Much of the discourse so far on the DfE’s new Regional Improvement in Standards and Education (RISE) teams has focused on targeted support. Questions about commissioning and accountability are discouraging exceptional school and trust leaders I’ve spoken to from applying for team adviser roles. I urge them to reconsider, focusing instead on advisers’ broader and more alluring role in the universal offer.
For too long, school improvement policy has been based on a deficit model, with the emphasis on intervention in ‘under-performing’ schools. I am well aware of this, having been responsible in my former role as a senior civil servant for implementing the £400-million National Challenge programme under Ed Balls.
That initiative saw government-funded ‘National Challenge Advisors’ devise and deliver bespoke improvement plans for around 700 secondary schools at risk or below the ‘floor target’ of 30 per cent of students achieving five good GCSEs, including English and maths.
Last week, DfE indicated far fewer schools would be in scope for targeted support from RISE teams – suggesting a figure in the “low hundreds”.
By contrast, the universal offer commencing in April 2025 has the potential to make a difference to thousands of schools and millions of pupils. It is a task I hope school and trust leaders will be queuing up to play their part in.
Challenge Partners has worked since 2011 to drive ‘upwards convergence’ in the school system. We invest as much effort in ‘growing the top’ as tackling weaker areas, because it is only by stimulating the best to rise higher that we can push the boundaries of strong performance and create the capacity to move the whole system up.
So I am excited by a government approach to school improvement predicated on a similar principle of continuous improvement for all schools, where even the best are expected to get better.
RISE teams are also intended to align resources and system endeavours around agreed local priorities. This mirrors the approach embodied in Challenge Partners’ 34 local hubs, locally constituted and led groups of schools, often drawn from across phases, trusts, governance types, specialist and mainstream provisions.
Success relies on everyone playing their part
Our hubs collaborate to deliver a funded action plan to tackle needs collectively that are decided by participating schools and informed by an annual peer review of each school.
For example, the Aspire hub provides a vehicle for collaborative profession-led improvement across the north west. Encompassing 64 schools and 10 trusts across 16 local authorities, the hub is jointly led by co-‘senior partners’ from Forward as One Trust and Wade Deacon Trust, who share the belief that, with so much at stake, collaboration can’t be fluffy.
Of course, success relies on all schools and partners playing their part in realising collective goals. But the trusts provide the ‘organisational capital’ to run the hub and co-ordinate activities. These have centred in recent years on improving SEND provision by learning from special schools in the Leicester-based Ash Field hub .
What makes our hubs effective is that they are locally determined, with sensitivity to the local education landscape. As DfE configures RISE teams, they should embrace regional variations and grant them the latitude to craft their own priorities and improvement approaches, based on local education leaders’ greater knowledge of the challenges they face and the capacity available.
Where possible, they should build on the infrastructure and connections that remain from Opportunity Areas and Priority Education Investment Areas (PEIA), rather than starting again from scratch.
What they could add is something I’ve often felt lacking as Liverpool PEIA chair, and which is evident in the work of the Aspire hub to learn from its Leicester counterpart.
Namely, we need more systematic joining up of parallel efforts in different areas so they can learn from each other and spread excellence, avoiding the inefficiency of each reinventing the wheel and the injustice of further entrenching regional disparities.
We can only achieve these ambitions if the exceptional school and trust leaders with school improvement capacity and wisdom to share step forward to contribute as advisers.
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