When we visited the Mansfield Getting School Ready project in April 2026, we met a group of people who are genuinely invested. A combination of lived experience and professional commitment runs through the whole Getting School Ready steering group. Something else that stood out to us is who is holding it together. Most backbone organisations in early years work are charities or community organisations. This one is a university. 

The Getting School Ready project in Mansfield sits within Nottingham Trent University's civic and widening participation work. It is led day-to-day by Luke Parmenter, Collective Impact Manager] with a strategic link to NTU from Kimberly Simms, Head of Widening Access and Community Engagement, whose role involves securing funding and staffing for the team and connecting the project into the broader university. The steering group is chaired by David Woolley, Director of Student and Community Engagement, signalling that this is not a peripheral research project but something the university has committed to institutionally.

That commitment shows up in practical ways too. NTU brings more than coordination. It deploys university resources directly into Mansfield Getting School Ready: widening access outreach work and research and evaluation capacity that most community partnerships cannot access. One team member works out of family hub buildings rather than NTU offices, to understand barriers to service access from the inside and bring that learning back to the partnership.

The challenge Mansfield Getting School Ready is trying to solve

Mansfield sits in the top 20% most deprived areas nationally. The headteacher on the steering group told us that in a recent intake of 16 children, 11 were not toilet trained, seven were very difficult to understand, and nearly half arrived with communication and language below expected levels. She also told us that her early years team had worked with those children and got GLD scores from 48% up to 77% by the end of the year. This is not a story about low expectations. It is a story about what happens when children arrive without the foundations they need, and what it takes to change that before they ever reach the school gate.

The collaboration is trying to shift those conditions upstream. Its goal is to increase the proportion of children in Mansfield achieving a Good Level of Development, using a collective impact approach that brings schools, family hubs, health, the local authority, and community members around a shared agenda.

The steering group reflects that same mix of professional expertise and personal investment. An early years specialist teacher from the county council has worked in Mansfield for years and talks about wanting to make things better for families she has watched struggle through the same transitions repeatedly. The family hub service manager came to the project through covering a colleague, then stayed because she saw the Mansfield work could become a genuine test-and-learn space for the county's wider Best Start in Life ambitions. An educational psychologist has been alongside since the original Getting School Ready Oak Tree pilot. And a parent representative, who first got involved over a cup of tea at school, now chairs community events, has spoken to a room of 100 educational psychologists, and brings families into spaces where professionals rarely hear from them.

What the steering group meeting showed us

When we observed the April steering group, what struck us was less the content of the agenda than the way it ran. At the start, people were relatively cautious. By the end, several members had volunteered to join new working groups and group began connecting the dots between the many initiatives from multiple services. The one-to-ones Luke had done with steering group members in the prior weeks seemed to have mattered. People felt heard before they arrived. That kind of relational groundwork is easy to overlook because it’s invisible on any agenda, but it is what makes the discussion itself possible. When people trust the space, they take risks. When they take risks, things actually start changing. 

The group is candid about being early in this journey. There is not yet a joint delivery plan with committed activities across all partners. The theory of change still feels abstract to some members. Partners are stretched and cannot give more than they already are. These are not failures. They are what early-stage systems work looks like when people are being honest about it.

What this raises

The civic university tradition is not new, but NTU's version of it, embedded at neighbourhood level, doing operational backbone work, with senior leadership visibly behind it, is rare. What seems to make it work in Mansfield is the combination of its strong convening power, neutrality and the additional resources and skills it can bring to the table. The steering group members are clear about what the university's neutrality makes possible. NTU has no service to protect and no contract to win. As one member put it, ‘NTU is invested in the outcomes but has no investment in the delivery.’ That means it can keep the focus on what the community needs, rather than on what any single partner is there to deliver. But it is also not just convening. It brings capacity the partnership could not otherwise access.

The sustainability question hangs over this work, as it does everywhere. The project has funding to 2027. The shared data dashboard NTU is developing is designed partly as a legacy piece of infrastructure, one that would finally give partners postcode-level data on which children they are and are not reaching. But when we asked the steering group what success would look like in ten years, nobody reached for a dashboard. They talked about parents who feel confident, children who arrive at school able to communicate their needs, and a Mansfield where professionals know each other well enough to make a phone call rather than send a referral.

That is the work. NTU is helping to create the conditions for it. The rest depends on what the partnership builds while that support is still there, and whether the support can be extended long enough for the partnership to bear its fruits.