Changing the odds: Chard
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The partners whose work you'll see here are part of the first cohort of our Cradle-to-Career Accelerator.
The C2C Accelerator is our growth fund for partners showing the most promise in building coherent, place-based support around children. Each place selected joins a bespoke three-year programme, with investment and dedicated support from our cradle-to-career specialists, to accelerate the model it is already building in its own community. The work draws on what we learned in Feltham, and on what this growing community of partners is learning from one another.
We commissioned Postcode Films to make these short films in the communities where that work actually happens. We didn't want slick promotional pieces, and we didn't want stories of heroes. We wanted to bring the work home: to show what cradle to career looks like up close, in real places, as ordinary and curious people do the patient, often unglamorous work of changing the odds for children and families.
They are also a way of honouring these partners, and of learning in public, so that others weighing up this work can see what it really involves.
Great schools are necessary but not sufficient, and these films are about the rest of the answer: the people of a place choosing to close the gaps children fall through, together.
In 2021, as we started to emerge from successive lockdowns, a headteacher in Chard sat down and wrote a letter. Not to families about remote learning, but to the whole town: come and have breakfast with us.
It sounds like a small thing. It wasn't.
Holyrood Academy is a single secondary school in a Somerset market town where too many children were slipping through the gaps between school, home and the services meant to catch them.
This film follows what happened when its leaders stopped treating that as someone else's job and started bringing the whole community around one table, one breakfast at a time.
No heroics. No overnight fix. Just a school that decided it couldn't do this alone, and did something about it.
Seven minutes, and as good a picture of what cradle to career looks like up close as we've got.
If you’d like to learn more about our Cradle-to-Career Partnership, please get in touch.
