Offering a comprehensive evaluation of education reforms in three regions, seeking to identify common factors in driving school improvement, this report may make for particularly interesting reading for school leaders and policy makers.
Evaluation of the City Challenge programme
Inter-school collaboration
Leadership and governance
Regional / location differences
System improvement and collaboration
UK policy
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Synopsis
This report sets out the findings of a mixed methods evaluation of the City Challenge programme in London, Greater Manchester and the Black Country, and a retrospective review of the London Challenge 2003-8. The evaluation was led by the Institute for Policy Studies in Education, London Metropolitan University between August 2010 and February 2012.
The City Challenge programme built on a substantial body of research about school improvement that emphasised the importance of effective leadership, networking and collaboration and sustainability with schools.
This evaluation of the programme identifies a wide range of points that arose from the experiences of City Challenge, including the importance of area and school level strategies having clear and achievable objectives; that it takes time to bring about sustainable improvement across an area, with three years being too short; that different forms of support are effective in schools at different stages on their improvement; and that weaker school leaders can be supported through coaching, mentoring and other development opportunities.