Challenging educational and social disadvantage in Yorkshire
Posted 11th February 2025
This is the wider transcript of information we shared with Tes for this article.
Our mission is to challenge educational and social disadvantage in the North. In the communities we support, we understand that poverty is rife, and it’s the most powerful lever to pull in tackling inequality. There are more children (nationally over 100,000 more in 2023 than 2022) living in poverty, but this number is not evenly spread. It’s always the poorest, especially in the North, who are disproportionately impacted. It is no coincidence that children living in the poorest communities in Yorkshire are subject to some of the highest rates of youth violence in England (CoTN youth violence report 2024). The link is clear and borne out time and again by the research. And particularly since the decimation of local services, schools in the communities with the highest level of challenge have become the fourth emergency service by stealth.
For us at Dixons, the sheer complexity of the schools we run is the privilege and the challenge of working in the communities we serve.
54% of schools in Yorkshire and Humber are academies. We believe in the power of a uniting governance structure as an enabler for schools to improve and serve communities: this is best achieved in the form of school trusts. We also believe that the debate has been unhelpfully polarising: academies and local authorities – we are all schools, we are all educators, we are all seeking to serve young people.
Making an impact: our work at Dixons
The challenge of recruiting and retaining teachers is as significant in Yorkshire as it is nationally. For trusts, building a resilient workforce and a pipeline of new educators is a meaningful priority. That is why we have sought to innovate, introducing our nine-day fortnight for all teachers, while they retain the same salary, and why several years ago we made the move to ensure every colleague at Dixons has a coach. Without innovations like these, education will be left behind as a profession, especially in Yorkshire, which has historically suffered from “brain drain”.
We have worked closely with Mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, with positive impact for students. There are significant opportunities for mayors across regions to use their convening powers to challenge educational and social disadvantage.
We urgently need to rebuild the resilience of local services: last year we made a call on government to ensure three things – ensure families can advocate for themselves on local services; mandate all areas to hold convening partnerships, led and driven by people within the community, bringing together the public sector agencies that support young people; and create a joint workforce plan between local services, enabling multi-disciplinary work to happen smoothly, effectively and with efficiency that isn’t cruelly reductive to what the price is today. We stand by these calls to action.
We have been making meaningful leaps forward in workforce design and are partnering with sector leading organisations to understand and trial how emerging technology can shift the paradigm in which we are all currently working. We are actively seeking to responsibly challenge received wisdom and are committed to sharing our findings with the sector, as part of our moral duty.
One part of this has been our well-publicised nine-day fortnight pilot. We are partnering with Ambition Institute and the EIF on evaluation and will share more towards the end of this year.
Ultimately, like all cultural shifts, this work comes through deep, intentional design. We have started to take some concrete, innovative, and honestly experimental steps in our ongoing work towards self-organisation and self-management. We talk about our organisation in three ways:
In organisational health: we have been moving away from executive job titles – moving away from status, the negative impacts of ego, and the fear of not knowing an answer – and towards deferring to the expertise of others.
In organisational design: we have been moving away hierarchy – pushing power to the most impactful and appropriate level, working on systems processes and essential professional development to enable this.
And in organisational agility: we have been developing as leaders, working on how to get great outcomes by setting the appropriate context, rather than by trying to control. Providing the insight and understanding to enable sound decisions and actions, and continuing the sector leading leadership development which has offered so many CEOs and principals to the sector.
All of our work is about getting the right people in the right room working on the right thing at the right time. All of our work is in service to our mission.
Our future plans include a deeper highlighting of the essential relationships we hold with the communities we serve. Core to this is our belief in clarity: enabling families to choose us. We support our communities to advocate for themselves, and we support families and colleagues to choose Dixons by being unrelentingly clear on what we are here to do: within our communities, we work together to establish joyful, rigorous, high performing schools and colleges, which maximise attainment, value diversity, develop character and build cultural capital. Our mission is to challenge social and educational disadvantage in the North and we do that through explicitly accelerating student outcomes.