The Partnership Agreement
The Southwest London School Effectiveness Partnership is a co-operative and collaborative arrangement among the London boroughs of Kingston, Merton, Richmond, Sutton and Wandsworth working in association with the Anglicn Diocese of Southwark.Mission
This partnership allows individual southwest London authorities to build their capacity for school improvement, through co-operation and joint project work.
Purpose
The partnership is designed to allow partner authorities to gain strength and increase their effectiveness, by sharing their capacity, supporting each other's work and identifying and developing innovative solutions to national and local agendas. This will enhance, rather than replace individual school improvement services.
Intended outcome for schools
The aim of this work is that schools in the SWLSEP area will be supported in their improvement , so that Ofsted would judge all of them as at least ‘good', with many graded as ‘outstanding'.
Principles
- Within the partnership, each authority retains its individual structure and accountabilities.
- Partners working together will offer a wider range of school improvement provision, support and services to their schools, by sharing their capacity and encouraging schools to work together and share best practice.
- All partners remain free to work in collaboration with other providers (from outside of the partnership), in order to further their own needs.
- Partner authorities will, where appropriate, to plan jointly - so as to avoid unhelpful repetition of provision.
- Partners will agree on a pricing structure to reduce the costs of purchasing support from outside of the partnership, in order to provide a low-cost, high-quality range of support.
- Partners may collaborate, where appropriate, to commission work - to ensure best value.
- Partners will provide CPD possibilities for their teams, through access to a greater range of work and planned development opportunities.
- There will be no central bureaucracy set up to support this work other than some admin to support management meetings.
Organisation
- The five heads of school improvement and their deputies will meet regularly to review provision and plan against identified needs.
- Individual authorities will also meet, as necessary, taking joint projects forward.
- Membership of the partnership will be renewed annually.
- All joint projects will be monitored and evaluated annually by the partnership, to ensure that quality is maintained. Where possible, joint methods of gaining feedback on services will be adopted.