Changing the odds: Middlesbrough
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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.
You can build your future here.
In Middlesbrough, too many young people feel they have to leave to get on. Our latest Changing the Odds film follows what happens when a school and a group of local employers decide to change that, one young person at a time.
The young people in our latest film are clear-eyed about where they live. You can have choices, one says, but not much opportunity. Another has applied for apprenticeship after apprenticeship, in plastering, joinery, plumbing and heating, and heard nothing back. The advice they have absorbed is simple and sad: get your qualifications, then leave.
The cradle-to-career work in Middlesbrough, led by Phil Latham, is early in a long road. What this film offers is a picture of how a place starts to shift the odds for the young people most at risk of being left behind.
Phil has spent his whole working life in Middlesbrough. Over the last decade, he has watched poverty not just widen but deepen, and the stories arriving through the school gates are growing ever more complex. He became convinced the school could not meet them on its own, and started working in partnership with the community. There he found people with real ambition for Middlesbrough's young people, and a clear message: don't leave it there; we want to keep working with you. That became a habit of convening, bringing local employers around the same table as the school.
The employers did not go looking for easy wins, and asked about the students who would not get their grade fours, the ones at highest risk of leaving school with nowhere to go. Could we work with them?
Three years ago there was no post-16 route for those young people. So, in partnership with local employers, the school built one: an advanced course that works a little like a foundation year, giving students an extra year and shaping it around what local employers know. The practical side is their strength, so the course leans into it, with interview practice, a look at how GCSE maths shows up on a real job, and the small things no one had told them. "I had no idea you were meant to have a cover letter when you apply," one student says. "No wonder I wasn't getting any jobs."
What comes through most is the shift in how the young people see themselves. "Not everyone who doesn't get good grades doesn't care," one says. Given a little more time and belief, that changes. "I'm feeling much better about things," another says. "I do think I'm going to have a good future."
None of this is magic, and none of it is free. Core school funding only stretches so far across one-to-one careers work and employer engagement. What convening does, in Phil's words, is leave you a few years down the line with a bigger organisation, more capacity and more levers to pull. The employers, for their part, keep turning up. Many of them admit they have not always found schools easy to work with, so the work here has been to make that collaboration as easy and as natural as it can be.
The odds in Teesside are still long, but where these young people once heard only "leave", they are now hearing something different from the people who do the hiring in their own town: “you could build your future here.” That is what changing the odds looks like up close. Not the work of heroes, but of ordinary, curious people choosing to do it together, in one place.
If you’d like to learn more about our Cradle-to-Career Partnership, please get in touch.
