LAST night marked the start of an important journey which, if navigated successfully, will benefit thousands of young people in Swindon.

I am talking about the launch of Swindon Challenge, which will bring together key stakeholders in education with a common goal – to drive up standards and improve educational outcomes within all our schools.

Swindon Challenge has replaced the previous Education Strategy and my colleagues in the Council’s Education team have been working hard to get to this point where we have a clear set of objectives and plan to improve the educational outcomes in our town.

Cabinet agreed to implement Swindon Challenge in October, before the public criticisms made by Ofsted, in order to address the challenges we know exist in some of our schools and to meet the targets set out in the Council’s Priorities and Pledges.

As its name suggests, the strategy will involve lots of hard work and we know it will not be easy.

But through Swindon Challenge we will strive to ensure that every school in Swindon is rated by Ofsted as being ‘good’ or better by 2020.

We have also set a target of increasing the proportion of young people accessing Higher Education by 25 per cent.

The council has pledged £600,000 over the next three years and I know there is a real desire among education leaders in Swindon to realise our ambitious targets.

Anji Phillips will lead the Swindon Challenge Board as the independent chair.

Anji has a wealth of experience being a former headteacher, Ofsted inspector and director of Children’s Services in Richmond, which was graded as outstanding under her leadership.

The board will also bring together headteachers, the Regional Schools’ Commissioner, governors, local businesses and the teaching schools, while Ofsted have also agreed to have observer status.

We will bring leading educational research and best practice into our schools, utilise strong partnerships with high performing councils and national educational bodies and invest in our teachers so they can benefit from training programmes.

Leading educational research and practice will be brought into Swindon to shape and influence leadership in schools.

Stronger partnership working with national educational bodies and high performing local authorities will also be high on the Swindon Challenge agenda to improve outcomes across all Swindon secondary providers.

We want to ensure we are meeting the national average, or exceeding it, in key performance indicators and our ambition is for Swindon to become a ‘Learning Town’ where we increase the aspirations of our young people and deliver education on a town-wide basis.

The issues we are trying to address will not be a quick fix, but with everyone pulling in the right direction we can deliver improvements that will benefit young people in our town for many years to come.