Schools have lots of opportunities to work together in all sorts of organisations and structures. But the risk is that looking elsewhere for solutions can sometimes come at the cost of what goes on inside your school: do you have any time left to actually improve your school? Are you so busy looking outwardly that you fail to see what is happening right under your nose? Are you putting more into a partnership than you are getting back?
Finding the right balance on those points is as key as the structures you put in place. At my school, we believe we have got it right. Here’s what we did:
1. The set-up
Paul Armstrong’s 2015 report, Effective school partnerships and collaboration for school improvement: a review of the evidence, shows clear and numerous benefits of school collaboration, and in particular for professional development; the sharing of good practice and innovation; the reduction and alignment of headteacher workload; and the improvement of organisational and financial efficiency.
After reading Armstrong’s report, we recognised that for an effective partnership to be formed, we’d need to work with schools with similar priorities and those that share a history of working with us. As we wanted our partnership to focus on school improvement, we also realised that we needed to make sure the schools were located close enough together to ensure staff could meet for professional development. Finally, we wanted our partnership to be small enough initially to allow for a clarity of vision that would enable us to become a coherent organisation.
2. Forming the partnership
We started by talking to the headteachers of schools that met the criteria outlined above. We involved governors right from the beginning, making sure that they were very clear about what we were doing and why we were doing it. We shared our self-evaluation forms, end-of-key-stage data, vision and values statements, and improvement plans with our potential partners. Then we arranged to meet to talk about how we could work together. We wanted to ensure that there were no jarring differences in our priorities or approaches, and that we could all be honest and open with each other.
After this sharing process, we had a core group who were keen to collaborate so we drew up and signed a partnership agreement that set out clear ground rules, committing us to membership of what we decided to call the River Exe Learning Partnership (RELP).
We worked with an external coach, who helped us to identify what was important to us as school leaders; this input was used in drawing up a shared vision and values statement. This process has allowed us to be really clear about why we are doing what we do, and has driven decisions about the work we want to do together.
3. Ensuring your school benefits
One of our agreed value statements was that we all wanted to “provide an inspirational and creative curriculum”. To make this happen, we have carried out teacher-training sessions together that we would not have been able to do on our own. These have involved setting up a series of workshops from which teachers can choose, to help them develop their skills and knowledge.
The first of these was focused on art. Some workshops were led by teachers from within the partnership, and some by people with whom we have worked in the past. Teachers chose between working with clay, printing, watercolour painting and photosensitive paper.
The second series of sessions explored how we could use the outdoors; the choice here was between cookery, storytelling, shelter-building and spirituality.
We have scheduled a series of workshops for each term so that, over the course of the year, teachers will have had access to three good-quality CPD opportunities that meet their own needs; the cost to each school has been minimal. The way we have structured the workshops also means that teachers who want to lead training have an opportunity to do so, and we have all been introduced to external providers that are new to us.
Away from CPD, all schools in the partnership share summative data about cohorts each term. This gives us a chance to establish strengths and weaknesses to enable targeted help for schools; it also provides us with evidence to share with governors about how well different year groups are doing. To ensure data is used appropriately, we have all signed a confidentiality agreement, and we will not identify individual children.
Our fortnightly partnership meetings have given us the chance to develop our own leadership skills. Each school also has the opportunity to share some of its good work with the rest of us and each head gives a “think piece” presentation to jolt us out of our habitual thinking. For example, last term we heard from Sarah Hitt, Pinhoe C of E Primary School’s designated mental health lead, about its mental health strategy; this has informed the work of the partnership for the coming year. We used this input to create a RELP wellbeing strategy and a shared action plan to improve this area in all of our schools.
Finally, we have put in place a system of school-leadership reviews. Each school is visited for a day during the autumn term by two headteachers who look at how the school is addressing areas identified in their own improvement plan. They produce a written report, which is shared with governors, and a follow-up half-day visit is scheduled for later in the school year. This is not an evaluative visit or a “mocksted”, but a chance for each of us to share the work we are doing and ask for advice from our peers.
After two years, our learning partnership has become a robust and purposeful group that is making a positive difference to all of our schools. We are all committed to all of our pupils; it is being outward-looking at a pupil - as well as a leadership - level that drives the openness and honesty between us. We have worked hard to get to this stage and are all proud of the organisation we have created.
Roy Souter is headteacher at Stoke Hill Junior School in Exeter
