Institutions changing how they think about place

Local authorities and schools engaging in institution-led culture change in places

This post is part of an ongoing series applying our taxonomy of place-based change to practice. The examples here are drawn from real UK organisations and the work of many others; our analysis is exploratory and the evidence base varies significantly across cases. We are happy to be corrected about any of our assumptions. Pieces looking at backbone models, and innovation led change can be found on our site. These are all part of what we define as category 3 place-based work: rebalancing civil society and state relations.

Introduction

Institutional culture change is something that is frequently claimed but is hard to rigorously evidence outcomes in place-based work. Organisations describe themselves as having changed how they relate to communities. And then, often, nothing much changes, or what changes does not last. The reason for wanting to change is clear though, and that is a recognition that if communities are going to assert their power, work as a partner with the state and not be ‘done-to’, then the institutions with power around them need to change how they work too – they have to give up power, work collaboratively, and be receptive to other kinds of place-based work being valuable.

In our taxonomy of place-based change, this pattern of practice is concerned with the process by which state institutions (schools, health services, local authorities, police) shift their basic assumptions about their relationship with the communities they serve. The endpoint is institutional culture change that is durable, that survives leadership turnover, and that produces different services for everyone who uses and works with the institution. The causal chain required to get there is clear. It is also long, and it is not the same thing as delivering a training programme.

The distinction between the activities and the pattern of change is the organising idea of this piece. We draw on four UK cases to explore what the pattern looks like when it is operating, what distinguishes the organisations that have reached genuine structural embedding from those that are still in earlier phases, and what this means for how we evaluate and consider this kind of work.

How institutional culture change works

We do not treat training programmes, workforce development events, or even multi-year professional development as the mechanism of change. They are activities. The mechanism operates when sustained, embedded, relational change processes shift how individual professionals work and when that individual change accumulates, through team norms and structural adjustments, into institutional culture change that persists beyond any single programme or person.

The implementation science evidence is explicit on this point (Fixsen et al., 2005): professional development events do not change practice. What changes practice is sustained, embedded engagement (coaching, reflective supervision, peer learning communities, structural feedback loops) over years, not months. And what changes institutional culture is not that engagement alone, but the structural changes it enables: revised hiring criteria, changed performance frameworks, governance reforms that embed community voice in decision-making. Edgar Schein’s (2010) model of culture change distinguishes between espoused values (what organisations say) and basic assumptions (what they actually do when no one is watching). The pattern is only operating when the latter is shifting.

This gives us a precise diagnostic question for any piece of work claiming to be working on this pattern of place-based practice: have any institutional decisions been reversed specifically because of work with the community, at a level that cost the institution something? If not, the work is still in the early phases, and calling it culture change is premature.

Examples in local government: Wigan and Test Valley

The Wigan Deal, launched in 2012 as a direct response to austerity, is the strongest available UK case of a local authority reaching the later phases of this pattern: the culture change has embedded in institutional processes sufficiently to survive leadership change and to reproduce itself without the original programme architects.

What distinguished Wigan from a communications exercise was the professional development architecture: sustained, structured and embedded across the whole council over multiple years, involving reflective practice, changed supervision culture, and structural changes to how the council measured performance and managed its relationship with residents. The evidence documents improvements in staff morale, resident trust and service innovation over time.

In 2024, Wigan council and partners launched Progress with Unity, a ten-year strategy explicitly framed as a movement for change across the borough, not a council initiative. This represents a shift at basic assumptions level: the institution has changed its model of what a council is for, and that change is now sufficiently embedded to extend beyond the council’s own direct responsibilities. This is Fixsen et al.’s (2005) full implementation stage, where the new practice is reproduced through institutional process rather than individual effort.

Test Valley Borough Council, and their excellent work with Collaborate CIC (who have probably done the most to explore these questions in the UK), offers a detailed UK account of a local authority deliberately rebuilding its institutional culture from the inside over more than a decade. This was not driven by austerity as an external forcing condition, but as a deliberate choice to become what it describes as a “community council”. The activities are distinctive: council values and behaviours were co-created through 50 senior managers across all services, not written by a leadership team and cascaded down. The community councillor role definition, which now begins with community facilitation rather than formal decision-making, was developed with participation from all councillors and agreed by full council.

An LGA Corporate Peer Challenge of October 2025 rated Test Valley in the highest category across systems leadership, place-based working, and organisational development, noting a “strong strategic golden thread” as “part of the council’s DNA”. This peer opinion is consistent with a council approaching the later phases of this work.

Our research insists on considering the ambient social ecology of a place, and Test Valley is very different to Wigan. We must consider what these two (and other) cases both tell us but also accept that they had to both work with the realities of their place. There are always similarities and differences in this work.

What school institutions require: Reach Foundation and PLACE

The Reach Foundation’s training work is the UK’s clearest illustration of the difference between professional development as an activity and professional development as the initiating condition for this pattern of place based work. The distinction is not in the content but in the architecture: sustained professional learning communities, not one-off events; coaching and structured reflection over years, not cascade from a training day.

Reach works with clusters of school leaders to redesign the relationships between schools, families and community support services. What it builds over time, through coaching, through peer learning, through supported structural change, is the conditions under which an institution sustains changed practice without Reach in the room. Schools that engage fully with the model go on to redesign parental engagement policies, attendance frameworks and community liaison structures: the structural changes that distinguish moving from ambition to do this, to starting to embed it. Schein’s language applies precisely: the work targets basic assumptions about what is possible in a school’s relationship with its community, not merely espoused values about engagement. The school itself must the take on what Reach initiates for it to be truly sustained.

PLACE (People, Learning and Community Engagement) is the Tees Valley Education MAT’s approach to operating as an institution embedded in community rather than acting upon it. It illustrates this pattern of place-based work in two related but distinct ways: as internal institutional culture change within the MAT, and as workforce development with the wider education sector. Sean Harris from Tees Valley Education recently spoke to us on our podcast, and it’s worth listening to how that change came about.

What distinguishes PLACE as an example of this pattern is how it began. Rather than moving quickly to designing interventions, the MAT spent considerable time interrogating its own mental models of poverty and disadvantage, testing assumptions held widely across the education sector: that low income equates to low aspiration; that families need to make better choices; that schools are the primary solution. Each assumption was challenged by research and by the voices of children and families. This process of deliberate disconfirmation (testing professional assumptions against evidence and community voice before designing any programme) is the beginning of the pattern working. It produced a basic assumption change visible in institutional language: the MAT actively resists positioning schools as the “beating heart” of communities, recognising that framing schools as isolated solutions overstates their reach and understates the complexity of structural disadvantage.

The structural embedding that followed (PLACE as a directorate within the MAT, with a published theory of change and an independent evaluation by ImpactEd in progress) represents the next phase of this pattern: the institution has changed its architecture to sustain the changed approach beyond the individuals who initiated it.

PLACE also matters as an analytical case because it operates in one of England’s most deprived educational contexts: almost 70% of children eligible for free school meals across Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees and Redcar & Cleveland. This pattern of place-based change is sometimes assumed to be easier in less constrained environments. PLACE shows that the pattern can initiate in contexts of deep structural disadvantage. But the balancing forces that can stop the work achieving change are stronger there (Ofsted pressure, budget constraint, staff turnover) and the risk of reversion is correspondingly higher without structural protection for the changed practice.

What these cases show collectively

Taken together, the four cases reinforce three things that matter for practice and for evaluation.

1. The pattern operates across institutional types. Wigan and Test Valley show it in local government; Reach and PLACE show it in education. The causal chain (sustained professional engagement → individual practice change → team norms → structural embedding → basic assumption change) is consistent across contexts. What varies is the specific activities, the timescale, and the structural barriers to be addressed.

2. The distinction between the middle phases of this pattern and the more embedded phases matters enormously for evaluation. Wigan is the only case here that has clearly reached later phases: structural embedding that survives leadership change. Test Valley is approaching it. Reach Foundation and PLACE are demonstrably in early to middle phases (but there may well be schools going further that we do not know about). Evaluations that treat any institutional development programme as evidence of culture change risk over-claiming; the question is always whether the change would survive if the external partner or instigating leader withdrew tomorrow.

3. The activity/pattern distinction is not pedantic. A local authority that funds a 12-month workforce development programme and expects institutional culture change has misunderstood the timescale and the mechanism of change. All four examples show that the pattern requires sustained relationship, structural change, and time.

The evidence base, and its limits

The evidence base for this work is real but genuinely constrained. Fixsen et al.’s (2005) synthesis of implementation science provides the foundational evidence that sustained, embedded engagement changes professional practice where one-off training does not. Schein (2010) provides the conceptual architecture for understanding what culture change requires. The evidence from Wigan is the strongest available UK local government case, but it is practice example evidence with external evaluation signals.

Attribution of institutional culture change to any specific intervention is genuinely difficult. Multiple forces shape institutional culture simultaneously, and the connection to population outcomes is typically mediated by many other factors. Where we describe outcomes (improvements in resident trust in Wigan, changed attendance frameworks in schools working with Reach) we are describing associations and plausible causal stories, not established attributions. Honest evaluation requires contribution analysis rather than attribution claims, and longitudinal designs that track whether changes persist through leadership and staff turnover.

This is also why our forthcoming pattern book’s diagnostic questions matter as much as its evidence base. Before commissioning this kind of work, the right questions are:

• Is the institutional leadership commitment genuine and senior enough to protect the work?

• Is the timescale realistic, or are we expecting culture change from a 12-month project?

• Are the structural barriers (performance frameworks, HR systems) being addressed, or only the mindset?

• Is there a plan for when the institutional champion leaves? Culture change that lives only in the heads of enthusiasts is not yet culture change.

What this means for practice and commissioning

This pattern of place-based change makes demands that most institutional change programmes are not designed to meet. The timescale is three to seven years at minimum, longer to reach structural embedding. The commitment required from institutional leadership is not to a programme, but to a sustained process of discomfort, one that involves being genuinely open to finding that what the institution has been doing is wrong. The external capacity required to support that process is substantial and cannot be provided on the side by an organisation with other priorities.

The four cases in this post show what this looks like when it works. Wigan did not achieve later phases by running a good training programme; it achieved it by rebuilding what the council rewards, how it measures performance, and what it believes its role is. PLACE did not begin with programme design; it began by spending months interrogating whether its own assumptions about poverty were accurate. The Reach Foundation does not deliver workforce development events; it builds sustained relationships with institutional leadership over years. These are not differences of degree. They are differences of kind.

This work also has a clear limit. Institutional culture change makes institutions more effective and more relational. It does not address the structural resource constraints on those institutions, or the structural inequalities that determine which communities benefit from institutional services. A more relational NHS still cannot meet the full burden of health inequality if the social determinants of health are not addressed. This pattern belongs within a broader theory of change, not as a substitute for one. It must engage with other patterns of place-based practice, and other types of change.

References

Fixsen, D., Naoom, S., Blase, K., Friedman, R. and Wallace, F. (2005). Implementation Research: A Synthesis of the Literature. Tampa: NIRN.

Schein, E. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership. 4th ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Needham, C. and Mangan, C. (2016). The 21st-century public servant. Public Money and Management, 36(4).

Morley, K. and Harris, S. (2025). Tackling Poverty and Disadvantage in Schools. London: Bloomsbury.

Wigan Council and Partners (2024). Progress with Unity: Ten-Year Strategy. https://www.wigan.gov.uk/Council/Progress-with-Unity/index.aspx

Collaborate CIC (2026). Neighbourhood Governance in Practice: Lessons from Test Valley. https://www.testvalley.gov.uk/assets/attach/25180/Neighbourhood-Governance-in-Practice-Lessons-from-Test-Valley-for-Democratic-Renewal-FINAL.pdf

SSAT (2026). Developing and Supporting PLACE [blog, 25 March 2026]. https://www.ssatuk.co.uk/blog/developing-and-supporting-place/