By Lindsay Rose and Jimmy Pickering
The Brilliant Club
‘Education is the beating heart of the infrastructure of opportunity’ – Fiona Hill
A recurring theme of Forum Strategy’s recent CEO Conference was the changing role of public service leadership in today’s complex and fast-moving society. The need for connected and empowered communities to play a role in this leadership is greater than ever. Schools and trusts have the power to not only be the beating heart of opportunity, as Fiona Hill describes, but the beating heart of their community. In a climate where school and trust leaders are, in many ways, increasingly asked to ‘do more with less’, trusts are in a unique position to be able to harness their role as a civic anchor, building community leadership capacity and addressing challenges and opportunities in a participatory and collaborative way.
This article will explore the principles behind effective community engagement, drawing on The Brilliant Club’s approaches and sharing case studies of best practice, before offering some reflections and questions for Forum Strategy members.
The context
The Brilliant Club is an award-winning charity tackling educational inequality. We help young people from all backgrounds access leading universities by inspiring learning, building academic skills, and facilitating community-led systemic change. We work across the UK, bringing together schools, universities, and communities to unlock every child’s brilliance, regardless of where or how they grew up.
“Schools and trusts have the power to not only be the beating heart of opportunity… but the beating heart of their community.”
The stark regional disparities laid out in The Sutton Trust’s recent Opportunity Index highlight the urgent need for more effective community engagement and collaboration. The government priorities set out in the Devolution White Paper ‘Power and Partnership’, and initiatives such as the Pride in Place Programme, present a powerful opportunity for trusts to cement their role at the heart of place-based approaches. Trusts are in a unique position to truly understand and address local challenges and act as long term, sustainable civic anchors, encouraging a shared accountability within their communities.
In a system predominately focused on attainment outcomes, it is often challenging to carve out time to consider how we are engaging with and empowering our communities for long term progress. In the case of parents, however, the evidence is clear that effective engagement has far reaching impacts, not least on student outcomes. It is the families from underserved communities where the barriers are often the greatest, from time pressures and language differences to a lack of trust in the education system, making it even more crucial to embed community engagement into our core education strategy.
There are growing examples of trusts leading the way in positive community engagement, such as Dixons Academies Trust, The Reach Foundation, The Co-operative Academies Trust, and Forum Strategy members such as Batley Multi Academy Trust, HEARTS Academy Trust, North Star Community Trust, Fortis Trust and more Whilst it remains inadequately acknowledged by government accountability frameworks, key to these trusts’ success is taking ownership to embed community engagement into their core strategy, mission and operations and ensuring buy in from trustees and senior leaders.
The Brilliant Club’s approach
Our Parent Power chapters bring together parents and carers in a local area and empower them to become educational changemakers in their communities. They are supported to become higher education experts, and our 16 chapters work with parents from underserved communities where access to higher education is historically low – helping them build relationships, share experiences, and take action to break down local systemic barriers to university.
“Parent Power is rooted in community organising – a values-based methodology for creating social change.”
Parent Power is rooted in community organising – a values-based methodology for creating social change. Community organising focuses on building strong relationships with and between local people, leading to community-led solutions to local issues. In each of our Parent Power chapters, we have a trained Organiser conducting one-to-one conversations with parents and working with them in group meetings to plan campaign actions. Parents are supported to develop the skills, knowledge and confidence to run parent-led campaigns specific to their local contexts, whether this be improving rural connectivity, work experience opportunities or access to mental health support.
A Case Study: Bradford Parent Power, Dixons Academies Trust
Schools as anchor institutions
Each Parent Power chapter has an anchor institution, such as a university, a local authority or a multi-academy trust. The anchor institution for our Bradford Parent Power chapter is Dixons Academies Trust and runs in collaboration with, and with support from, Queens’ College, Cambridge and Go Higher West Yorkshire. The Brilliant Club collaborates with Dixons to act as a bridge between the community and the institution to help build trust and a sense of belonging amongst parents. Bradford Parent Power meetings are held at Dixons schools and are also attended by Dixons staff, ensuring families build a sense of shared accountability with the trust.
Overcoming Barriers
To ensure we work with a broad base of parents, we need to understand and reduce the barriers they face. With Parent Power, we ensure that meetings are held at accessible times for parents (6-8pm for Bradford parents), and that catering is provided for all attendees (usually pizza across all our chapters!). We also provide childcare for all primary age children, with secondary age children often joining meetings with their parents to take in the HE advice and guidance and lend their voice to campaigns. This ensures that Bradford Parent Power includes parents and carers who have not previously been able to engage with efforts to involve them in school life.
“Flexibility in approach is vital to ensure the right approach for every community.”
Building relationships to facilitate action
A relational approach is essential if we are to build the trust needed to facilitate meaningful co-produced action. Bradford Parent Power held its first meeting in July 2024, led by Community Organiser Rahilla Ali who is, like many of our Organisers, a parent herself and can relate to the hopes, dreams and anxieties of other parents in their community. In this short period of time, the chapter has already engaged 157 parents and carers, with Rahilla holding hundreds of relational one-to-one meetings to build trust with parents and listen to what they want to see change. As a result of this approach, the group have secured 18 free tuition places for Year 11 students through University of Bradford; planned a visit for 50 parents, carers and children to Queen’s College, Cambridge to learn about the university; contributed to a consultation with EY Foundation for a 10-school work experience pilot, and founded ‘Learning Legends’, an independent and free tuition group for 20 children on Saturday mornings, which has just received funding from the National Lottery Community Fund.
“Parental engagement is a defining issue facing schools nationwide. Parents ultimately want what’s best for their children, and in Bradford Parent Power they have the opportunity to have their voice heard. It allows schools and parents to work together to break down barriers to education in the community, and we cannot recommend this work highly enough.”
Jim Lauder, Assistant Principal for Civic Responsibility, Dixons Academies Trust
Community organising and framing
A central mantra of community organising is to always place ‘people over programme’. This remains at the heart of the Parent Power model. However, flexibility in approach is vital to ensure the right approach for every community. There are lessons we have learned which can be embedded into practice across all chapters. For example, framing at the start of a Parent Power chapter is vital. This involves both being clear about the parameters within which we are organising (issues pertaining to access to higher education) and providing some fundamental information about university at the start to spark conversations.
Excitingly, we are now building a national movement, with our second national conference held in September 2025. Parents came together from across all our chapters and decided to prioritise work experience and mental health as national campaigns. It has been great to see parent leaders take the step up from local action to working with parents from across the UK to improve their children’s lives. This video captures the sense of community building and energy of the movement.
Final reflections and helpful questions for trust leaders
How much power are you willing to share?
Authentic community engagement means parents and carers’ voices are central to the conversation. Education leaders need to create structures that welcome these voices and allow them to be heard. Leaders also need to truly listen and respond to what communities are saying in a flexible and collaborative way. Within the traditional hierarchical structure of a school or trust, embedding this culture takes great thought, time and courage, so it is worth asking ourselves whether your trust is ready to truly share power. If the answer is unclear, then what is needed to shift this mindset?
“Authentic community engagement means parents and carers’ voices are central to the conversation.”
What story do you want to tell?
“Hope is one of the most precious gifts we can give each other and the people we work with to make change. The way we talk about this is not just to go up to someone and say, “Be hopeful.” We don’t just talk about hope and other values in abstractions. We talk about them in the language of stories because stories are what enable us to communicate these values to one another.” – Marshall Ganz, Public Narrative
Marshall Ganz, senior Harvard lecturer in Leadership, Organising and Civil Society, highlights the role of storytelling in creating strong communities to create a shared purpose, urgency and hope. It needs to connect the story of you (your trust leadership), the story of us (shared community values and experiences) and the story of now (action needed), and this takes time to cultivate. Introducing storytelling to your leadership practice can help to build a relational culture within your trust and provide hope to the communities you work with.
What practical barriers exist and how can you overcome them?
The examples of Dixons Academies Trust and Inspire Partnership highlight that the devil is in the detail, and that effective parental engagement is complex, challenging and time-consuming. For sustainable and long-term change to occur, what steps need to be taken along the way, what evaluation structures need to be in place and what administrative, financial and governance choices may we need to make? Who will we empower in our staff to build capacity across the trust and ensure long term sustainability? Alongside this planning, how will we remain flexible to make sure community voice and relationships remain at the heart of both our strategy and actions?
A final thought
As Forum Strategy outlined at their CEO conference in September, the development of partnership working between schools and trusts and their communities has to be a core focus now and in future. By working in true partnership, we can work together to address some of the biggest challenges facing our sector and society as a whole. Please do contact us if we can support you with this important work.
Further reading
Citizens UK, https://www.citizensuk.org/join/join-us-as-a-school-community/
Arnstein, S, ‘The Ladder of Citizen Participation’, https://organizingengagement.org/models/ladder-of-citizen-participation/
Ganz, M. Public Narrative, https://leadingchangenetwork.org/
Hill, F. There is Nothing for you Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, New York: HarperCollins, 2021
Jeynes, W. ‘The Relationship Between the Parental Expectations Component of Parental Involvement with Students’ Academic Achievement’, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00420859211073892
Pickering, J. ‘Organising with Parents and Carers: Lessons Learned from US East Coast Cities’, https://media.churchillfellowship.org/documents/Pickering_J_Report_2023_Final.pdf
Parentkind Pixl Insights, ‘Partner with Parents for Impact’, https://www.pixl.org.uk/attachments/download.asp?file=10&type=pdf
Useful Forum Strategy Resources:
Trusts at the heart of community engagement in a changing world
Strengthening Communities and Deepening Social Impact at HEARTS Academy Trust
Leadership That Looks Outwards: Community-Enabling Trusts and Schools
Michael Pain’s Speech at Forum Strategy’s National CEO Conference 2025
Trusts in Practice – Being a community focused trust
Being the CEO – A cross sector perspective on community participation
