The recently published Schools White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, feels remarkably familiar in both its headline vision and many of its details. For those of us at Challenge Partners, it is like seeing our 15-year mission for pupil excellence and equity, and collaboration-driven ‘upwards convergence’ in school performance reflected back at us in national policy. As the sector prepares for these reforms, we are proud that Challenge Partners is already trailblazing many of the specific approaches highlighted.
Breaking the link between background and success
The White Paper sets a bold ambition to halve the disadvantage gap and aims for 10,000 more disadvantaged pupils to meet the expected standard in primary reading, writing, and maths. In our latest Impact Report, we calculated that if all primary schools performed at the level of ours, 8,000 more disadvantaged 11-year-olds would already be meeting this standard.
With a similar pattern among our secondary schools, we are confident that some of them will be among the 300 mainstream comprehensives the White Paper says are already meeting the government’s goal of “children achieving a grade 5 or above on average across their GCSEs, with disadvantaged children achieving at the level needed to halve the national disadvantage gap even as overall standards rise”.
Though scant on detail, the government’s Mission North East and Mission Coastal share our drive to accelerate collaboration and impact in areas of greatest need, as well as our origins in the London Challenge. Since establishing in 2024 a North East Mainstream Hub alongside our longstanding North East Special Hub, it has been our fastest-growing region, and we are ready to play our part alongside others in improving life chances for young people across the North East.
High standards and inclusion
A core theme of the White Paper is that high standards and inclusion are "two reinforcing halves of the same coin". This resonates deeply with our belief that a truly excellent system must be an equitable one, where children facing the greatest barriers - whether through socio-economic disadvantage or special needs - are prioritised for additional support to succeed.
The accompanying consultation, SEND Reform: Putting Children and Young People First, emphasises the ambition for mainstream schools to be better equipped to meet a wider range of needs. Our SEND Developmental Peer Review is already doing exactly this, helping mainstream schools evaluate and improve their provision. We are augmenting the programme this year by piloting the inclusion of specialist provisions to promote reciprocal learning between mainstream and special settings, so we welcome the government’s encouragement of this type of cross-sector learning. With 24% of schools in our partnership from the specialist sector, we have rich, deep SEND expertise to draw from.
Collaboration: A core responsibility
The White Paper is clear that "collaboration is a core responsibility of every school leader". This underpins the expectation that all schools will join or form high-quality trusts (though with no compulsion or timescale for doing so). Schools and trusts are also expected to collaborate with each other, local authorities and the other local services which the White Paper commits the government to restore so schools do not face the challenge of meeting complex needs alone.
New Trust Standards, annual public benefit reporting, and trust inspection frameworks will embed the expectation on “all school trusts to look outward with purpose, to share expertise and support others to improve”. This mirrors our Trust Peer Review, which specifically evaluates the trust’s contribution to the sector alongside its impact on its own schools and pupils. We welcome the White Paper’s commitment to the focus of trust inspection being on “assessing quality, rather than checking for compliance and it will consider the efficacy of a trust’s activity, rather than prescribing particular approaches” - a methodology embedded in our Trust Peer Reviews since their inception in 2018.
Disciplined innovation and quality assurance
A central tenet of the reforms is a self-improving system driven by "disciplined innovation" and a recognition that "for almost every challenge our system faces, there is excellent practice somewhere, or the ingenuity to develop it".
Challenge Partners was founded on these principles, which are operationalised in our systematic approach to hard-edged collaboration and knowledge exchange. Fundamental to this is our rigorous peer-led approach to identifying what truly works, ensuring only replicable leading practice is promoted and that we never recycle mediocrity.
Our Quality Assurance (QA) Reviews are the main vehicle for this and already ahead of the White Paper curve in their focus. Well-received changes to our framework this year support assessment of how well schools foster engagement and inclusion. And our QA Reviews have long provided a sharp focus on how well disadvantaged and SEND pupils are served, with scope to evaluate how enrichment and parental engagement, foregrounded in the White Paper, contribute to their development and outcomes. We are delighted to accept the White Paper’s invitation to share expertise as the government works up its proposals for funded Pupil Premium strategy reviews.
Intent to implementation
Meeting in the days after the White Paper was published, our Education Advisory Group (representing schools and trusts across our partnership) were optimistic about the direction, overwhelmed by the scope, and curious about the practicalities. As the proposals take shape in the weeks and months ahead, we stand ready to share our established expertise and infrastructure, playing our part in ensuring that the commitment to a self-improving system translates into a tangible, positive change for every child.