Summary - this section identifies the principles upon which Education Imporvement Partnerships or EIPs, as they are also known, should be founded, including a common purpose; inclusivity; and mutual accountability.   

• The Education Improvement Partnership should define the common purpose underpinning its joint activities and how it intends to pursue its over-arching aims.
• The Education Improvement Partnership will often serve a defined local community of learners and should operate on an inclusive basis. Every school in the defined locality should be encouraged to participate.  
• The members of an Education Improvement Partnership should be equally committed to success for all children and young people. This commitment could be demonstrated both through the partnership's inclusivity and through mutual accountability, and could be supported through the establishment of a shared partnership fund to which each member contributes a specified sum.
• Where functions are being delegated from a local authority, the Education Improvement Partnership should have a joint agreement (by way of a protocol or service level agreement) with that authority to deliver an agreed, specified set of functions. Appropriate funding would be devolved from the local authority to the partnership in accordance with those functions.  
• In these cases, it must be clear how this joint agreement fits into the wider Children's and Young People's Plan for improving children’s services across the area – and within the children's trust arrangements which will underpin it and deliver improved outcomes.
• The members of the partnership will be mutually accountable for shared functions and for the outcomes it delivers in connection with those functions. The partnership will want to develop a strategy which is broad-based, raising attainment amongst learners, promoting efficiency through workforce reform, and combating bureaucracy to maximise the benefits of collaborative working for teachers. It could benchmark itself against other partnerships through self-evaluation and peer review to measure the impact that partnership working is making on learning and teaching across the group of schools and other partners.

Publication Date: May 2005

Last Updated: July 2006