So why did they engage in peer review? 

Peer review within the Alliance emerged in response to the question of how to build deeper partnerships that directly impacted on the quality of education each school could provide. 

There was found to be a lot of positive and helpful activity within the alliance but, as the alliance grew in number, leaders realised that they needed to connect to one another in deeper, improvement-focused partnerships within the overall alliance. The aim was to build a network of improvement partnerships that moved beyond transactional interactions between schools and into transformational interactions. 

In the initial stages, leaders within the partnership began by measuring engagement in peer review. However, as the groups have matured, leaders are increasingly focused on capturing the precise changes and improvements that have been made as a result of the peer review process. Peer review groups meet on their own but also together with the wider alliance to discuss the journey toward a robust and effective peer review model. 

 When reflecting on the impact of peer review, one headteacher said: 

“Peer review for me has created a deeper sense of harmony, in that we are all working together for one aim - outcomes for children in all the settings we’re partnered with. I feel a genuine sense of collaboration when working together with our team and a true sense of responsibility when I’m reviewing another school.

As our partnership has deepened in maturity, we’ve learned lots of lessons and reviewed our methods and one of the reflections from the first year was about how we follow through that sense of responsibility for each other’s schools. We’ve now built in a stronger mechanism for accountability, for checking back and seeing how it’s going.”