About Right to Succeed

Right to Succeed’s mission is to support communities affected by poverty to collectively improve the future for children and young people. We believe every child deserves the right to succeed, no matter where they live. Our vision is that the places we work become communities where children and young people thrive, throughout childhood and into adulthood.

We believe that no single organisation can solve the problem of inequity on their own – but together we can. 

We bring together the community, and all that serve it, to transform children's outcomes because we believe every child deserves the right to succeed, no matter where they live. We do this in two ways:

• Working across a whole district or local authority to overcome a thematic educational issue (currently inclusion, literacy and NEET prevention).         

• Driving whole-system improvement in a small, defined community (typically the size of a ward), to create cradle to career improvements in outcomes for children and young people.                                                                                               

We build on global best practice, and believe there are three key strategic pillars required to deliver effective place-based projects:

• Create and maintain the collective conditions required for effective place-based change                                                                                                             

•  Focus all partners on developing capability and well-being in children and young people.

• Deliver great implementation of intervention/change using a four-stage implementation process.

We now have over five years’ experience supporting young people to fulfil their potential and overcome inequity. 

We have developed significantly since our origins in 2015, when we launched our first pilot programme in Blackpool. The town was the most disadvantaged community in the country, according to the indices of multiple deprivation, and it also had one of the highest rates of school exclusion. Through our project there, we helped schools diagnose the needs of their most at-risk children, and found that behavioural issues correlated with significant well-being needs, and that 80% of at-risk children had undiagnosed speech, language and communication (SLC) needs. Schools had previously been treating the behavioural issues with disciplinary measures alone, and had provided no support for well-being or SLC.

Wider impact in Blackpool:

• Five years on, Blackpool is changing its commissioning behaviour around exclusion, directing funds to preventing exclusion through a town-wide approach to trauma and literacy. 

• The town has just developed a 10-year strategy for education, building on the learning of the past five years.

• Insight is now driving better decision-making, with the town becoming more analytical in understanding child development (before working with Right to Succeed, schools were completing child development measures with 32% of children, and are now completing these with 94% of children). 

• We supported the commissioning and set-up of the Education Endowment Fund (EEF) Research School in Blackpool and now partner with it to champion great implementation of interventions. 

• All projects in the Blackpool Opportunity Area (OA) now require an implementation model. 

• Using a survey developed with Alex Quigley at the EEF, all secondary staff in Blackpool were surveyed at the start of the Literacy programme and the end of the first year, to elicit their views on literacy development. Headline results are: 

Year-on-year, our organisation grew alongside the demand for our programmes. Last year in particular, we saw a huge demand for rapid scale-up of our community programmes, particularly with the political focus on levelling up and supporting communities to recover in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.