Working with Boroughs from the Beginning

Even since it's inception, Tales Toolkit was working closely with local council partners. We ran our very first trials in Rochdale and not long later, their close neighbour Stockport joined us. The support of these boroughs allowed us to really test the mettle of our training programme.

Our Pals at Oxfordshire

Paula Lochrie, a long-standing member of the School Improvement team, has been an advocate for us for many years now. She fights for the budget to keep her settings on board with us and we couldn't be more grateful for her continued faith in us. Paula also supported us in multiple other projects, including testimonials for funding bids and finding settings for our pilot study with the EEF - read more about that here. Paula has been instrumental in helping us to reach more children with the power storytelling in her region.

The Latest Council Partner

St Helens is a more recent partner with us, but we are already into our second year with them and a second round of funding for even more settings! They are seeing the benefits and the teachers love it too.

Stronger Practice Hubs

Through our pilot study with the EEF, we connected with 4 regions of the UK through the Early Years Stronger Practice Hubs based in Kent, Birmingham, Thames Valley and Bristol. Since then, we have had continued interest from these areas to maintain funding support, in particular Kent, who have chosen to role out Tales Toolkit for Childminders in the area.

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How we work with Local Authorities

Budgets are a complicated business, so we take care working with local authorities to ensure the best methods for delivering Tales Toolkit. If there is a central budget you know you have to work with or we need to negotiate with you and the powers-that-be to come up with the most viable option, we're more than happy to have those conversations. The most important thing for us is that we reach as many children as we can and we hope you agree!

Ongoing Support

Some of our borough partners are very hands-off, once funding has been sussed out, leaving it to the settings to come to us if they ever need support. We are happy to provide support to any setting who comes to us with questions, so that's absolutely fine.

If you'd rather have more of an ongoing process in place, then we can talk about what you think will work best for your team. For example, one borough we work with decided they wanted to have regular online meetings for their settings and a WhatsApp group to chat with each other.

Working Together on Other Projects

In the past, we have asked for the support of our borough partners in the formulation of funding bids and research projects. All these endeavours are with the single goal of supporting the children and practitioners - sometimes they may be specific to the area of your borough too.

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What now?

If you'd like to chat more with us about how we work with local authorities, please get in touch. And why not take a look around the members area by creating a free account to see what's what?