Schools Can't Do It All. So, How Best To Ask For Help?

Schools need durable partnershps with other types of organisation to do all that they can for their students and all that is expected of them by government. These five principles are a place to start.

In our book Greater Expectations: Enabling Achievement for Disadvantaged Students, we wrote at length about the qualities that make for effective partnership working. The following principles represent an updated though not radically different version of our original take.

The Department for Education’s recently-published Enrichment Benchmarks are an important challenge to schools to be more than exam factories. They arrive at a good time. The preliminary report from the Millburn Review into adolescent and young adult unemployment decried this tendency as contributing to “a record of failure” in education that has fallen most heavily on white working class communities.

There’s a great deal to like about the Enrichment Benchmarks, much of which was discussed in a previous post. One of the stylistic features we most appreciate is the willingness to confront reality: working in isolation, few schools are likely to offer young people the range of enrichment opportunities needed to prepare them to succeed in modern Britain. To meet this test, schools will need to form durable partnerships—with one another and with other types of civil society organisations: businesses, hospitals, youth groups, sports centres, and the like.

What follows are a series of five recommendations for effective partnership working based on our respective experiences of building these relationships. We are not focused exclusively, or even primarily, on Enrichment. We hope our recommendations are relevant to schools looking to partner with other types of organisations in support of any goal that improves the quality and effectiveness of the education they provide. They could equally apply, for example, to schools wishing to partner with local businesses to meet rising, if still wooly, expectations of vocational education.

For our purposes, we take ‘educational partnership’ to mean any agreement between one or more schools and a third party organisation that contributes to the quality and/or effectiveness of students’ education, and based on which either party may reliably commit resources or make medium-term plans.

1. Start with self-awareness

One of the principal obstacles to schools partnering well with other types of organisation is that schools are profoundly strange institutions whose staff regard them as profoundly normal. Timetables, duty rotas, directed versus ‘PPA’ time, leadership points, safeguarding regulations, routine consultations—most of these are either alien to or have only indirect parallels in commercial businesses. Even other parts of the public sector, culturally closer to schools, often function very differently.

Expectation of partnership behaviours will be correspondingly different. A common point of tension is the tendency of business leaders to imagine that schools can match their agility when it comes to organising events or programmes at short notice. This is almost never true. Many school staff and leaders make the mistake of framing this as a shortcoming of the partner.

A better strategy is to start with a recognition of our own idiosyncracy and try to explain to potential partners the limitations schools face, what sorts of opportunities they find useful, how they can best take them up, and to identify the broad swathe of well-intentioned activity that is likely to prove too challenging to undertake.

2. Partner wisely (and at the right level)

Choosing the right partner organisation, or organisations, is probably the single most important decision a school can make. Partnership needs to be grounded in a shared set of values and perhaps even a shared philosophy. The London Academy of Excellence has partnered for several years with the global law firm Latham & Watkins. The partnership is founded on a shared commitment to excellence, an unapologetic level of ambition and a willingness to take risks and try new things. These values don’t diminish the importance of clear goals and rigorous planning, but they are the connective tissue that enables the partnership to hang together if ever day-to-day reality undershoots our expectations.

It also matters where and with whom the partnership rests. People who work in schools are often uncomfortable with professional hierarchy, but it exists for a reason. Partnerships need institutional commitment that can only be delivered at a senior level. A head of department might start working with a local museum, for example, but the relationship can only become a partnership in the sense suggested above if the Head or Principal commits to it. The same is true from the partner’s perspective; the curator of a specific exhibit can organise a trip, but she can’t sign off on a multi-year partnership without the positive support of her Museum Director.

3. Set clear goals

It is vitally important from the start to establish the partnership’s near-, medium- and ultimate aims. Partnership itself is not an aim. Nor is ‘giving something back’, satisfying government priorities, networking, promoting social cohesion or raising school profiles. Such levels of vagueness serve no one well. The wider aims can be highly ambitious, such as improving social mobility, but they need to be chunked into identifiable, achievable milestones. If these aims are closely tied to addressing known curriculum deficits or extra-curricular developments that could however tangentially improve results, then they will be undoubtedly secure greater buy-in from teachers.

This search for purpose needs to be based on a sound and secure understanding of the specific issues being faced in-school and the partner’s effective capacity to support. Ideally, this rationale and the goals that flow from it will be captured in a clear memorandum of understanding or other guide to how the partnership should function in practice. The function of such documents is not any legal weight they may carry; it’s the clarity of thinking and the extent of the dialogue necessary to produce sensible goals in the first place.

4. Review and adapt regularly

Successful partnerships aren’t set in aspic; they evolve. Day 1 priorities only remain relevant on Day 1,000 under two circumstances: either they were framed too abstractly, frustrating the need for clear goals; or the partnership has failed to deliver. Change is inevitable, and needs to be recognised, so that a partnership is not seen to be meeting expressed needs that may have been relevant from years before, that have now radically shifted, or been met.

There needs to be an upfront agreement as to who is given the power to agree or to veto approaches from other schools and to clarify procedures to shift the balance and focus of the programme or partnership as and when it is needed. So a useful question any partnership should be asking themselves from the very beginning has to be, what developments might be next? Planning in quite formal opportunities to re-visit the ‘What Next?’ question at a project level is key.

Perhaps there is a need for an annual exercise revisiting the extent to which the partnership is meeting its overall objectives. Closely followed by how best to capture processes, rather than just narrative descriptions, to try to preserve the authentic voice of the educators and learners to enable practice to be understood as it is.

5. Cultivate trust

It is easy in education to assume that goodwill is in endless supply. Sadly, this is not the case. Likewise, partner organisations can never be as steeped in school values and culture as people working in the school itself. For these and other reasons, a genuine partnership must have the development of trust as a central objective, contributing to its effectiveness and longevity.

There is no substitute for candid, ongoing dialogue about the partnership. Conversations must focus as much on identifying what isn’t working and how to correct it, as on celebrating those things that are already working well. Review meetings are therefore essential, but so are clearly-identified points of contact, regular check-ins and the willingness to pick up a phone, write an email or otherwise reach out in the moment. In summary, thought needs to be given to how the hearts and minds agenda becomes central to the moral purpose of the relationship between colleagues from both partners.