Serving the Teesside Business Community | 55
Martin McKinnell
(left), senior
associate from
Endeavour
Partnership’s
corporate and
commercial
team, with
Peerz Academy
founder Wayne
Harrison and
director Kevin
Wilde.
Legal firm help growing
education business to be
E
ndeavour Partnership has advised a
new online education platform on a
significant contract win.
Peerz Academy fought off national and
international competition to secure a tender
with the North East collaborative outreach
programme, FutureMe.
The contract will provide 45,000 lessons
to 108 schools in the North East to support
pupils who have the potential to go university
achieve in GSCE maths and English.
The business focuses on engaging
students through online lessons, created by
experienced teachers and delivered online by
peer mentors.
The mentors are successful university and
college students, chosen specifically due to
their skills in communication and confidence
in supporting others.
Peerz Academy has designed its platform
to be affordable, flexible and safe for
students, containing a number of built-in
safeguarding features aiming to protect
users and provide a secure online learning
environment.
The overall aim of Peerz is to boost
the North East’s success rates in GCSE
maths and English as the region is bottom
nationwide for top grades at GCSE and
second bottom for standard passes in GCSE
maths and English.
Wayne Harrison, founder of Peerz
Academy, said: “The original thoughts behind
Peerz Academy were to make learning
opportunities equally available to all students.
Many parents support their children’s learning
top of the class
through additional, and often expensive,
private tuition but for many parents this is not
an option due to the financial barriers. We
designed our peer-to-peer-based intervention
around such problems, as educational
research evidence shows that peer tuition
can be as effective as costly one-to-one
tuition.
“The advice we received from Endeavour
was effective and efficient. Since the initial
meeting, the team has continued to support
our business, helping us further our work
with students.”
Peerz Academy director, Kevin Wilde,
added: “We are always trying to encourage
North East businesses to get involved in
education and the platform itself. One of the
benefits of working locally is to improve the
learning opportunities given to students in
the area, which in the long run will be great
for the companies they later go on to work
for.”
Martin McKinnell, senior associate from
Endeavour Partnership’s corporate and
commercial team, has been leading the
project with Peerz Academy, helping launch
the business and advising on setting up the
legal documentation required on the Peerz
platform.
McKinnell said: “Peerz is a flourishing
business and it’s fantastic to see the
team beating off national competition to
secure this significant contract. It’s really
interesting to have worked with them
from their initial concept to this point and
we’ll continue to have involvement as they
progress further.”
Endeavour has strong links with the
education sector through their work on
providing specialist legal support and
is passionate about working with local
schools.
This year their team have also been
involved with several enterprise-focused
and work experience-based programmes.
One of which was Project Dragonfly, which
helped encourage creative confidence
through ideas and activities in primary
school children.
Endeavour employs a team of 54 and
has a reputation spanning over 16 years,
providing high quality advice on a range of
business law matters including mergers
and acquisitions, intellectual property,
employment, commercial property and
corporate recovery and insolvency from its
headquarters at Teesdale in Stockton.
Last month Endeavour Partnership was
again recognised as one of the North East’s
top corporate and commercial practices in
the prestigious Legal 500 guide, with every
department highly ranked.