Business Class: An Evaluation

Business Class: An Evaluation looks at the strength of the Business Class model and its impact on participating schools and businesses in the North West, where the model was conceived and developed. The aim of the research was to understand the impact of the model's targeted, sustainable and holistic approach to education/employer partnerships and to ascertain where it could be developed more fully to provide even greater support to a broader range of schools and organisations.

Participating Schools and Businesses believed the following improvements had been assisted by the programme:

•  38% improvement in academic achievement for students
•  Students’ employability increased by 40%
•  Leadership and governance improved by 25%
•  Progress with wider goals  - well over 30%
• Optimism about the sustainability of the partnership increased by 57% and 32% for schools and businesses respectively

In addition the results show that:

• School-centred partnerships that are not one-dimensional but demonstrate depth and breadth of engagement from business are more likely to have a greater impact
• The programme’s unique cluster approach, grouping together schools and businesses to pool resources and share ideas rather than relying purely on individual partnerships, helps to generate greater impact for participating schools
•  Business Class is perceived as strongly assisting businesses in delivering their CSR objectives, businesses involved in the programme reported an improvement in meeting their CSR objectives by 23%
• The Business Class approach utilizing both research and testing provides a robust model and follows best practice in programme design

The evidence demonstrates that Business Class is improving educational attainment, employability and school governance and its cluster approach, grouping together partners in specific localities, is enabling effective sharing of best practice to generate greater impact. The research provides powerful impetus for our plans to develop Business Class. We are committed to rolling out the programme to embrace more schools and communities, with a target of 500 partnerships by 2014.