The Sycamore Trust supports autistic individuals, their families, and communities delivering significant benefits to society.

The Sycamore Trust provides autism support services in Barking and Dagenham, Havering, and Redbridge in East London. Sycamore provides programmes such as skills development, peer group support, parenting resources, and much more.

The charity has run highly successful programmes, but its funding has decreased 40% in real terms since the 2019 pandemic. This reflects a combination of reduced Government funding and increased competition for private funding.

At the same time, demand for Sycamore’s services is rising as autism is becoming better understood and more people come forward for autism diagnosis and support. 

Our approach

Frontier Economics worked with Sycamore to determine the social benefits of the charity’s work and to quantify these benefits. We developed a framework that maps Sycamore’s programmes to their expected impact.

We then modelled the economic benefits of one of the mechanisms through which Sycamore is expected to generate social value, by developing important life skills.

What we found

We estimate that Sycamore generates £2.8 million to £4.5 million of  benefits to society from less than £500k in expenditure. This means that for every £1 of donations Sycamore receives it generates £5 to £9 in value.

This value is realised through improved communication and  wellbeing leading to lower costs for healthcare, childcare, and education.
These estimates are conservative in that they don’t include the benefits for all of Sycamore’s programmes, and they don’t capture all the mechanisms through which benefits are expected. As such, they are a lower bound of the overall social value benefit from Sycamore’s support work.

What this means for the UK

There is a sound economic case for improving autism support across the UK. Previous studies highlighted interventions supporting autistic individuals deliver value for money. Further work is needed to strengthen the evidence base to provide information for robust assessments.

Autism is increasingly better recognised in the UK. This means that individuals are more likely to obtain a diagnosis, which often opens the door for support services. It is important that everyone has access to these services, and Sycamore is a good example of how support services can be delivered effectively at a local level.

You can read our full analysis here. 

For information on working with Frontier on a pro bono basis, please email hello@frontier-economics.com.