Great schools are necessary but not sufficient. Our new film follows our first cohort of C2C Accelerator partners—school leaders who stopped trying to meet every need alone and started bringing their place together instead.

In Middlesbrough, too many capable young people keep hearing that opportunity is somewhere else. This film, from one of our C2C Accelerator partners in Middlesbrough, is not the story of one heroic leader. It is about a school that decided it could not do this alone, and brought the town's employers around the same table to open real routes into work for the young people most at risk of being left behind, in the place they already call home.

The nursery and reception teachers saw what was coming: children arriving at school already behind, and the support that might have helped in their earliest years thin and scattered. So they started running groups for local families. This film, from Bligh in Medway, is not the story of one heroic school. It is about a trust that decided every one of its primary schools should be a proper anchor in its community, with support for families built where they already are, from a child's earliest days.

In the middle of lockdown, 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. This film follows what happened when the leaders of one secondary school in a Somerset market town stopped treating the gaps around children as someone else's job, and started bringing the whole community around one table.