stop qualifying.

Higher-rate and additional-rate taxpayers can go further: GOV.UK says you can claim back the difference between the tax you paid on the donation and what the charity got back, through your Self Assessment tax return.

For a small charity able to claim it, 25% is not a rounding error: it would turn six days of a student’s travel into seven and a half.

Payroll giving: relief before tax

If your employer or pension provider runs a Payroll Giving scheme, you can donate straight from your wages or pension before tax is deducted. GOV.UK sets out what a £1 donation actually costs you: 80p for a basic-rate taxpayer, 60p at the higher rate and 55p at the additional rate, with slightly different figures for Scottish taxpayers. Schemes are run through a Payroll Giving agency, which may deduct an administration fee before passing the money on, so it is worth asking your employer whether they cover it. As with Gift Aid, the receiving charity must be recognised by HMRC.

These are illustrations of the published rules, not tax advice. Tax positions vary, and GOV.UK is the authority on what applies to you.

Monthly giving: the kind of money we can plan against

The donation form offers a monthly option as well as one-off gifts, and the case for monthly giving is not that monthly gifts are larger.

The reason is planning. A summer school is committed to in the spring: places offered, volunteers rostered, materials ordered, travel budgeted. At the point we make those commitments we do not know what we will raise over the summer. Regular income is the only kind we can plan against, and it is the difference between offering places confidently and offering fewer cautiously.

If your employer runs a matched-giving scheme, that last row is worth a look. Matching can add substantially to a gift for the cost of filling in a form, and it is one of the most under-used sources of income available to small charities.

Restricted or unrestricted: what is the difference?

This is the single most useful piece of charity vocabulary for a donor, and it is rarely explained.

The Charity Commission’s guidance on reserves, CC19, defines the terms. Restricted funds are funds subject to specific trusts, declared by the donor or with their authority: in plain English, money that can only be spent on the purpose the donor named. Unrestricted funds are income that can be spent at the discretion of the trustees in furtherance of any of the charity’s objects. Designated funds sit in between: unrestricted money that trustees have earmarked for a particular use, without legally committing it.

Why does it matter to a small charity? Because restrictions stack up. A charity whose income is mostly restricted grants may have money in the bank and still be unable to pay for a laptop, an insurance renewal or a safeguarding course, because none of its funders named those things. Unrestricted money is what pays for the unglamorous essentials that make the restricted projects possible.

The same guidance defines reserves as the part of a charity’s unrestricted funds that is freely available to spend on any of its purposes, and the Commission expects trustees to decide, publish, implement and monitor a reserves policy.

Our donation form lets you direct a gift if you want to. If you are happy to leave it unrestricted, it lets us put the money where the need is greatest in a given year, whether that is summer school travel, the online mentoring scheme or the new work placements and internships programme.

How do you check a charity before you give?

We would rather encourage scrutiny than ask for trust, so here is what to look at, for us or for anyone else.

Start with the register

In England and Wales, every registered charity has a public record on the register of charities. Ours is here, under number 1201227. The Commission’s advice for donors, repeated in its Giving Tuesday guidance with the Fundraising Regulator in December 2025, is to check a charity’s name and registration number before giving; most charities with an annual income of £5,000 or more must be registered. The same guidance says to look for the Fundraising Badge, to be careful with links in emails and social media posts, and never to feel under pressure to donate immediately. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own registers.

Read the accounts over several years

The Commission’s accounting guidance, CC15d, explains that what a charity must prepare depends on its structure, income and assets, and that where it must send its annual report and accounts to the Commission, it must do so within 10 months of its financial year end.

Compare income with expenditure over several years, not one. A small charity that raises lumpy grant income will show a surplus one year and a deficit the next as it spends what it raised. Look at what proportion is restricted. Check the reserves policy: too little is fragile; a great deal too much, with no stated plan, is a fair question to ask. And look at the trustee list and how it changes. A board that has not changed in a decade, or that changes completely every year, both tell you something.

Know the fundraising rules

The Fundraising Regulator’s Code of Fundraising Practice sets the standards for fundraising in the UK. A revised, principles-based Code came into force on 1 November 2025; as Bates Wells summarises, the foundation is unchanged: all fundraising must be legal, open, honest and respectful. The Charity Commission’s refreshed trustee guidance, CC20, updated in February 2026, tells trustees they should register with the Fundraising Regulator and follow the Code, and only use the funds they raise for the purposes for which they were raised.

If you are ever concerned about how a charity asked you for money, CC20 says to raise it with the charity first, and then with the Fundraising Regulator for fundraising in England, Wales or Northern Ireland.

Be careful with “percentage spent on the cause”

It is the most cited and least useful metric in the sector. A charity with no staff will always score beautifully, and a charity that invests properly in safeguarding, evaluation and fundraising will score worse while very likely doing better work. A volunteer-run charity like ours tends to score well on it, and we still think it is a poor measure.

Is outreach like this good value? What the evidence says

An article about value that only quotes the charity’s own view is marketing. The most useful independent source in England is TASO, the Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education, whose evidence toolkit rates common widening-participation interventions on strength of evidence, cost and impact.

Its rating of summer schools is sobering, and we think donors should see it. TASO classes them as high cost, with emerging evidence, a small positive impact on aspirations and attitudes, and more evidence needed on behaviour and outcomes. Its 2022 randomised trial of online summer schools found a small positive effect on self-reported applications to higher education. But TASO also concludes that there is not yet enough evidence to say summer schools are an effective tool to widen participation, and it suggests comparing them with less intensive approaches.

The most important finding is about who turns up. In TASO’s reflections on its summer schools trial, published in November 2023, over 94% of applicants to both the online and in-person summer schools said beforehand that they were likely or extremely likely to apply to higher education anyway. Those who attended the in-person summer schools did come away more confident that university is for people like them, and better informed about where and what to study. But the evaluators warned that summer schools risk reaching students who are already on their way, rather than the ones who most need the opportunity. The post noted that actual enrolment data, expected in 2025, would show whether that pattern held.

For mentoring before entry to higher education, TASO’s ratings are medium cost, emerging evidence, a small positive impact on attitudes and more evidence needed on outcomes, with a recommendation that providers evaluate their own programmes locally.

What we take from that

Three things, honestly stated.

First, the targeting finding is precisely the failure mode our spending rules are built against. Fully funded travel and food are how we try to reach students who would not otherwise get an opportunity like this. Our analysis of the GCSE vacuum sets out why young people who arrive at 15 or 16 are so poorly served by the usual routes, and the refugee education statistics show how far behind the starting line they begin.

Second, our cost structure is unusual. TASO describes summer schools as large-scale, high-cost and resource-intensive interventions, and many involve a residential stay. Ours has no paid staff, no residential element and borrows its laboratories. That does not make it effective, but it does change the arithmetic of the marginal place.

Third, we cannot yet prove impact, and we will not pretend otherwise. We know what our students say. We do not know, statistically, where they end up.

Applications against places, 2025

The gap is the entire fundraising case

• Applications received315 young people
• Places available30 young people

Show the data as a table

Applications against places, 2025

Category	Value
Applications received	315 young people
Places available	30 young people

In 2025 we received 315 applications for 30 places. That ratio explains more about our budgeting than any other figure. We are not fundraising to sustain a programme at its current size; the programme at its current size already turns away roughly nine out of every ten young people who ask. What that demand looked like in 2025 is set out in a separate piece.

The cost of not doing it

A young person who does not find a route into education at seventeen does not simply pause. They enter adulthood without the qualifications that many jobs and courses require. The costs of that fall on them first and most heavily, and then on everyone else for decades. The case for STEM as a route into skilled work is part of why we teach what we teach.

Against that, the marginal cost of an additional place on an existing programme is small: a week or two of fares, eight lunches, a share of the reagents. We are wary of pushing that argument too hard, because it slides easily into pricing human beings, and because we cannot prove the counterfactual for any individual. But the arithmetic of the marginal place is real, and it is why we would rather grow the programme than polish it.

How we decide what to spend on

With a small budget and more demand than capacity, almost every spending decision is a decision about who is excluded. We try to make them against three tests.

Does it remove a barrier, or improve an experience? Travel money removes a barrier: without it, a specific group of students cannot attend at all. A better lunch improves an experience. Both are worth having; only one determines who is in the room. Barrier spending comes first, always.

Would a volunteer do it for nothing, well? Teaching, demonstrating, mentoring, coordinating and governance are all done by volunteers, and done well. Our mentors alone have given more than 250 hours to 32 students since 2022, as one hour a week describes. Travel, food and reagents cannot be given in the same way. We spend cash on the things that cannot be given.

Does it survive a bad year? A commitment that must be honoured, such as a place we have offered a student, is different from an ambition. We would rather run a smaller programme that keeps every promise than a larger one that cannot.

Those tests produce some unglamorous outcomes. We spend nothing on staff, because we have none. We spend a striking proportion of the budget on Oyster top-ups, which does not photograph well and is the most important line in the budget.

What would more money change, and what are the risks?

In rough order of what we would do next.

More places on the same fortnight. The cheapest expansion per student, because the space, the volunteers and the curriculum already exist. Each additional student adds travel, food and materials: real money, but incremental rather than structural.

A second cohort, or a second location. Doubling the fortnight would double space needs, volunteer numbers and coordination. This is the step where “volunteer-run” starts to strain, and it is the honest threshold at which we would need to think about paid coordination.

Extending mentoring. The scheme runs from October to March, and starts again in October 2026. Extending it across the full academic year, and to more students, is largely a matter of recruiting and supporting more mentors, which is a coordination cost rather than a teaching cost. If you could mentor, volunteering with us is the most direct way to expand it.

Following our alumni properly. Finding out what happens to our students after they leave would take time and money that would otherwise buy places, which is why we have not done it. Given what TASO’s evaluations show about how hard impact is to establish, it is also the thing that would most improve the programme.

The risks in a volunteer-run model

Key-person dependency. A programme run by volunteers depends on particular people continuing to volunteer. Our operations team changes composition every year, which brings energy, and also means institutional memory lives in documents rather than in staff.

Funding lumpiness. A single institutional contribution is a large share of the budget. Diversifying towards a broader base of individual donors is slower and less efficient per pound, and it is the right thing to do for resilience. It is a large part of why we now ask on this website at all.

Growth outrunning governance. Our board is small and entirely voluntary, with a treasurer who is an actuary. There is a size at which “everyone volunteers” stops being a strength and starts being a safeguarding and financial-control risk. We would rather grow more slowly than cross that line unprepared.

The measurement gap. We know what our students say. We do not know, statistically, where they end up. We are open about that rather than filling the gap with an estimate.

What we will publish next

Two commitments, so that this page can be held against them. First, our filed accounts remain the authoritative financial statement, and we will keep pointing to the Charity Commission register rather than asking anyone to rely on summaries. Second, when we next publish a full year’s figures, we will update this article with the actual cost per place for that year, alongside the number of applications we turned away. If those two numbers move in opposite directions, we would rather say so.

Summer School 2026 has now finished. Applications for Summer School 2027 will be announced on our apply page, and the money raised over the coming months decides how many of those applicants we can say yes to.

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First compiled November 2025; updated September 2026 with March 2026 TfL fares, current asylum support rates, Gift Aid and payroll giving rules, Charity Commission and Fundraising Regulator guidance, and TASO’s evidence ratings. Our own figures come from Bridging the Future programme records. Our annual accounts and trustees’ annual reports are filed with the Charity Commission for England and Wales under registration number 1201227 and take precedence over anything summarised here. Fares, tax rules and allowances change: check TfL, GOV.UK and HMRC for the current position, and take advice on your own tax affairs. If you spot something out of date, please tell us.

Keep reading

• Inside a free STEM summer school: what the money actually buys, day by day.
• Ten times demand in 2025: the 315 applications behind 30 places.
• Refugee education in numbers: the wider picture our students come from.
• Donate: one-off or monthly.