Over the project the team has:
- Produced six-monthly reports reviewed by the Pilots, the Steering Group, and the AEC Trust Board.
- Regularly communicated with a nominated lead for the project from each pilot participant, who acted as the day-to-day contact for the LocalED team. The Isos Partnership sought to to engage with local areas monthly, and also brought all local areas involved in pilots together on a six-monthly basis to reflect on progress project-wide.
- Asked local areas to participate in the external evaluation of the pilots at regular points during the two years, including practice-sharing sessions at the end of years one and two.
- Released an external evaluation report was produced at the end of year 1.
Forging Local Coherence: LocalED final project evaluation
Our nine pilots, four covering ways to tackle pupil absence, four exploring new approaches to professional accountability and one delving into how a combined authority can support school improvement, have been independently evaluated by Professor Toby Greany and Dr Susan Cousin from the University of Nottingham.
Their findings have been released in a new ‘Forging Local Coherence: LocalEd project evaluation report‘ and were shared with delegates at the January 2025 ‘Locality working in education’ conference.
The overarching question for the evaluation was: What are we learning about leading successful locality working? The report focuses on the synthesis of findings relating to this overarching question, with detailed findings on each pilot area available.
The report found that all localities have made significant progress in relation to their chosen ‘common cause’, stating that local leaders across England – and, potentially, more widely – can learn from the work outlined in the pilots.
To download the full evaluation report, click here.
Read our news story about January’s conference here.
