The Surrey Confederations website provides information on effective partnership working, case studies, best practice, and has links to all the individual Surrey Confederations and key stakeholders.

The website is updated regularly - if you have any comments about the site or any information that you think would be useful to add, please contact the adminstrator

SUMMER TERM 2012

Welcome to the summer term of 2012. Ofsted have now made their intentions clear and by the end of this year we are likely to see 15% of inspected schools placed into a category. So what can you do about this within your partnerships?

Many partnerships already organise CPD events and workshops, but there are many other ways schools can support each other in this turbulent time.

• Producing a joint SEF and action plan to target specific issues. Quite often schools are working on the same issues but don’t always realise it.
• Share the problems and the issues to identify solutions. This requires trust and respect within the partnership.
• Use of learning walks and shadowing across the partnership. These are simple ways to offer teachers and support staff local level CPD to help raise standards
• Joint policies and procedures. This will save time and also ensure for more effective transition, especially from KS2 to KS3.
• Sharing staff to help raise standards. Within each partnership there will be a comprehensive range of staff, which will have the qualities and expertise to raise standards and share best practice. Schools can look to ‘swap’ staff etc. to get the most from their expertise and experience.
• Identifying preferred supply staff. Using an ‘ ebay’  style approach to grading supply staff can help all schools within a partnership.
• Commissioning of services. Often schools would like more support services to meet the need of their pupils, but do not have the funding. Joint commissioning can enable all schools in the partnership to be more cost effective and improve services.
• Procurement of services. Schools can get much better value for money if they work together on procurement of a range of services.

These ideas are just a few approaches that partnerships could be looking at to ensure they are meeting the needs and requirements of all their schools. If you know of others then let us know as we would like to continue to add more ideas to ensure partnership working is the solution for the future sustainability of schools.

Mark Scarborough 

Senior Consultant for Extended Services - Inclusion

Babcock 4S

Email: mark.scarborough@babcock.co.uk

Mobile: 07717 536843