As schools await this year’s SATs results, thousands of teachers and leaders will be reflecting on what has gone well, what they would do differently next year and what they have learned along the way. That process of reflection is one of the great strengths of our profession. Education only moves forward when teachers and leaders have been willing to share what works, learn from one another and improve together. We learn best when we learn together. It is also why the success of the government’s RISE school improvement programme will ultimately depend on something very simple: whether it helps schools connect with one another in meaningful and practical ways. The ambition behind RISE is hard to disagree with. There is a wealth of expertise, experience and effective practice across the education system. The challenge has never been whether that expertise exists, it’s how we make it accessible at scale. REAch2 has helped to explore that challenge through the RISE east of England teaching exchange. Over the past seven months, practitioners from hundreds of schools, trusts, dioceses and local authorities have focused on strengthening practice in the lead-up to SATs, with the goal of improving key stage 2 outcomes. The programme offered 36 free live webinars, a dedicated microsite accessed by more than 16,000 visitors, downloadable classroom resources, on-demand webinar content, leadership development opportunities and access to wider English and maths hub support Sharing expertise But what matters more than the scale of the programme is the way in which this knowledge and expertise have been shared. From the get-go, we were determined this would not be a programme where expertise was simply transmitted from one organisation to another. Instead, we wanted to create opportunities for genuine professional exchange. That meant bringing together different parts of the system around a common purpose. Trusts working alongside local authorities. Subject hubs sharing expertise with schools that had never engaged with them before. School leaders, subject leaders and classroom teachers learning from one another’s experiences. The result was something that felt less like a programme delivered to schools like tablets of stones from the Mount, but instead more a collective endeavour with schools and practitioners learning from each other and with each other. Too often, school improvement falls squarely into the “done to” category, rather than something that happens with them. Yet some of the most powerful professional learning happens when practitioners engage with colleagues facing similar challenges, to ask questions, test ideas and adapt approaches to their own contexts. We saw examples of exactly that throughout the teaching exchange. Teachers looking for practical strategies they could use the next day. Subject leaders refining approaches to reading and mathematics. School leaders exploring how they could strengthen provision across their schools. Experienced colleagues supporting those newer to a role. Unlocking expertise At a time when schools face significant pressures, from improving outcomes for disadvantaged pupils to supporting increasingly complex needs, there is enormous value in creating structures that allow expertise to travel more freely across the system and not get stuck at organisational boundaries. And this is where RISE has the potential to genuinely make a real difference. It is a model where existing expertise can be unlocked to the benefit of so many more schools than before. And the experience of the east of England teaching exchange suggests that when schools are given the opportunity to learn from one another, they seize it. As this year’s SATs results arrive, we will rightly focus on outcomes. But we should also pay attention to the conditions that help those outcomes to improve, not just this year but building over time. And one of the most important of those conditions is making sure that great practice does not remain isolated within individual schools, trusts or regions. If RISE continues to help make that happen, it has the potential to become one of the most valuable school improvement programmes in the system.