Essex County Council

About the work

Essex County Council is the upper-tier local authority for Essex, based at County Hall in Chelmsford. It’s responsible for schools and education, adult and children’s social care, highways, libraries, and economic growth across the county, and works with Essex’s 12 district, borough and city councils. It also leads Essex Partners, which brings together senior leaders from the public and private sectors to plan the county’s long-term future.

The council and Essex Partners appointed Always Possible as lead design and programme management partner for Essex 2020. The Year of Science and Creativity was a county-wide celebration of science, technology, engineering, arts and maths (STEAM), and it was the largest of its kind Essex had ever seen. Between 2018 and 2021 we worked with the council, schools and businesses to set priorities and design how the programme would be run. We set up 12 local hubs that brought schools, cultural organisations, businesses and councils together. We also ran a community grants scheme so that grassroots groups could create their own Essex 2020 projects.

We built the Essex 2020 website, with an events calendar, funding guides and teacher resources. We mapped STEAM provision across more than 200 schools and organisations, which gave the Essex STEAM Commission its baseline. When Covid-19 hit, we moved the programme to hybrid and online formats. That still produced 491 events, 49,000 website visitors, a social media reach of 479,000 and a 12-episode podcast series. The year also led to new partnerships between industry, education and culture, including with Teledyne e2v and Global Marine Group.

In 2024 the council’s Green Sector team, part of its Sustainable Growth Directorate, asked us to help with a new priority. Its brief was to make green growth a “golden thread” that ran through every economic plan in the county, rather than an add-on. This came as the old LEP’s functions moved into new North and South Essex business boards. We designed and facilitated a strategy workshop at County Hall that looked at four things:

• where Essex’s green sector stands today
• what value green sector development is creating
• which stakeholders need to be influenced, and how
• which priorities would build green thinking into economic planning across the county

Our write-up recommended engaging more with small and medium-sized businesses and making the work visible through stories and case studies.

“Always Possible have been great at co-designing a project with the local authority and a whole range of partners, with many different moving parts. They’ve been great at listening to the needs of different partners, providing ideas and delivering actions. Always Possible respond to challenges very quickly. I don’t think we would have overcome some of the challenges without having them involved.”
— Zenith McIntyre-Allen, Essex County Council