On 10 March 2026, the research team behind the From the Centre to the Periphery project met with the Rt Hon Justine Greening to discuss how place-based approaches can improve opportunities for young people.
A former Secretary of State for Education, Transport and International Development, Justine developed the Opportunity Areas programme, a UK government initiative that launched in 2016 to improve educational outcomes and social mobility in 12 areas of the country with historically low social mobility. Justine remains a leading advocate for social mobility and currently chairs The Purpose Coalition campaign.
The lively Q&A session explored the importance of locally driven solutions and community knowledge, alongside light-touch governance and reducing politics in education processes. It also highlighted the need for systems thinking and recognising what can be achieved through the art of the possible.
Below is a snapshot of the conversation.
What were the early ideas behind the Opportunity Areas programme, and how did you get it off the ground?
I love systems thinking. My theory was that, as someone who grew up in Rotherham, no one's ever going to care as much about what happens in Rotherham as people who live there. They are the most invested in their community doing better.
So this was about a more homegrown, home-owned, grassroots approach – enabling people on the ground to set the priorities for education improvements in their own areas.
Of course, it had to be called Opportunity Areas! It was about where we wanted to get to and the promise of ‘better’. It was about opportunity.
My theory was that different social mobility ‘cold spots’ might be grouped under the same name, but they are often driven by different things. I wanted to experiment in these different social mobility cold spots and see what mix of education interventions each place needed.
I chose 12 areas, split between rural, urban and coastal communities, which I felt reflected different social mobility cold spot archetypes – and off we went! The motivation was to test a place-based approach: could we understand and design a model to do place-based, tailored education?
Opportunity Areas focused on careers, education and early years – is that what you see as the problem in these areas?
It is much more complicated than just education.
I took an active decision not to involve other departments [beyond the Department for Education – DfE] at the start. I thought about it long and hard. I would have loved to have included the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Health, the Treasury, and maybe the Department for Business and Trade as part of it.
But I thought if I did that, nothing was ever going to happen – it’s impossible to get Whitehall departments, who’d all want to own the project, to work as collaboratively as they’d have needed to. I realised it was the right approach in theory but, in practice, the wrong one.
I decided to crack on with, at least make a start, with Opportunity Areas driven by the DfE – then I’d potentially have something that proved the concept. At that stage then I could revisit involving a wider group of government departments.
That turned out to be completely the right thing to do.
What happened was that local public services teams on the ground reached out to one another, depending on what they needed. They were used to working together so it came naturally to them. In Bradford, for example, the Opportunity Areas team quickly got in touch with the local NHS and started to analyse data on kids going to opticians, which led to the Glasses in Classes initiative. More children with the right glasses then of course helped literacy rates rise.
The ethos of Opportunity Areas was to trigger a change in process on the ground, but in a way that offered maximum freedom to tailor that change so it worked for specific local areas – increasing buy-in, successful implementation, impact and outcomes.
We're collecting that very evidence that you just spoke about, in terms of how people on the ground start to work together with a common, shared goal. We hear people saying, ‘this is the first time we met the school that is opposite us’.
Crazy, isn't it?
I tried to remove all those boundaries, to provide an obvious, clear sense of shared purpose. But then, behind that, a jointly owned plan that meant I didn't need to tell people what to do. They knew where they were going and had the freedom to do what they needed to get there.
From a policy perspective, or running any kind of organisation, you've got people, processes, systems, information, culture – these bits of the organisational architecture that you can use to drive outcomes. What I was trying to do was create a project where it was so clear where the Opportunity Area team needed to get to, that, once they bought into it, they could populate that purpose with a plan – I didn't need to control it via a process or through constant checks. I could be lighter touch.
If I got the right people, and we did, they could deliver a lot of that nuanced approach on the ground.
Obviously, you see the problem as much bigger than just education in these areas. What precisely do you see as the problem?
This is actually why I left Cabinet and, later on, Parliament.
The problem with Britain is that talent is spread evenly, but opportunity is not. It represents two halves of the social mobility challenge...
Talent is spread evenly but not developed consistently – that’s an education-led issue.
Opportunity is not spread evenly – that’s about employers and business.
So now I'm getting businesses around the country to start thinking, ‘What's my plan to ensure my opportunities have the maximum social mobility impact?’
We use a framework called the Purpose Goals. Essentially, I've taken an analogy from the Sustainable Development Goals, which I was very involved in shaping as Development Secretary. It breaks down the social mobility challenge into 15 key goals. The first few are education, but the rest include things like health and wellbeing, the digital divide, entrepreneurship skills, access to credit and finance, open recruitment, and fair progression. So, it's, if you like, the wider bundle of Purpose Goals beyond education that would need to be addressed by the country as a whole – especially employers and business.
I wasn't at the DfE long enough to, in a sense, do anything more than get that education piece up and running. It was fascinating doing it, because the officials found it a very different way of working, and they were galvanised. But there’s an employer/business bit still to be shaped, which is what I’m working on now.
We are curious about whether government felt it was giving away too much power?
This is where I came up with something different, because it wasn't devolution. I wasn't just saying, ‘Right, there's your skills budget, now make things better – that’s your responsibility now.’ It was co-owned between me, the DfE and local communities, and that was really important.
We had one plan that we'd all agreed we were going to make successful. It wasn’t about huge investment – there was some seed funding for Opportunity Areas – but the point was that by being clearer on our local priorities, having them owned by everyone, getting a plan and a whole range of local actors all pointing in the same direction, that in itself is really powerful force for driving change. It’s a stronger model.
Has it experienced the same level of success in all the areas, or have some done better than others?
I think the ones that were the hardest to make work were the rural ones. My take on it, quite early on, was for some of the more ‘classic’ urban deprived communities – maybe Bradford is a good example – they were well networked. Maybe it was because they were used to getting government or regional funding and having to work to put that into effect. The relationships were already there somehow, so actually we weren't starting from scratch.
Similarly, with the coastal areas, weirdly, the isolation of the places – i.e. one half of what was around them was sea, rather than other communities – made a real sense of identity in some of the coastal area teams – almost a sense of ‘we're in it together, so we’re going to have to look to ourselves to make improvements’. There was not only empowerment but recognition that they were remote yet actually well networked. It was more intense than other community networks as they had ‘half’ an area to build in.
The rural Opportunity Areas were the hardest because they physically weren't located all together. They might have been in the same region or county, but these were communities in different places – villages, small towns – and they had really different sense of place to one another.
Even getting them physically together to build the Opportunity Area relationships was a hassle because they weren't in the same place, so travelling took time and effort. That ‘people and common purpose’ element that really made the Opportunity Areas work was probably a lot harder in those rural areas.
Had I been in that role longer I would have wanted to get on top of what it takes. Quite early on, I felt the sense of common identity was less strong, and the ability to build physical, personal links between the team was less strong and less easy because of the lack of proximity.
That's quite a unique perspective, I would say, in terms of the cultural, place-based thinking. Is that quite different to the official understanding of place and geographic inequality in the UK?
I think it's the systems thinking that’s different.
I think about this in terms of ecosystem policy. It's understanding that education is impacted by health, which is impacted by community, which is impacted by employment opportunities, and the causality runs both ways between all of those elements. Therefore, in the end, you have to craft something that works on the ground in a real, connected community ecosystem.
What do you see as the solution going forward? There are lots of other areas that are deserving of this kind of attention, clearly.
One of the things I was always conscious of is that Opportunity Areas needed to feel special for each place. You couldn't do them everywhere, otherwise I suspect they might stop feeling special. But I believe you still could do a lot more of them.
Maybe I would have come up with two or three other special, system- led projects – ones that reflected places where things were doing better, but they could still excel further. I certainly wouldn't have left anyone behind.
I'd probably have gone with about 50 Opportunity Areas next, to see how we could get on, optimise those, and then maybe double and double again.
Would you have thought about expanding the time span from three to more years?
They're meant to be ongoing projects, generational projects to deliver generational change. So I would have done both quantity and quality. I'd have done more Opportunity Areas, and I would have woven in the learnings from those already working on the ground in the earlier pilot areas.
I would have taken the learnings about local connections, the different social mobility cold spot ‘archetypes’, and what that was telling me about place-based education approaches. I might have also woven in the Department for Transport in some rural Opportunity Areas, where basic physical connectivity was clearly a limiting factor we needed to address.
I think I would have looked at that next layer of driving change. I absolutely would have woven in the economic growth and business element as a next step. That's what I wanted to do.
What do I mean by that?
Well, Bradford is a great example where I was building a talent pipeline through the Opportunity Areas policy. We were looking at early years and had involved primary and secondary schools, and looked at colleges – working along the talent pipeline.
What was interesting was that the university was very involved in Bradford (as in other Opportunity Areas like Stoke and Derby), and so were businesses. PwC actually ended up opening an office in Bradford to tap into the city’s underutilised college and graduate talent. They were, in effect, building the other end of the pipeline – the opportunity end.
Maybe I would have said, ‘Okay, I want every care leaver in Bradford to have an opportunity when they leave education.’ I don't want anyone coming out of the care system without a pathway into an opportunity, and support in that opportunity through their employer.
We would have experimented on the art of the possible.
What do you think needs to change in central government, and regionally, to make these kinds of place-based initiatives work?
That's a whole new conversation that includes a long discussion on Treasury reform and the valuation of human capital, because there is a gap in understanding how to invest in people.
If it's a pothole in Bradford, that’s an instant return. But if it's if it's a small child, the return takes longer to come through but lasts a lifetime. If only repairing potholes did.
I think the thing that drove me mad was the piecemeal nature of Whitehall decisions. I, honestly, really found it frustrating. I would always be making the connections and looking at the systems and ecosystems. Whitehall isn't set up to work across the piece. It works vertically via traditional departments.
So you need to find a way to slightly break the system, slim down the centre, but then diffuse it – as we did with Opportunity Areas – but in a way that still has some control over outcomes. Quality control, I mean.
And dare I say, certainly for education, just take the politics out of it. If you get the right people together on the right mission, they don't need a lot of strategy documents. Give them the evidence to decide priorities, and they have the capacity to drive the change far better than any Whitehall government department can.
From the Centre to the Periphery: Project team
This project is led by the University of Bath, with input from colleagues at the University of Bristol and Durham University.
- Professor Michael Donnelly (University of Bath), Principal Investigator
- Dr Ceri Brown (University of Bath), Co-Investigator
- Dr Chris Cunningham (University of Bath), Research Assistant
- Dr Jo Davies (University of Bath), Lecturer and Research Associate
- Professor Matt Dickson (University of Bath), Co-Investigator
- Professor Richard Harris (University of Bristol), Co-Investigator
- Professor Nick Pearce (University of Bath), Co-Investigator
- Professor Nadia Siddiqui (Durham University), Co-Investigator
- Dr Elle Young (Durham University), Postdoctoral Research Associate
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.
