Strengthening professional accountability through local education partnerships
This blog summarises our recent work supporting four local education partnerships.
What were we asked to do?
Isos Partnership was engaged to support four local education partnerships as part of the LocalEd 2025 programme, sponsored by the Association of Education Committees Trust. This work was aimed at exploring how local systems could strengthen professional accountability within education through partnership-led innovation. You can read more detail about the project in our blog. As part of the LocalEd 2025 project we also worked on a project that explored a “granular approach” to addressing vulnerability and you can read about our work here.
The project aimed to:
Develop and test new approaches to professional accountability within local education systems.
Support schools and teachers to feel ownership of accountability, rooted in professional practice rather than external enforcement.
Encourage collaboration and shared improvement across schools and partnerships.
Generate learning that could be scaled and adopted more widely across local areas.
The brief focused on working with four local areas- Ealing, Milton Keynes, Sheffield and Surrey- to pilot a range of approaches to strengthen professional accountability. The key areas of focus included:
Enhancing school self-evaluation tied to rigorous evidence.
Developing new forms of school reports that offer a broader, more balanced picture for parents, carers and communities.
Exploring peer review models that enable practitioner-led external challenge.
Understanding how local education partnerships themselves can support a culture of professional accountability.
What did we do?
Isos Partnership collaborated closely with each local area’s education partnership to design, implement and reflect on pilot activities. Our approach combined research, facilitation, peer learning and ongoing structured engagement - our Isos Partnership approach.
The Isos Partnership approach to building learning communities with local areas
School reports pilots: Worked with Milton Keynes Education Partnership and Learn Sheffield to co-design and trial innovative school reports that broadened how school performance and strengths are communicated. These reports incorporated not only data but also narrative elements that reflected each school’s ethos and culture.
Collaborative improvement activities: In Milton Keynes, this included a Key Stage 3 Reading for Life project that built collaborative capacity and strengthened local practice.
Peer review & self-evaluation: In Ealing and Surrey, the focus was on developing peer review processes and self-evaluation frameworks that empowered schools to reflect rigorously on their own practice, and work together to address shared priorities.
Community of practice: We facilitated shared learning across the four partnerships through regular check-ins, joint reflection sessions and participation in national conferences, helping to build a community of practice that supported collective learning and reinforced shared goals.
Partnership strengthening: Throughout, the role of the local education partnership was supported to embed trust, reciprocity and local leadership- crucial conditions that enabled the pilot activities to be delivered meaningfully.
What difference did we make?
Schools and leaders reported positive reception to new approaches, particularly the broader school reports which offered richer insight than traditional formats and were valued by leadership teams, parents and carers.
Pilots helped foster greater professional ownership of accountability, with feedback indicating that school leaders appreciated opportunities to present their school’s story and highlight context-specific strengths and challenges.
The pilots helped stimulate collaborative improvement activity across schools, strengthening professional dialogue and mutual support mechanisms- especially in the areas of peer review and cluster-based work.
Partnerships strengthened their roles as trusted convenors, fostering conditions where schools were more willing to engage with collective initiatives and share practice.
Pilot school reports from Milton Keynes and Learn Sheffield captured alternative ways to present school performance and narrative context.
The work was presented at the LocalEd 2025 national conference in January 2025, where findings and tools were shared with a wider audience.
The pilots and reflections from leaders pointed to the value of locality-based models in building trust, enhancing professional agency, and encouraging shared responsibility for improvement among schools, parents and local partners.
‘The work Ealing is doing is really influencing schools and it feels much more collaborative… there is increased professional pride.’ - Learning Cluster Lead, Ealing Learning Partnership
‘It was important that the mentor team in Christine Gilbert, and the Isos Partnership team of Simon Day, Simon Rea and Ben Bryant, had people who were able to bring authority and national best practice to the discussions.’ - Jonathan Crossley-Holland, Conference Report, January 2025