"We’ve built in a stronger mechanism for accountability, checking back and seeing how it’s going."

The Kyra Teaching School Alliance, based at Lincoln Mount Street Academy in Lincolnshire, began in 2012 as a partnership of seven schools. Since then it has grown to be a large strategic force for school improvement in Lincolnshire and now includes over 50 schools.

So why did they engage in peer review?

Peer review within the Alliance emerged in response to the question of how to build deeper partnerships that directly impacted on the quality of education each school could provide.

There was found to be a lot of positive and helpful activity within the alliance but, as the alliance grew in number, leaders realised that they needed to connect to one another in deeper, improvement-focused partnerships within the overall alliance. The aim was to build a network of improvement partnerships that moved beyond transactional interactions between schools and into transformational interactions.

In the initial stages, leaders within the partnership began by measuring engagement in peer review. However, as the groups have matured, leaders are increasingly focused on capturing the precise changes and improvements that have been made as a result of the peer review process. Peer review groups meet on their own but also together with the wider alliance to discuss the journey toward a robust and effective peer review model.