All our schools participate in the Challenge Partners programme, helping us collaborate with like-minded schools and trusts to drive school improvement. Find out more here.
School leadership has a huge impact on the experience of education for children, and we understand that high standards at the leadership level help foster high standards and improved outcomes for everyone in our schools.
With this in mind, all of our schools are partner schools in the national school leadership and improvement programme, Challenge Partners.
Led by a group of headteachers, Challenge Partners is a collaboration-oriented standards-setting organisation focused on spreading good practice.
As part of their mission, they run three-day quality assurance reviews, led by lead reviewers with experience as Ofsted inspectors, of all their partner schools. We’re proud to state that, after rigorous inspection, all of our schools have been rated as highly effective schools with most achieving the highest rating in the leadership category of the review criteria. Recently, two schools, Brookside Primary School and Manor High School, have even been officially designated as “an exemplification of leading practice”, meaning they represent examples of what to aim for to other schools looking to improve.
Describing Brookside Primary School, reviewers said: “The Pupils’ remarkable achievement is due to a combination of factors. Highly skilled teaching and an engaging and challenging curriculum, together with the clear identification of pupils’ individual needs and next steps form a potent elixir.”
Meanwhile, the recent report at Woodland Grange Primary School stated: “The forward-looking headteacher, together with her proactive senior leaders, have built an ambitious and caring school.”
Finally, the visiting delegation to Manor High School, which has been judged to be a leading school in all categories, were impressed by the leadership standards throughout the school: “The leadership team is very visible to the students. There is a sense of community and real trust amongst students that their concerns will be tackled, together with confidence in the way decisions are made. One student said, ‘They reach out to us, we don’t reach out to them’.”
These inspections demonstrate the high quality of our School Improvement Support, CPD for staff, and the excellent development of our pupils. You can read more about what reviewers had to say about each school in blogs soon to be published on their websites.
We know that improvement can only come with scrutiny of current practices, and we’ve been incredibly impressed with how our schools have embraced this quality assurance programme. As a result of their success, our schools are now being used under the scheme as examples of good practice, with our staff participating in the “Growing the top” programme bringing close collaboration with other partner schools who are also amongst the best in the country.
Challenge Partners is just one way we work towards school improvement. You can find out more about the scheme here: https://www.challengepartners.org/about-us