Case studies
EcoCoach CIC – Meeting the needs of the next generation
Most award winners at the UK Social Enterprise Awards have years of history behind them. EcoCoach CIC had barely twelve months. Liudvina Pires, Head of Operations, tell us what it means to win national recognition when you’re still finding your feet – and why the award matters far less than the children it’s helped them reach.
When EcoCoach CIC applied for a UK Social Enterprise Award last year, they genuinely did not expect to win. They were a small, locally-rooted organisation, still relatively new, still building. The application, says Liudvina Pires, Head of Operations, was never really about the trophy.
“Our application was less about recognition to us as a business and more about giving our mission a bigger platform,” she explains. “We wanted to test whether what we are building resonated beyond our local area: to help raise awareness around child-first, inclusive provision.”
They found out they’d won the following day, having been unable to attend the ceremony due to personal circumstances. “It was a mixture of shock, pride and disbelief, if I’m honest,” Pires says. “To become a national award winner within the very first year, it does feel surreal.”
Supporting all kinds of kids
EcoCoach works with schools across the East Midlands and beyond, delivering curriculum PE lessons, lunchtime and after-school sports clubs, and wraparound care in the form of breakfast and after-school provision. But it’s the third strand of their work – alternative provision – that Pires describes as simultaneously the most challenging and the most rewarding.
Alternative provision serves children who, for a range of reasons, cannot thrive in mainstream education. Some have special education needs or disabilities (SEND) or social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs. Some are at risk of exclusion. Some are simply in the middle of a difficult transition – from primary to secondary school, or from a care home into a new environment.
“We try to meet them where they are,” says Pires. “We read their Education Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), their referral forms, what they enjoy, what their triggers might be, and we plan sessions around that.”
The approach is disarmingly practical. If a child loves football but struggles with maths, you don’t sit them down with a worksheet. You score goals and count them. “We slowly build that connection through the activity they enjoy,” she says. “And when we reflect on the progress within a term, it’s clearly visible. Which is really, really rewarding.”
The children that EcoCoach works with range from two-and-a-half years old (following a recently signed nursery contract) all the way to teenagers in alternative provision settings. Across all of it, the guiding principle remains the same: no child should be left out because of their capabilities, and no session plan should be left unmodified if a child’s circumstances require it.
A business built on a gap
EcoCoach was founded by Matthew Nelson, the company’s director, who saw first-hand how many children were being failed by systems not designed around the way they actually learn, regulate, or engage. Through his own experience of school and child development, he became increasingly aware of the distance between what some children needed and what many institutions could reliably provide.
The business started in April 2024, operating initially as a sole trader under the name Eco Coach PE Solutions. That early phase, says Pires, served a purpose: it allowed the team to test the model and refine the provisions before making the transition to a Community Interest Company structure, which happened in March 2025. The CIC designation was always the goal to formalise the social mission and create the right structure for long-term growth.
From those early days of working with a handful of schools, EcoCoach has grown by around 75% in contract value, and expanded geographically across Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and beyond.
Focusing on the mission whilst growing
That growth has brought its own challenges. Pires is candid about the tension between scaling an organisation and preserving what made it worth scaling in the first place.
“It’s so easy to shift from what you want to achieve into just securing more contracts and increasing values,” she says. “In the early days, everything sat with a very small number of people – delivery, safeguarding, staffing, finances, operations. As we grew, we learned that scaling isn’t just about taking on more work. It’s about building the right team and systems around the mission to protect it.”
Recruitment, she says, is central to that. Working with children who have complex needs requires not just skills but emotional resilience, and getting that wrong can do more than disappoint, it can pull the organisation’s attention away from the children it exists to serve. “It’s not about getting bigger,” she says. “It’s about building the right team around the mission and protecting the integrity of the organisation as it scales.”
National recognition
In the months since winning the ‘One to Watch’ award at the UK Social Enterprise Awards, EcoCoach has noticed something shift. Conversations are happening in places they hadn’t reached before, such as Somerset and Manchester, areas well beyond their East Midlands base.
Pires is careful not to overstate the causal link. “We can never know for definite,” she says. But she suspects visibility has played a role: when people know what you do and can point to external validation of its value, the mission travels further.
The most meaningful signal, though, comes not from award judges but from care homes. When one care home refers EcoCoach to another – when a child who worked with them becomes, in effect, a recommendation – that, says Pires, is the real measure. “It does speak volumes for us. It does tell us that we make a difference.”
