Essex Academies Enterprise Trust
Place worked with the Essex Academies Enterprise Trust on this major project to turn three schools with differing performance levels into three Academies. In this instance, one of the existing schools also became the sponsor for the Trust. This complex project required many of our core skills, most notably our work to bring all project elements together into a standard delivery model, and our stakeholder engagement activity across three separate communities. Place acted as the central point for all organisations involved in the project and kept the focus firmly on the desired outcome throughout all stages of Feasibility and Implementation.


A London Borough
We were recently engaged by a London Borough to design an alternative education setting for more than 165 children and young people aged 14 to 16. All of the young people had a history of Social Service intervention, child protection, youth offending, SEN/EBD or being known to the Attendance Service. With the ultimate aim being to re-engage individual students, we designed a more vocational curriculum and worked with a range of agencies to identify specific education strategies, including professional mentoring and introducing learners to employers. Following this work, the project received an ‘Outstanding’ grade in its first Ofsted inspection.


Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council
Here we carried out extensive ongoing community engagement work over four years as part of a Building Schools for the Future programme. This involved taking the community through a process of consultation in a way which was suitable for their individual situations, including more than 14,000 pupils and a further 4,000 individuals from a wider audience group. The student engagement element of this project was entered for an award in recognition of the successful outcome achieved.


Building Schools for the Future Programme, Essex
Place managed the ICT governance structure for the Building Schools for the Future programme in Essex. Visioning, project scope and specification for the Managed Service were all devised through an extensive programme of engagement with stakeholders, which was required in order to ensure ‘ownership’ of the ICT Managed Service across the schools. Place also delivered the feasibility, affordability, sustainability planning and strategic integration of the ICT Managed Service between education and corporate IT services – as well as the ICT procurement engagement, timetabling, documentation, evaluation toolkits and quality assurance models.


Manchester City Council
Place has been working with Manchester City Council as its Education Transformation Partner since 2004. Part of this includes planning and implementing a new curriculum across all of its seven Academies and helping them to work together in partnership to provide the best possible educational resources for students in Manchester. This complex project required many of our core skills, including facilitation and communication in order to bring all of the stakeholders together. We acted as the central point for everyone involved in the project, keeping the focus firmly on the desired outcomes throughout all stages of the process.

Alongside Manchester City Council, we also identified and ‘recruited’ a number of blue chip private sector organisations to ‘sponsor’ education across the City. With our support these companies are now actively engaged in rolling out programmes and initiatives to ensure that young people in Manchester gain the necessary skills and experience at school in order for them to be able to secure employment in the key growth areas of the City.