2006 Big Tick winner

Big Tick winner 2006

L-R Sal Pigott, Alan Duncan and Simon Proffitt

AstraZeneca R&D Charnwood collect their award

Big Tick winner

AstraZeneca R&D Charnwood - Function School Partnership

Merrill Lynch Investing in Young People Award 2006 supported by the Department for Education and Skills

AstraZeneca partners its business functions with local schools. The model provides a sustainable, targeted way of working with schools and has increased engagement and involvement by staff, helping the company achieve 20% of employees involvement with community activity.

Processes

The Function School Partnership is a key element of AstraZeneca’s community strategy, which was launched in 2001 following consultation with external community groups and partners. A dedicated Research and Development (R&D) Charnwood Community Involvement (CCI) Committee of staff steer strategic direction, chaired by a member of the Site Leadership Team (SLT).

Since the launch of the community strategy the company’s education programmes have focussed on initiatives including mentoring, school governors, and science based volunteering. A primary programme sees staff leaving labs each week to help teachers run extra-curricular science clubs. In addition, AstraZeneca is a sponsor and supporter of the national CREST (Creativity in Science and Technology scheme) in collaboration with the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Following a review of the programmes, it was recognised that the programmes were delivering immediate value to improving literacy, providing extended learning in science and targeting areas of real community need. However it was decided that if the company was going to achieve real impact and engagement, a more embedded approach across the business would be required.

In consultation with the SLT, the CCI committee responded and ‘Function School Partnership’ was developed – a framework where business functions partner local schools and partnership is sponsored by individual SLT members as Function Heads.

To launch Function School Partnership the CCI Committee recommended partner schools to the Site Leadership Team, proposing schools that R&D Charnwood had worked with and had prior relations with. The company’s science-based functions partnered with local secondary schools where they could add value in the sciences and primary schools with operations-based functions.

The benefits of the Function School Partnership are that it:

  • Increases ownership and moves activity away from PR department
  • Increased engagement and involvement by staff
  • Increases awareness and endorsement by senior managers
  • Provides a more sustainable, targeted way of working with schools.

Impact

  • Partnership activity in 8 local schools, covering a pupil population over 4,500
  • A recent survey confirmed that of those involved in community activity 74% knew skills could be used in performance review and over half actually had community based learning and development objectives documented.
  • Externally 144 community stories including 55 photos have appeared in the local media since launching our partnership with schools. The PR value of this coverage is calculated at around 27,000 (based on current mono advertising rates).
  • All teacher feedback suggests AstraZeneca is inspiring children and helping renew or encourage an increased interest in science and science lessons.
  • The programme has leveraged other benefits for the schools. Following involvement with Cobden School, a volunteer extended commitment by becoming a School Governor – a vacancy the school had struggled to fill through traditional routes.
  • AstraZeneca’s £20K donation to support partner De Lisle in its bid for specialist science status helped leverage additional support from other science-based companies locally and successful matched funding.

See also