Teach First
Teach First places high performing graduates and career-changers on a two-year leadership and teacher training programme in challenging schools. It is the UK’s largest graduate employer. The organisation aims to create thriving schools, delivering a fair education with great teachers, brilliant leaders and the right policy.
The context:
• In 2013, Teach First’s retention of trainee teachers was at 80%. This was over 10% below other, cheaper, teacher training routes.
Our approach:
• Between 2013 and 2019, we coached over 500 of the graduates who were at risk of leaving the two-year programme in our resilience building methodology. We provided 6 sessions of coaching tailored to each individual’s circumstance to provide bespoke support.
• We have trained, and continue to supervise, a group of Teach First staff, to support them to model our resilience-building methodology, and to make the approach sustainable across the organisation.
• We have worked with Teach First to create an online learning course, which is accessible to all of their trainee teachers and staff. This learning course provides our wellbeing content in the form of videos, online activities, and further ‘real life’ activities to build behaviour change.
Our impact:
• Over 3 years, we boosted the organisation’s retention of trainee teachers on the programme and in schools from 80% to 92%.
“We have found the quality of the training that The People Project provide to be perfectly pitched, bringing together theory with practical solutions and ideas that people can try immediately.”
The Cambridge Building Society
The Cambridge has an excellent reputation for being trusted, customer-focused, valuing its people and having a strong commitment to the local community. It is currently undergoing a transformation to become a ‘Challenger Building Society’: becoming more innovative, creative and adaptable.
The context:
The Cambridge wanted its manager and director team to confidently support their staff to develop a ‘Challenger Mindset’ where people felt resilient, innovative and adaptable.
Alongside this, The Cambridge was over-hauling its rigid performance management system; it wanted its managers to develop a flexible, coaching-style of performance management.
Our approach:
We developed a two day ‘Coaching for Performance’ programme – supporting mangers and directors to understand the emotional underpinning of high performance, and enabling them to use strengths-based coaching strategies to create culture change.
We supported managers and directors to use flexible coaching approaches with their teams, rather than relying on the previous process-heavy performance management system.
All managers and directors had a follow-up coaching session with us, to ensure that they were able to embed their learning in their management practice.
We trained the People team at The Cambridge in our ‘Coaching for Performance’ approach - they are now able to train new managers, and they run a working group to support ongoing adherence and innovation.
Our impact:
95% of managers and directors rated the quality of training and facilitation as ‘excellent’.
The Cambridge is using the ‘Coaching for Performance’ approach to underpin its new approach to performance management.
“Being able to recognise threat, drive and recovery in my team has been a game changer. This has been such a positive training experience for me.”