School partnerships alliance
About us
The School Partnerships Alliance (S.P.A.) is the membership organisation dedicated to researching, enabling and promoting meaningful partnerships between different schools across the state and independent sectors for the benefit of children throughout the national education system.
Why we exist
Our over-arching objective is to be a force for school improvement and the strongest pupil outcomes, informed by research and driven by impact.
S.P.A.’s origins are as an expert group of volunteers: The Schools Together Group, which raised the profile of Independent State School Partnerships (ISSPs). They advised on setting up new school partnerships, supported peer-to-peer engagement and helped to capture case studies. Their ambition was to more formally support school partnership work and the development of practitioners. S.P.A. was founded as a charity in 2021 to make this happen.
We believe that school partnerships should:
- Become a force of improvement in the whole system.
- Support learner aspirations, academic outcomes, social enrichment and well-being.
- Be focused on the sharing of resources and foster professional learning for staff.
What we do
To achieve maximum impact through school partnerships, we work to:
- Raise the profile, status and access to partnership working;
- Better understand and evaluate the impact of partnership working; and
- Equip partnership leads with a common language and framework that will help schools at every stage of partnership engagement and development.
There is already a significant amount of hugely important partnership work carried out between state and independent schools which have come together voluntarily as equal partners, at varying levels and by different methods, for the mutual benefit of their pupils.
While supporting and promoting these existing school-to-school partnerships, S.P.A. also enables schools to forge new and sustainable partnerships. Our Innovation Hub acts as an incubator to enable strong, impactful projects to be replicated in schools in other areas, ensuring successful models have wider impact.
What this means for children
A schools system in which all schools, wherever they are and whatever their size and resources, are engaged in meaningful partnerships, with all parties learning from one another, would help achieve the strongest outcomes for all children, including those in disadvantaged communities.
What this means for schools
S.P.A. supports schools to develop and promote strong and successful cross-sector partnerships, ensure impact assessment outcomes and measurement are robust and meaningful and provides advice and guidance every step of the way. With S.P.A.’s help, schools at every stage of partnership engagement and development can work together in strong collaboration for the joint purpose of achieving common good.
What this means for partnerships
Partnerships consist of cross-sector collaboration characterised by the sharing of resources. What this looks like in practice can be tailored to the needs of those involved, but examples include partnerships to support digital innovation, strong STEM teaching and learning, the sponsoring of teachers, successful well-being projects or the sharing of sector-leading professional development programmes.
The most important factor is for partnerships to be mutually productive and make a materially positive difference to the educational, social and employment outcomes and opportunities of the pupils educated across the partnership.
The most important factor is for partnerships to be mutually productive and make a materially positive difference to the educational, social and employment outcomes and opportunities of the pupils educated across the partnership.