Having achieved much in the first three years, the fourth year of our activity saw significant increases in the numbers of people and organisations worked with. Our support really- has moved into a different gear. By the end of this year we had supported- every school in the city. In 1999-2000 our support impacted directly on the learning of more than 130,000 pupils. During the same year we directly supported more than 20,000 additional parents-. At the same time we enabled- direct support to more than 5,000 new young people; to 56 more community organisations; worked with 154 new businesses; trained more than 900 new volunteers and so on. The emphasis of our work has also changed, with much more of an emphasis- on supporting secondary pupils, supporting employees and meeting the basic skills needs of adults in community settings. Work that began with a few secondary pupils, and then grew into the hundreds is now in the thousands. Work that began with isolated- companies is now being carried- forward with hundreds of businesses. Work that was with a few voluntary organisations has built into a voluntary sector basic skills strategy. The scale really has moved into a sufficiently high gear for us to talk in terms of whole-city work and whole-system impacts. Another significant change has been a shift towards using increasing amounts of Partners’ data to focus on those groups, organisations, and people who are not making the same progress as others. There have thus been a number of quantitative and qualitative shifts in our ways of working over the past year. At the same time we have kept the central organising structure amazingly small - fleet of foot and active of mind - with resources being pushed out into developments. It is to the great credit of the various organisations that make up the Partnership, and the organisations implementing the changes we are supporting, that all have responded to shifts of pace despite great pressures on their infrastructuArialre. Balancing development and capacity in times of change is something we are all getting more skilled at - and it all doubles in scale and pace again during this current year!!