Our History

In December 2007, during a discussion about adult education in the workplace LEAD’s founders concluded that there must be a way to deliver a quality programme, which:

• Addressed employers’ concerns with regard to their previous experiences of workforce education.
• Delivered a consistently resourced programme for an employer, which created business benefit and not just qualifications.
• Created a quality learning experience, which would embed learning that could be used competently over and over again.

The reason for LEAD had been conceived.

The early months of 2008 were spent defining our vision, our mission and our philosophy. Additionally, from day one we established five customer- focussed behaviours we would expect our clients to experience.

Critically, we wanted to establish a world-class provider of lean education, which would support its client employers in:

• Promoting a continuous improvement culture
• Creating a thinking workforce
• Generating business benefit

In July, with the support of Lowell Williams, Principal of Dudley College of Technology, LEAD was supporting its first two clients and in tandem with this adapting to the business lessons it was learning through client feedback.

By the yearend it was evident that four factors were helping maintain the ongoing relationship with our clients and would become ongoing principles for future clients:

• The provision of a resident team for the employer.
• The high professional expectations we set for our own employees and highlighting them onsite with the provision of branded uniforms
• The employment of team members with industrial lean background and experience
• The continuous review and improvement of our own staff, delivery materials and methods.

The continuous development of our employees was, and still is, critical to our success and we committed one day a week to their development, so that they were learning and implementing skills required in an educational environment as well as sharing and increasing our collective lean knowledge.

2009 was planned to be a year of controlled growth. However, whilst we continued to build a reputation for quality delivery through our resident teams and operational support team members, we, along with the rest of the education world, were hit by the Learning & Skills Council’s withdrawal of Train to Gain funding as well as the impact of the global recession.

During these months, we believe that our partner, Dudley College, stood by us as they recognised the high levels of quality we were delivering in education and as such they were able to offer alternate funding as it became available. We were now working with companies totally committed to the lean journey and this allowed us to play our part in supporting them.

Critically, to support our employers’ workforces, we continue to commit one day per fortnight (at least 26 days per annum) for company wide professional development as we expand our employee base. The constant development of LEAD’s employees is essential to our success.

Although this year was tough, we are proud to say that we held to our belief in our philosophy and were able to keep the majority of our team together, riding out these months of uncertainty as a single unit. The camaraderie and loyalty from all members of our team, in what we were aiming to achieve, cannot be underestimated and continued to build the LEAD reputation for quality and customer focus.

Began with the funding hangover from 2009, but quickly saw us grow into a national group of companies from April as funding became available again, with clients driving our growth in their plants across the South West, South East, West and East Midlands, Wales and the North West.

The year also saw the fruition of over a dozen other partnerships with colleges of further education, who recognised the value and quality of our team and programmes.

Additionally, after only two years of trading, we were delighted to be accepted as a preferred provider for the Skills Funding Agency.

In the autumn we launched a new venture at the request of our long-term partner Dudley College, to create a new approach to engineering apprenticeships, by including lean into the programme from day one.

Titled the Lean Engineering & Manufacturing Academy, this innovation has been well received by employers and was officially open by the Mayor of Dudley in November with all of our apprentices in attendance.

The final highlight of 2010 was the introduction of Adult Apprenticeship frameworks as the primary structure for workforce development. Although George Osbourne, Chancellor of the Exchequer confirmed this as part of the spending review in November 2010, LEAD had been developing their model and promoting it to their clients since the late summer.

LEAD launched, what the company’s board describe as their dream framework, in November as well. A very challenging and successful year all round.

Well the first thing to say about 2011 is – where did that year go? What an incredibly busy and positively challenging 12 months.

Having prepared for the delivery of the adult apprenticeship model during 2010, this wider opportunity for employee development was totally embraced by our employer companies both existing and new.

This increased employer demand to develop continuous improvement cultures through the education process meant that LEAD had to find even more lean experts to join its coaching team to support its clients and by the end on the year, and many months of interviewing, the company had more than doubled in size. Not an easy challenge to achieve, but we have recruited some superb LEAD team members who will enhance the development of our clients’ workforces.

Quality; ever the watchword had to be maintained as a business imperative and to ensure that the excellent reputation LEAD had built over the previous years with its college partners for quality and compliance was maintained whilst we grew, additional industry expertise was recruited to support the team in the field. Additionally, three apprentices were recruited and are being initially developed as compliance experts. Definitely a year of team recruitment and development.

The Lean Engineering and Manufacturing Academy launched last year has enjoyed a very successful year adapting and innovating in both its delivery and working with the apprentices’ employers to ensure that the apprentices had been fully supported during their stay at the LEMA and had clear, yet diverse, progression routes to follow at level 3 with Dudley College.

November saw LEAD, after a very exacting and thorough investigation by our assessor, achieve the Matrix Award. A great achievement and testimony as to how well our team members look after their learners.

In summary, 2011 was a far more challenging year than we could have ever expected or even hoped for, but all very much driven by a shared belief on the part of our learners, employer clients and ourselves that the use of lean thinking makes a massive competitive difference to the future of industry of any sort. 2012 – well the challenge continues – fantastic.