Leading Improvement

Leicester City Council

The background: Leicester is a city with ambition, with a community of education and children’s services professionals committed to supporting the aspiration of its young people. In 2007, however, it became apparent that the city needed to take rapid action if the overall performance of schools were to keep pace with other comparable local authorities and the best practice already present in Leicester were to be replicated more widely.  

The challenge: The local authority had limited capacity to be able to support a major school improvement programme. It turned to Navigate to provide a flexible response, developing an ongoing partnership which brought together a team of school improvement professionals to support local school leaders.

The solution: Our approach was to engage fully with Leicester’s aims and objectives, developing a strategy which would support student achievement as a measurable outcome and enhance the life chances of the young people of Leicester.

In doing so, our team established a working presence at every level of the school system in the City: at individual school level, working directly with headteachers and SLTs to support improvement; at leadership level within the local authority to establish the capacity to better support schools; and with the DCSF team supporting Leicester, to help ensure that additional investment into Leicester schools was well directed.

We appointed our own Project Manager for Leicester who works within the LA structure to co-ordinate the work of our team within the wider strategy for Children’s Services. In total, we have a team of 20 practitioners working at a strategic level across the City.

This is an example of Navigate’s work at a “whole system” level, working within complex structures and relationship to bring about change. This is only possible because of our commitment and understanding of the public service environment – as well as our capacity to assemble experienced teams quickly to bring additional capacity to bear in challenging circumstances.

The result: In September 2008, Leicester was one of the most improved authorities in England in terms of pupil attainment at primary level.