Changing the Odds: Chard

In 2021, as we started to emerge from successive lockdowns, a headteacher in Chard sat down and wrote a letter. Not to families about remote learning, but to the whole town: come and have breakfast with us. It sounds like a small thing. It wasn't. Holyrood Academy is a single secondary school in a Somerset market town where too many children were slipping through the gaps between school, home and the services meant to catch them. This film follows what happened when its leaders stopped treating that as someone else's job and started bringing the whole community around one table, one breakfast at a time. No heroics. No overnight fix. Just a school that decided it couldn't do this alone, and did something about it. Seven minutes, and as good a picture of what cradle to career looks like up close as we've got.