This article explores the development of school to school support and partnerships in England. These partnerships have become a defining feature of what the Government calls the ‘self-improving, school-led’ system (DfE, 2010; Sandals and Bryant, 2014). Most schools engage in partnerships that are informal and emergent, based on shared interests, concerns, or simply personal relationships. Even partnerships that do have a more formal basis face sometimes fraught political and inter-personal adaptive challenges (Kamp, 2013). The focus here, however, is on more formal arrangements that are structured through a policy-driven process. These generally fall into one of the following non-mutually exclusive categories:
- structural governance models, such as multi-academy trusts/academy chains and federations;
- designations based on formal criteria, such as National Leaders of Education (NLEs) and Teaching Schools;
- role-related partnerships, such as where an Executive Head oversees two or more schools (but not in a formal federation).
Key to this development has been the emergence of a cadre of what are called ‘system leaders’, broadly defined as leaders who work beyond their immediate school to support the improvement of the wider system (Fullan, 2005).
The need for such lateral school-to-school partnerships has become apparent in the face of evidence that neither top-down centrally imposed change, nor pure competition and marketization can achieve sustained improvement across school systems (see the article by Greany and Earley which is also in this issue). Instead, the aim has been to ask school system leaders to work together in ways which transfer knowledge, expertise and capacity within and between schools, so that all schools improve and all children achieve their potential. There is emerging evidence that such models can prove effective in addressing underperformance and improving outcomes, in particular in some of the most challenging schools. However, as this article highlights, England’s ‘self-improving’ system also faces significant challenges, at both conceptual and practical levels.
The role of school partnerships in England’s quasi-market system
Strange bedfellows: autonomy, accountability, competition and collaboration
Granting schools autonomy to determine how they secure improvement whilst holding them accountable for their performance has become an increasingly central tenet of international thinking and policy on school system reform (OECD, 2015). Such approaches are frequently associated with wider quasi-market reforms, such as giving parents the right to choose which school they prefer for their child, backed by funding models which reward more popular schools. The argument for granting schools autonomy is that it will free them up from hidebound bureaucracies and make them more responsive to their parent ‘customers’ (Institute for Government, 2012). Quasi-markets are thus clearly predicated on competition between providers as the primary driver of improvement (Lubienski, 2009). Of course, in practice, public education systems are not markets in the true sense of the word, since the consumer does not pay and failing providers (i.e. schools) are rarely allowed to close altogether.
England is recognised as a relatively extreme example of high-school-autonomy-high-accountability quasi-market (or neo-liberal) reform by international standards. By the time of PISA 2009, schools in the UK were judged to be among the most autonomous in the world1 (OECD, 2011) and few would argue that they are also among the most accountable (for example, as a result of high stakes inspections published by the inspectorate Ofsted). Given this focus on quasi-markets and competition, it may seem strange that England now sees networking and collaboration as central to the success of its ‘self-improving school system’. How and why has this happened?