Challenge Partners

Challenge Partners is a practitioner-led charity that enables collaboration between schools to enhance the life chances of all children, especially the most disadvantaged. Our unique approach has been developed over more than 20 years' work. Challenge Partners was formed to continue the learning which emerged from the development of Teaching Schools that evolved out of the London Challenge. We provide networks and programmes that facilitate sustainable collaboration and challenge between schools in order to underpin improvements in educational outcomes which would not be possible for a school, or group of schools, to achieve as effectively or efficiently on its own. Our work assumes that if we build a trusted practitioner-led network, identify the knowledge and skills of the best, and facilitate effective collaboration with the rest, then we reduce the variability in provision. And if we also link the best schools with external knowledge, we drive up the performance of all schools, leaders, teachers and pupils in the network and by harnessing the collective voice of member schools we empower them to influence national policy and practice for the benefit of all. The two Associates will be working on three primary focus areas: developing and launching a new programme based on leadership for our member schools, looking at the information we generate about our schools through the programmes we run, and how we can use this information to allow schools to connect with each other more effectively via our online platform, the School Support Directory.