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  • Lead Member Manchester City Council
  • Participating Members Birmingham City Council, Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), Liverpool City Council, Manchester City Council, Oldham Council, Plymouth City Council, Stockport Labour Group, Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council
  • Year 2025
  • Type Policy Labs

Principles met

  • Co-production

    We will develop systems that enable citizens to be equal partners in designing and commissioning public services and in determining the use of public resources.

  • Community leadership and a new role for councillors

    We will explore ways for councils to act as a platform for helping the community to contribute to local outcomes, and to re-think the role of councillors as community connectors, brokers and leaders.

  • Innovation

    We will embrace innovation in how we work with local communities to drive positive change.

  • Learning

    We will capture and ‘expand’ the experience and learning from individual projects and approaches in order to encourage broader application of co-operative principles within individual member Councils and across the Network.

  • Maximising social value

    We will support the development of a framework and criteria for social value, giving substance to the concept and supporting Councils with the tools to ensure better local social and economic outcomes.

  • New models of meeting priority needs

    In exploring new ways of meeting the priority needs of our communities we will encourage models, such as co-operatives and mutuals, which give greater influence and voice to staff and users. in designing and commissioning public services and in determining the use of public resources.

About the project

Summary of project idea

Looking at Post-16 transition across LA boundaries to reduce the size of NEET cohort and better target resources – focuses on utilising existing research to support local interventions and linking to the impact of long-term socio-economic factors affecting households across the city region influencing post-16 destination choices, particularly those most affected by poverty, worklessness and low level educational qualification attainment. Including looking at data sharing as one of the issues to address, with the intention of aiding a quicker understanding or post-16 destinations, reducing the NEET cohort quicker and ensuring an increasingly stretched resource is best served in areas of need.

We see this is an area of work where many Cooperative Councils will have similar challenges – and where developing an ecosystem of good practice can provide innovative approaches to help maximise the effectiveness of this work – leading to better outcomes for both young people and councils delivering services.

What are the three key outcomes this project will achieve?

1. Peer-learning sessions between different parts of the country, through at least 2 study visits. We have brought in 2 other “core cities” Birmingham and Liverpool to the project and will aim to use these links to broaden the knowledge base on the project.
2. GM workshops to knowledge share on cross-border activity. GMCA and the 3 GM councils will develop an in-depth model for how to knowledge share.
3. Developing a digital toolkit and approach to knowledge sharing to help develop an eco-system of best practice and collaboration. The approach to the knowledge base will be developed out of the workshops, and in particular, to ensure that the use of the toolkit can be valuable to those council’s working in this area. We will look at how we sustain this work going forward.

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