Collaboration and partnership are slippery words. They circle around organisations, from schools to businesses, charities to companies, like toothless sharks. As individuals, we are constantly exhorted to collaborate to improve our own and others’ performance. Even if we just want to get on with the job, in solitude if possible, we feel the pressure of the “better together” mantra.
Our schooling system is part of this trend. While school-to-school collaboration probably predates the introduction of universal education (think of all those dioceses), the past three decades have seen a growing and now omnipresent focus. This has partly been an attempt to ameliorate the collateral damage of increased competition between schools that, while possibly a factor in raising standards, may have widened inequalities between schools. There is a long-term, cross-party consensus that school-to-school support is a key driver to improving outcomes and closing performance gaps.
Although our own programmes and research have unearthed a growing global interest in school-to-school collaboration, including in low-income countries such as Kenya and Rwanda, it appears that England is probably the global leader in experimenting with collaborative structures. Schools in England are involved in a vast range of partnerships, including academy trusts, dioceses, federations and teaching school alliances, as well as less formal partnership arrangements, including subject-specific or thematic arrangements. Local authorities are still very much in this mix, often in the form of arms-length arrangements such as the Camden and Birmingham Education partnerships. These informal or membership-based partnerships have to “lead beyond authority”, which does not necessarily mean they are any less effective - the threat of school exit that multi-academy trusts rarely face might, in fact, make their collaborative efforts sharper and more user-focused.
The positive policy environment for collaboration may be more vulnerable than it appears. The fact that all this collaborative business has not translated into changes to accountability, inspections or funding regimes probably demonstrates that key national and regional players, from the Department for Education to Ofsted to regional schools commissioners, are more sceptical than they appear about the genuine value of collaboration. The scepticism goes beyond Whitehall. One favourite definition of partnership, offered by a primary headteacher, is “the mutual suppression of loathing in the pursuit of money”. As teachers, our lived experience of school-to-school collaboration was largely an increasingly absent headteacher at “partnership meetings”, with little obvious return on this investment, and no increase in opportunities for cross-school teacher collaboration.
The recent early closure of the DfE’s SSIF fund shows a preparedness to cut losses, and the current DfE capacity review may force radical rethinks about interventions such as teaching school alliances. At school level, although funding constraints may stimulate collaboration through sharing resources, any “mutual suppression of austerity” could also be counterweighed by urgent financial demands. School governors are likely to pay closer scrutiny to those often-vague partnership-related budget lines. Squeezed resources, sustained accountability pressures and growing competition for the most scarce and vital resource out there - our teachers - might create a perfect storm of atomising forces that begin to undermine both the structures and the spirit upon which effective collaborations are based.
Greater clarity needed
In this challenging context, warm woolly words will no longer suffice. Partnerships will need to gain far greater clarity about their impact to justify their value and a far more evidence-based approach to their development. Unfortunately, England’s global leadership on structures has not yet translated to a high-quality understanding of whether and how these structures have their intended impact, or what the opportunity costs might be.
There is a growing body of evidence from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as from UK researchers such as CUREE, about the features of effective school partnership working. From our own work with partnerships across England and Wales, we have a growing understanding of promising practice. In Essex, we have found that clarity of purpose for the partnership and depth of engagement is crucial for its sustained success. Clarity of purpose allows partnerships to operate with greater focus and to be able to articulate their value more clearly to member schools and other key stakeholders. Leadership time and school resources are extremely scarce and partnership working can fall by the wayside unless sufficient capacity is found to keep the group moving.
When the capacity challenge is recognised and directly attended to, both at a partnership and local system level, partnerships are more likely to thrive. In Cumbria, we have seen how local areas groupings named local associations of system leaders have provided a forum for partnerships to better engage with and learn from one another. In Essex, the role of the partnership lead has become an established part of the ecosystem, with bespoke training provided to support the lead to become more adept at leading “beyond authority”. Across England and Wales, we have seen examples of partnerships pooling resources to fund leadership and administrative capacity.
Building on our School Partnerships Peer-review Programme, and informed by our global research, we’ve designed a Partnerships Evaluation Tool. It’s a web-based application that enables school partnerships to better understand their impact, and act on this information, with purpose, ease and rigour. This tool uses an enquiry-based approach based on a set of themes and questions to assess the quality of collaboration. These themes build on promising practice about the vital factors of effective collaborative working. They have been created with schools and are designed to flex to the ambitions and needs of any partnership, regardless of size, location or focus.
Having tested the tool with partnerships in Cumbria, Essex and Wales, we are now looking to work with other partnerships across the UK. We aim to help local partnerships to improve their collaborative working and better measure and evidence their impact and to contribute to the national debate on how to further effective collaboration.
Across our programmes we have found that school partnerships achieving sustained improvements are characterised by high levels of professional trust and high levels of support and challenge; building collective intelligence through what Pasi Sahlberg calls “big and small data” enables schools to have more legitimate, purposeful conversations. School-to-school collaboration may not quite be in the “last-chance saloon”, but now is the perfect moment to transform the culture through which we build, implement, and evaluate our partnership efforts.
Joe Hallgarten and Andrew Rixon are part of the Education Development Trust’s research and consultancy team. Their work on the Partnerships Evaluation Tool will be presented next month at the inaugural conference of Association of Education Partnerships
