Last year data from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) estimated that the level of child poverty in Middlesbrough had risen to an astonishing 41 per cent since 2019 - the highest rate in the North East.
What’s more, it wasn’t just that poverty had widened over the past five years, it had also deepened. This necessitated a new category in the JRF poverty studies, that of “destitution” - a reality that should shock us all.
Levels of poverty such as this create significant challenges in schools that are complex and deep-rooted, and produce major barriers that children and young people have to overcome if they are to lead lives of choice and opportunity.
Action against child poverty
Endeavour Academies Trust runs two schools in Middlesbrough - Archibald Primary School and Macmillan Academy. With nursery provision at Archibald and post-16 education at Macmillan, we see the full spectrum of how these issues affect young people at all ages.
While schools have an integral role to play in looking to address these complex issues, we recognise that they cannot do so alone and must work in partnership if children are to flourish and thrive.
With this in mind, for the past two years we have been working in partnership with the Reach Foundation in Feltham, West London, on developing our “cradle to career” model of education.
Reach has pioneered an innovative, place-based model of “cradle to career” support that emphasises three key areas:
- Maximising the benefits of being “all-through” from the perspective of pedagogy and curriculum design.
- Prioritising relationships between school and home in order to provide better support.
- Working more closely with the local community to map out and maximise available resources.
Reach has helped us to understand that while schools will always have an integral role to play in shaping young lives, collective action is required from a whole range of different community actors, from public health workers to parents to local charities and potential employers.
To support our work in the community, the trust is going through the process of setting up our own charity, The Endeavour Foundation.
This creates an infrastructure for the work in the community but crucially increases the opportunity to generate income, which will be used to make a difference to the local community. It is also a statement of intent: in setting up a charity, the trust aims to be proactive in enabling investment in the local community.
One of the early priorities of The Endeavour Foundation has been to create cross-sector convening groups to harness the expertise and insight of multiple people and organisations in Middlesbrough, with 40 people from 25 organisations, representing nine different sectors, already on board.
It hasn’t been difficult to persuade people to volunteer to be part of these groups. They see the value in collaborative working and are passionate about Middlesbrough.
Since meeting, we have outlined three key areas to focus on; health inequalities, worsening NEET (not in employment, education or training) data and rising child poverty levels.
Our three work streams of health, families and futures seek to develop a collective impact approach to supporting schools dealing with problems they clearly cannot tackle on their own.
The power of partnerships
One of the important features of collective impact partnerships is that they turn talk into action. While the partnerships have only been in operation for two months, we can collectively identify and adaptively tackle some of the really complex issues.
Early projects include local employers working with teachers and parents to explain local labour market information, the local public health team co-designing the PSHE programme, community-based charities helping to set up 0-2 provision, and the local university supporting the initiative through measuring impact through participatory research.
This willingness to work on real solutions to the problems that we face has been hugely uplifting and underlines that while the scale of the challenge and the data we see is daunting, collaboration is key if we are to change the fortunes of young people in our area.
Phil Latham is chief executive of Endeavour Academies Trust
He will be discussing this topic in more detail at the Schools North East Academies Conference 2025 on 23 January at The Grand Hotel, Gosforth Park, Newcastle. Book your place here.
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