With the Spring Term wrapped up and schools across England and Wales taking a well-deserved break, we’re thrilled to reflect on another successful few months in our 125,000 challenge.
Through our work with our delightful corporate partners, we’re aiming to appoint enough of their employees into governance roles to support the education of 125,000 children across the academic year 2022-23. You can follow the live progress of the challenge on our corporate pages.
How is the challenge looking?
At the end of March 2023, we have reached 192 successful appointments via our corporate partners. These volunteers are now serving in 185 different schools across 81 different Local Authorities and are collectively having an impact on the education of 100,622 pupils within these schools.
With a full summer term of the challenge remaining, we’re delighted to be over 80% of the way to our target. Such fantastic progress is testament to our strong relationships with corporate partners and their employees’ desire to volunteer to support younger generations.
These volunteers have been placed all across England and Wales, with volunteers joining schools from Bromley to Bristol, Croydon to Calderdale, and Suffolk to Swansea among many others.
What we have we been up to with our corporate partners?
Through January to March we’ve held over 15 information sessions across our partners, supported their internal recruitment campaigns and came together to celebrate their impact on National School Governor Awareness Day. Between the 1st January and 31st March 2023 the charity saw 149 applications from these partners – showing that even with all the successes we’re having the appetite to get involved is not dimming.
We’ve launched a new partnership and agreed relationships with two further partners to target successful school governor appointments in specific parts of the country. These will be launching in the summer term which will contribute to the final few months of the challenge which runs to the end of July.
How is the final term looking for the challenge?
We’re confident we will significantly exceed our initial target of impacting a collective 125,000 students by the end of the summer term.
We currently have over 150 further volunteers under consideration at, or in direct conversations with, schools across England and Wales, meaning we’re in an excellent position to bring the challenge home and create even bigger collective impact.
A huge thank you as ever to all of our corporate partners who sit at the heart of the work we do as a charity.
How can you get involved?
If you’re interested in learning more about how your organisation can get involved with the challenge in the months ahead, please reach out to Julie Thiberg, Head of Charity Development, at [email protected] or William Durham, Head of Impact and Corporate Partnerships, at [email protected].