Following the initiation of the LocalED project in April 2022, you can review below the progress made in the first six-months of the organisations involved in Pilot 3:

Schools Alliance for Excellence in Surrey

At the Schools Alliance for Excellence (SAfE) they believe that a truly great education system is one that is both ambitious and inclusive – one that supports all our young people, regardless of their backgrounds or challenges, to live their best lives and one where we work together as a connected system to realise this. The challenge SAfE faces is that the accountability measures are not always aligned with the ‘inclusive’ aspect of this vision, frequently setting ambition and inclusion in tension with each other, frequently setting schools in competition with each other.  Worse still, SAfE thinks that, at times, these measures not only fail to measure the things we value, but distort the quality of education that schools choose to deliver.

Therefore, the SAfE pilot is an exciting opportunity to collectively to look beyond the constraints of the current top-down accountability systems. They are working with two pilot groups of schools and academies – one geographically close and one spread across the county – to develop a new Surrey locality accountability framework that incentivises schools to be ambitious and inclusive and capture the real story of the school.

The groups will initially choose their own focus for accountability and develop the framework and measures. The pilot groups will also trial one or more approach to using the new accountability framework across their group – potentially peer review, self-evaluation, action learning sets or score-cards. The pilot groups are supported and guided by a steering group from SAfE and from the schools and partners that also champions and advocates for inclusive local accountability.

You can read a more detailed summary here.

 

Ealing Learning Partnership

This is a place-based partnership between 85 schools in the area, and the council, to promote educational excellence and wellbeing for all children and young people framed through the approaches:

  • No learner left behind: to ensure that every learner is supported to achieve the best possible experience, outcomes and pathways to adulthood.
  • No school left behind: to respond to the needs of individual schools and communities of schools so that collectively they can make the greatest difference to children and young people.

For the purposes of this research, the Ealing Learning Partnership is developing and researching a new style of formative peer review called ‘Peer Enquiry and Review’, building on previously established models. The model is part of a suite of school improvement processes and tools that will be delivered through five Learning Clusters of 12-13 schools and learning triads within each cluster. Two of the clusters are inviting their triads to be involved more closely with the research, data collection and evaluation.

The Peer Enquiry and Review supports schools to articulate strengths, pinpoint and review priority areas that need further development, challenge and learn from each other, within a culture of mutual respect, collective accountability and responsibility. This supports the partnership’s ambition to build strong, supportive, and mutually beneficial relationships that deliver sustainable school-led self-improvement.

 

Learn Sheffield

Sheffield is a core city with over 180 publicly funded settings. It has a demographically diverse school population, which includes some of the most and least advantaged cohorts in the country. The majority of Sheffield settings are academies.

The city has a well-established collaborative approach to school improvement and Learn Sheffield was formed in 2015 as a not-for-profit school’s company, which is 80% owned by Sheffield schools and colleges and 20% owned by Sheffield City Council. 100% of eligible settings are members of Learn Sheffield.

Learn Sheffield currently delivers both statutory school improvement (commissioned by Sheffield City Council) and a traded subscription offer. 91.2% of Sheffield settings have chosen to purchase a Learn Sheffield subscription package in 2022/23.

Sheffield is taking part in the third strand of the pilot which is titled ‘Towards a new model of professional accountability’. The Sheffield pilot will contain two strands:

  • Strand A: the development of school report cards to test how different reported information about a school could provide a more rounded perspective of a school and enhance both the culture of professional accountability and the quality of information for parents, carers and the community.
  • Strand B: moderated multi-academy trust (MAT) peer review to support rigorous internal evaluation using external (to the MAT but not the civic partnership) moderation. This will develop a locality framework to support rigorous and supportive accountability and explore how this might promote local professional accountability.