The London Challenge showed that “large-scale education reform can be done”.

It was “demonstrably the most successful urban improvement programme in education there has been”.

Those aren’t impartial verdicts. The former is from David Woods, the second of the London Challenge’s two chief advisers; the latter from Jon Coles, who was London Challenge director in what was then the Department for Education and Skills.

Nevertheless, 20 years on from the launch of the school improvement programme for the capital by Tony Blair’s Labour government, there are a few factors backing up claims for its continued relevance today.

Instead of lagging behind the rest of England as they did in 2003, the capital’s schools, in the wake of the eight-year London Challenge, now lead the nation.

In this year’s GCSE results, for example, 28.4 per cent of GCSEs taken in the capital were graded 7/A or above - the highest proportion of any region in the country (the North East was lowest, at 17.6 per cent).

“One of the key drivers behind the sustained improvement in London schools was the success of the London Challenge programme,” said a 2013 Ofsted report on breaking the link between disadvantage and low attainment.

Relevance today

There have been many attempts to emulate the London Challenge: a Hull Challenge, a Portsmouth Challenge, a Leeds Challenge and so on. Meanwhile, those who led the programme are still consulted by admiring education policy experts in countries including Denmark, Austria and Australia.

If Labour were to win power under Keir Starmer - a leader with a commitment to boosting regional development - it wouldn’t be hard to imagine some thinking about whether core concepts from the London Challenge could be applied today.

But some critics think much of the praise showered on the London Challenge hides an agenda, or they see it as further stacking the deck against schools in certain regions.

So, does the London Challenge deserve to be seen as the roaring success its leaders present it as? And if so, what made it a success? Twenty years on, are there still lessons the sector can learn from it?

What was the London Challenge?

By 2002, five years after he became prime minister, Blair had decided that a major programme for London schools was needed.

“If you look at the data, when [the challenge] was launched, London was a basket case,” says Tim Brighouse, who served as the lead in the programme at its inception as London schools commissioner, a role later retitled as chief adviser for London schools.

Estelle Morris, who was education secretary during the programme’s genesis before leaving the position in late 2002, believes there was also a political element to the thinking.

The Blair government was embarking on a national programme of education reform, but without clear improvement in London, the government “would never have got the credit because of the attention that is paid to what happens in London”, she says.

‘A strategy, not a policy’

The London Challenge was a “strategy, not a policy”, says Coles, now chief executive of United Learning. It had clear goals - improving leadership and teaching and learning; raising standards and closing attainment gaps; creating more “good” and “outstanding” schools - but its leaders were flexible and led by evidence in terms of the policies to achieve those goals.

“Tony Blair said to me that he regarded the low performance of London schools as a crucial national issue and a major priority to tackle,” Coles continues.

“I took that seriously. I thought, ‘That’s what [ministers] really care about; they don’t really care what the policy solution is.’

“I didn’t spend any time explaining ministers’ policy to people. I spent an enormous amount of time talking to leaders of local authorities, directors of education, heads…trying to understand where the barriers were, what’s not working, how the resources of government could be deployed better in order to make schools better places to be and teaching more attractive.”

Brighouse and Woods (who was lead London Challenge adviser from 2003 and succeeded Brighouse as chief adviser in 2009) had previously worked together as chief education officer and chief education adviser respectively in Birmingham.

They were “absolutely key in what they did in building partnerships and links and making sure everybody felt part of it”, says Morris.

And the politicians “did not try to run it themselves”, she adds. “They let Tim and David and the team get on with it.”

There were some huge challenges to start tackling: 38 per cent of pupils in London had English as an additional language (EAL), rising to 50 per cent in Inner London, while 30 per cent of the capital’s pupils were in receipt of free school meals, rising to 43 per cent in Inner London (against a national average of 13 per cent).

When it came to how schools viewed children from poorer or immigrant backgrounds, there was an attitude among some of “what more can you expect from kids from backgrounds like that?”, says Brighouse. “We eliminated that thinking.”

‘Tony Blair said to me that he regarded it as a crucial national issue. I took that seriously’

But what did that mean in terms of the nuts and bolts?

Brighouse imported the idea of “families of schools” from Birmingham, something that he sees as crucial.

In London, that meant dividing more than 400 secondary schools (the London Challenge was not fully extended to primary schools until 2008) into groups of 30, based on similarity of socioeconomic circumstances and the prior attainment of their students, and comparing the schools within each family on their exam results.

“That really shook up the system,” says Woods. With that data in place - which showed some schools that their counterparts with similarly high levels of students on free school meals or with EAL were getting higher levels of attainment - the “cynics” in underperforming schools could “no longer say, ‘What more can you do with children like these?’.”

“You can’t overestimate the power of data and evidence as a spur to improvement,” Woods adds.

In an intervention known as Keys to Success, the core target schools with the lowest attainment were each assigned an adviser who worked with that school individually. These advisers could then go to the Department for Education and Skills to push for speedy funding for other interventions or projects.

There was a London Leadership Strategy run by headteachers and overseen by the National College for School Leadership. Data was used to organise “head swaps” between schools.

“Getting them visiting each other’s schools and learning from each other was a key factor in why it worked,” says Brighouse.

‘A powerful morale booster’

He also emphasises “the centrality of teachers and recruiting them and retaining them and rewarding them”.

To that end, the London Challenge launched a Chartered London Teacher CPD programme, featuring conferences and knowledge sharing to help participants improve. Teachers got £1,000 at the end of the programme.

These programmes also created a sense of pride among participants, Woods believes. They promoted the idea that it meant something to be a “London teacher or leader” and, he says, this was “a powerful morale booster”.

But London was still an expensive place to live, meaning that it was losing potential leaders as teachers looked outside the capital for homes and jobs when they wanted to start a family.

As part of the London Challenge, an Inner London teacher pay scale - which is still in place today - was introduced to entice teachers to stay in the capital.

Coles also worked with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to produce a scheme allowing key teachers to borrow up to £100,000 to buy a house, targeted at those in leadership roles who were potential future heads.

The range of policy interventions was impressive in scope. But was the London Challenge really such a big success?

Did the London Challenge work?

A 2014 paper - “Understanding the success of London’s schools” by Simon Burgess, professor of economics at the University of Bristol - acknowledged that, in the wake of the London Challenge, the capital’s results “confirm that pupil progress on standard measures is significantly higher than the rest of England”.

But, Burgess argued, this was “entirely accounted for by ethnic composition” - ie, London had more pupils from recent migrant backgrounds who, he claimed, “have greater ambition, aspiration, and work harder in school”.

Meanwhile, a 2019 paper by Stephen Gorard and Nadia Siddiqui of Durham University challenged what they saw as English education policy’s focus on “surface regional differences in attainment and crediting schools for their results, as in the London Challenge” rather than disadvantage as the driver of attainment gaps.

They may have had in mind Michael Wilshaw, an enthusiast for the London Challenge in his time as Ofsted chief, who used it as evidence to argue that the lower attainment of northern schools was not driven by poverty.

He previously told Tes: “It’s got to be the quality of leadership, the quality of teaching and the expectation levels of the [secondary] schools [in the North]…London has deprivation and poverty the way that other parts of the country have deprivation and poverty, but London secondary schools do significantly better.”

However, Gorard and Siddiqui’s paper argued that “schools in London have received more funding per pupil than schools in the North for a long time, and that this funding increased further for the London Challenge”; “that the London schools started their challenge with already higher attainment and a lower poverty gap”; and that “the London results were perhaps largely the ‘effect’ of socioeconomic background and other geographical differences”.

“It is not clear how successful the London Challenge really was,” they concluded.

So, was it really all about the money?

In announcing the programme, Morris said it would have funding of £25 million over three years - a good level of investment but not huge compared with the total budget for London schools.

“The whole of education history is littered with big money interventions which have achieved nothing,” says Woods.

“The success was nowhere near just down to money, but money made it possible to actualise these interventions and programmes. Money doesn’t change beliefs or values. That wasn’t done by money.”

Morris feels that “a lot of people have spent the past five years trying to find reasons other than the London Challenge for standards being raised in London”.

While London’s growing economic success and social cohesion were factors, she says, those wouldn’t have had an impact on attainment had nobody taken steps to harness them.

“That’s a lesson learned: you can’t raise school standards just by looking at schools,” she continues.

A lasting legacy

Stephen Twigg, who was appointed minister for London schools - a role created in government to oversee the London Challenge - in May 2002, believes it’s important to acknowledge that the improvement in London schools happened “for a variety of reasons”.

But he also highlights the five boroughs at the core of the London Challenge: Lambeth, Southwark, Hackney, Haringey and Islington.

“If you look at those five boroughs, the improvement was very, very significant,” he says.

Despite some disagreement around the degree to which the improved standards in London can be attributed to the London Challenge, most agree that the strategy has left some kind of imprint.

“It does feel like there’s a legacy [from the London Challenge],” says Ed Vainker, chief executive of the Reach Foundation and co-founder and former principal of Reach Academy Feltham.

“It does feel like there’s been an energy that has been sustained.”

Vainker notes strong recent traditions of school-to-school collaboration in boroughs such as Camden, which was resistant to academisation, or in Haringey via the school-owned Haringey Education Partnership, “which I think is a legacy of London Challenge”.

However, “you wouldn’t say that that legacy is universal across the city”, Vainker adds, highlighting a “white British demographic” for whom “probably those challenges haven’t been addressed in the same way”.

The inspiration for academisation?

Other effects have arguably been more far reaching, though.

The London Challenge ended in 2011, following the arrival of a new Conservative-led coalition government in 2010.

The incoming education secretary, Michael Gove, only let the challenge run to its already scheduled end date of April 2011 - but, says Woods, he “accepted the learning” from the programme in some respects.

“I think the idea of academisation and multi-academy trusts was the idea of London Challenge upscaled,” he says.

“[Gove] liked school-to-school support…He adopted some of the key programmes of the London Challenge.”

MATs such as Ark Schools and the Harris Federation “come out of their London Challenge background” and “in their own way are operating the London Challenge system”, Woods adds.

Though the London Challenge began at the same time the academies programme was emerging, it was no one-size-fits-all, centrally imposed blanket solution, its leaders say.

“We didn’t ever come in and say, ‘Every school has got to be an academy’…We didn’t say, ‘Every school has got to have a change of leadership, every school has got to be a federation,’” says Coles.

“It was all quite bespoke and thoughtful about what’s going to work here.”

A shared endeavour

Woods agrees that what was happening during the challenge was significantly different from the current push towards academisation.

“If London had gone down that route, had said in 2003, ‘We’re going to make [all schools] academies, starting with secondary. And we’ll put them in small groups. They had better help each other. We’ll put some money in,’ do you think that would have transformed the system? No, it wouldn’t,” he says.

And there is another element that some may feel sets the London Challenge apart from current education policy: consensus.

There was a risk that the London Challenge would be seen as “yet another central government initiative imposing burdens on schools and others”, says Twigg.

So, leaders sought to “build a really broad consensus across London, across parties” - including across the five core boroughs, three of which were run by Liberal Democrat-controlled local authorities - to build a sense that the strategy was “a shared endeavour to improve education in London rather than trying to be in any way partisan about it”.

‘You can’t just raise standards in schools while there’s rack and ruin around you’

When it comes to the question of whether a London Challenge-type approach could work for other regions or communities today, it’s important to note again that there have already been many attempts to emulate it, without the same success - notably, the Labour government City Challenges in Greater Manchester and the Black Country.

An assessment of the policy published by the Institute for Government describes results as “more mixed” in those places, under a higher level of central control from Westminster and Whitehall: Greater Manchester achieved positive results that could have been developed if its programme had run for longer than three years, while there were questions over whether the Black Country had the requisite “density of schools and the spare capacity from high performers”.

So, what features of the London Challenge should we be trying to emulate?

Asked if a challenge programme could work in, for example, coastal communities where attainment lags badly, Brighouse says London Challenge concepts around the use of data or teacher CPD could be applied.

Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth would be “too small a wicket to get learning from each other” but the policy could be extended to places like Hastings and Margate - and the power of Zoom now makes it possible to collaborate remotely.

“There’s no one solution; every school is different,” says Brighouse. “There are common ingredients, but you need to allow for different schools in different places.”

The four Ps

A key lesson emphasised by Morris is that “place matters”.

“London teachers felt part of a shared endeavour,” she says.

Twigg, similarly, highlights “the importance of place - that regional, subregional coordination is incredibly important”.

And Woods singles out four Ps that are central to success: “place, pride, purpose and partnership”.

Preserving or rebuilding collaboration might be another goal.

“I definitely think that there is significantly less school-to-school collaboration than there was 15 years ago,” says Vainker.

That is partly down to resources, and “partly a function of the multi-academy trust system”, where the focus is on collaborating within a trust rather than more widely, he adds.

“Those [wider] connections, because of academisation and because local authorities are less strong, feel like they are more precarious.”

Vainker believes there’s a danger “that as the [academised] system matures, local collaboration and that local relationship-building and sense of coming together around common challenges, particularly around the needs of the most vulnerable children, is at risk”.

A time and a place

And there’s perhaps another key point. Morris notes that the London Challenge was reinforced by economic growth in the capital, the lesson being that “you can’t just raise standards in schools while there’s rack and ruin around you”.

Any challenge programme to improve schools in the North East, or in any region or city, would fall on stony ground if the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) crisis, or the crisis in local authorities’ social services provision, continued to drain school resources and time, or if the wider economic picture meant there were high numbers of families in financial crisis.

The London Challenge succeeded in a city with a great public transport network, where heads could easily pop up at each other’s schools; a city with more than 40 universities providing students with opportunities if they succeeded at school, at a time when the national policy was one of widening participation in higher education.

The economics, the politics and the personalities of the leaders all seemed to work - a tough combination to replicate.

‘People take from it what they want’

Perhaps the London Challenge repeats a tale very familiar in education policy: traditionalists and progressives will see in it the things they want to see, whether that is about the success of academies, the importance of CPD or the power of collaboration.

“People take from it what they want. That’s because it is a strategy, not a policy,” emphasises Coles.

The “reason why what we did worked was because we thought very hard about it all the time, listened a lot to people, engaged with people, looked at the data”, he says, adding that they were “rigorous with ourselves: did the thing we tried to do work, or not?”.

That is all replicable, he says. For example, the attainment gap between the North and the South is, in his view, “absolutely solvable” - but “copying things that worked in one place and thinking they are going to work somewhere else is not the way to do it”.

Instead, he says, what might work would be “to copy the [London Challenge’s] approach to strategic thinking and working with people and involving heads and local authorities - and now, of course, it would be academy trusts as well - in a process of doing something that is bigger than all of us”.

John Morgan is a freelance journalist