Multi-award-winning Social Enterprise
Producing Outstanding Results
Call us on 03300 109919
ABOUT US
What if everyone felt they could learn whatever they needed to pursue their dreams?
Our Vision
We want to live in a world where everyone finds their talent and has opportunity to develop it for the benefit of themselves, their family and their community.
Our Mission
We help people develop confidence in themselves as learners, develop academic skills and enhance resilience to change.
This video explainer was designed and made by the children at Peak Tuition Academy with support from film-makers in our wider community.
Our Values
Always learning: It's the journey that's important to us. We build a culture of high performance through continually learning from our experiences. We invest in experiences and ideas for our communities to broaden horizons and raise aspirations.
Trusted: We develop trust by co-designing our services with our communities through authentic participatory decision making. We are dependable, listen to our communities and encourage people to pursue their passions. We actively support people in our communities lead activities and service.
Caring: We build development relationships with people across the neighborhoods we work as part of a longer term commitment. We want people in our communities to feel understood and supported.
Challenging and supportive: We have high expectations of those we work with, helping people from our community develop skills to become active participants in our shared growth. This includes empowering people, navigating them through difficult situations, holding them to account and celebrating successes.
Willing to take risks: We know the initial work we do with communities and pilot projects, are often too risky for funders. So, we generate sustainable income through our education provision to find what works and then seek funding to roll it out.
Why we set up.
We're passionate about progress. With lived experience of the disadvantage we seek to address, we dedicate our very best efforts to every community we work with.
We started in Keighley in 2017 and started working on the Scholemoor estate in 2018, having been asked by local residents to offer services.
We use our skills, tools and techniques to help local people find and pursue their passions. We operate from a dedicated facility in Bradford and deliver remove provision in local communities.
What we mean by co-design
In a nutshell
We employ co-design as a pervasive method to deliberately democratise our service through a transformative process that enables equitable power structures amongst key stakeholders.
What we mean by pervasive
We view co-design as pervasive because it is a central part of our thinking in everything we do. We do not employ human centered design because we have lived experience of how easily that can be corrupted to become provider led. Instead we have created a climate of learning where our day to day participants (staff, volunteers, local community members, children, parents) decide whether we are heading in the direction they want in a way that is acceptable to them. It is both the means and the ends that we co-design.
What we mean by methods
We employ specialist techniques to nurture skills, attitudes and behaviours that enable our exceptionally productive, inclusive and purposeful climate of learning. However, creating a climate of learning where everyone contributes isn't enough for our community because sometimes, the children we work with feel peer influences are more important than their own judgements. So we facilitate deliberate and purposeful consultation to explore, verify and validate decision making. This consultation is continuous and forms part of our continuous improvement cycle and evolving approach to building our community of practice. Our methods are centered on utilising strong developmental relationships. So, we take time to get to know people. We don't use sanctions and don't have a zero tolerance policy.
What we mean by democratise
Democratisation for our community is about everyone having real choices about where we go and how we get there. As a result we have a wealth of ideas and experiences from our vibrant and diverse community that we value and celebrate whenever possible. We are particularly sensitive to people who have barriers to taking part in design. So, to build conditions for their participation and embed participation and lived experience in our everyday practice; we go to great lengths to hire professionals with lived experience of the challenges they face. Sometimes people direct those professionals on both means and ends. Sometimes, people place trust in them to lead toward specific, personal or academic goals they have chosen, and on that journey to empower and equip them to lead themselves. We usually reach consensus, as a community, through dialogue but sometimes it requires more in depth work. Our pervasive methods for achieving democratization can sometimes be uncomfortable because we often need to flex, rapidly reconfiguring very limited tangible resources to meet changing needs. With income uncertainty (short term funding and trading on the open market) we employ highly developed managerial skills to develop our assets and infrastructure to support the goal attainment objectives of our communities.
What we mean by equitable power structures
Equitable power means that we build conditions for design work to take place so that we understand the strengths and capacities of our community, what local people need to be included and stay included. We work holistically with families to ensure that there is open, transparent communication and everyone has equal opportunity to influence what we do and how we do it. Our participants (parents, children, volunteers) use clear structures (our consultation framework) to hold each other to account . Where we fail we learn quickly so that we can improve. We have clear methods for ensuring equitable power sharing between professionals hired to facilitate and people with lived experience of the challenges our communities face. Our mindset is that everyone in our community is capable so if people face barriers we work hard to overcome them together. Subsequently, over the past 18 months, we have launched five additional co-designed services on a shoe-string budget. These include various youth clubs, a food provision and a chartable giving function. Nobody in our community is short of the equipment they need to participate, hunger or nutrition are not barriers to participation and everyone has access to personalised support to develop their contributions towards goals they have chosen.
