Trust Peer Review
Drive sustainable school improvement across your school trust
All trusts are different. And while there’s no single formula for trust success, trust leaders share a singular ambition to drive improvement in their schools and enhance outcomes for the children and young people they serve.
Challenge Partner’s Trust Peer Review (TPR) is an expert-led three-day review, which evaluates a school trust’s effectiveness in driving improvement in its schools and outcomes for the children and young people it serves.
The Trust Peer Review is for school trust leaders who want to enable and enhance development and improvement across their schools.
How it works:
An external review team, led by an independent expert, teams up with host trust leaders, spending three days exploring strengths, areas for development and next steps. Host leaders are encouraged to focus on a particular challenge and involve their peers.
The review does not evaluate the trust against a pre-defined model or set of assumptions about what effective trust school improvement looks like. It offers no “judgement” but does provide feedback on what is going well and what the school trust needs to do to move forward.
Challenge Partners also trains host trust leaders as peer reviewers to review other school trusts, providing the opportunity to professionally develop leadership skills, visit trusts in different contexts with different approaches, and magpie ideas to take back to their own trust.
What partners say:
"[It] has helped to confirm that we are developing our trust along the right lines and to articulate areas for development and consideration. It also gave us feedback from a number of people in the trust outside the executive team."
"The opportunity to prepare for, discuss and concentrate on school improvement was incredibly valuable. [This] allowed us to really firm up our purpose and next steps."
“Being a reviewer gave me perspectives across all aspects of the trust: staff, leadership, governance, etc. and this was really helpful in understanding how the trust operated as well as providing real insights into my own situation. Reflection after the review has led to some substantial change here.”
Carolyn Morgan, CEO, Ascent Academies Trust
Challenge Partners' Trust Peer Review has been independently evaluated by the NFER and their positive report is published here.
How to access the Trust Peer Review:
To join the Trust Peer Review, your trust must join Challenge Partners for the next partnership year. The partnership year runs from September to July each academic year. Joining the Trust Peer Review will also provide access to all of the benefits of the national Network of Excellence.
For pricing and enquiries, please click here.
You can also sign up your schools to partner with Challenge Partners to benefit from our school improvement programmes and knowledge exchange networks.
Video: How one trust benefitted from the Trust Peer Review