ChangeThinking with SmithMartin

Category: Funding

Funding childcare – Westminster’s new way

Nothing new in the fact that childcare is hard to afford and the cost remains one of the biggest barriers to accessing high quality early years education. The good news is the extension…

Sure Start Children’s Centres
– still at the heart of communities

    Some startling figures emerging about Children’s Centre closures…     In November the government confirmed that 124 Sure Start centres had closed, (Children and Young People Now). In addition, there is…

Charities, Community Groups
and where to from here…

  Charities face closures as local authorities slash funding, making the delivery of community projects somewhere between hard and impossible. ‘Acevo (the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations) had already shown that…

Realism in social business development

The short video below tells the story of an organisation and team, in this case, in the technology sector, that burned through 40 million dollars of capital in five years and failed on…

Creating a more equal and productive Britain

25th Anniversary Lecture Daycare Trust “Don’t blame families, support them and help them to achieve better outcomes.” Sir James Heckman By special invitation from Daycare Trust, the leading economist and Nobel Prize winner,…

Startup Britain – a useful web resource?

The ‘Startup Britain’ web site has the support of the Prime Minister – but is it, as some commentators have cynically described a government backed web link-farm – offering already available resources to…

Authorities – give away your space?
Become an ideas enterprise…

We were reading an interesting web article about the internet giant AOL and how they had made available, at no charge, the 225,00 square feet of office space they own in Palo Alto…

The Schools System and
the Draft Structural Reform Plan

Somewhere, in my past I remember being told ‘more haste less speed.’ The Draft Structural Reform Plan is in plenty of haste. Built into that, is the feeling that there is no time…

Social Entrepreneurs 25 – 35 needed

The Arthur Guinness Fund, UnLtd and Rathbone have joined forces to create the Guinness Bring It To Life Awards, offering new young entrepreneurs with a community changing idea the chance to get started. Aimed at ideas driven…

National Childcare Week 2010

What I want to be……… Daycare Trust are asking children and young people of all ages to join them to celebrate National Childcare Week 12th – 16 th July. The art competition is…