Partnerships between state-maintained and independent schools have existed for decades, formally introduced by the Labour government in 1997, when they charged private schools with sharing their facilities and teachers with local state-maintained schools to address the ‘educational apartheid created by the public/private divide diminishes the whole education system’ (DFEE, 1997). Successive Governments funded independent state school partnerships, investing around £15 million in them between 1998 and 2011 (ISC, 2013). Since then, funding has been sporadic, with the last in 2019. In this round, applicants had to show how their project would ‘support pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds’ (DfE, 2019a, p.4). 

This report is an analysis of responses to a survey investigating how their partnership work is reaching disadvantaged pupils. It was completed by six members of the School Partnerships Alliance, all of which were secondary phase independent schools. In total, the research covers 10 secondary 

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