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Project aim:       
Develop a partnership of Teaching School Alliances (TSAs) in the South West that share the ambition to provide outstanding educational services to schools in the areas of professional development, school improvement and initial teacher training and wider educational services.  The partnership would enable TSAs to be collectively more effective and more sustainable in the long term. 

Rationale:
The importance of Teaching Schools in the educational sector have grown significantly in recent years. Some examples include:

• The Strategic School Improvement Fund announced in 2016 allows Teaching Schools (as well as MATs and Las) to deliver medium-large scale improvement projects
• Designation of LLEs has been moved from a national programme to local, teaching-school led designation
• Building system leader capacity in the sector to deliver a school-led, self-improving system
• New KPIs, with challenging expectations for recruitment of trainee teachers

In addition, the number of Teaching School Alliances has grown. This creates more opportunities for TSAs to collaborate, streamline their services, and each offer specialised areas of expertise. This has the additional benefit of reducing over-supply and duplication or services. TSAs in some regions have already taken the initiative and are working on an ‘alliance of alliances’ model, such as the Oxfordshire Teaching Schools Alliances.    
Crucially, planning is needed to ensure TSAs are sustainable in a future where grant funding may be reduced or removed. Working together allows greater opportunity to achieve this.

Teaching Schools in Phase 1 of Project:

• South West Teaching School Alliance (SWTSA)
• Exeter Consortium and Teaching School Alliance (ECTSA)
• Dartmoor Teaching School Alliance (DTSA)

Once the partnership is established, we would be in a position to add other TSAs who wanted to participate.

Project proposal:

Common Membership Agreement and Fee
Set out shared values, vision and strategic goals. Data Sharing protocols included. Common fee for membership set to allow equitable access to services.

Single online portal to access joint and individual services
Sophisticated online portal that allows all member schools to see their own TSA’s courses, events and services as well as joint courses etc. Portal will automate event management and evaluation procedures. Events can be branded as a TSA event or partnership event. System leaders’ profiles could also be accessible. Each school will have an account where they can access their activity bookings and activity history.

Co-ordinated Professional Development programme
Professional Development programme could be broken down into activities that are: single TSA to its TSA members only or single TSA to all partner TSAs. This allows TSAs to retain their own unique activities, or have access to a wider market of schools or give their members access to a wider range of courses than they could otherwise offer. Programming would take place in Summer Term for following year, leading to a comprehensive Professional Development programme for the year. A funding agreement would be in place so how

Co-ordinated Network programme
Run a co-ordinated programme of primary and secondary networks. Teams of high performing subject / phase leads / SLEs could plan and deliver networks 3 regional venues, sharing speakers and resources. Network leaders would be required to have a track record of strong performance in their area.  Covering all curriculum and key student group areas.

Joint System Leaders Team
Schools / MATs would have access to the collective SLEs and NLEs within the partnership. We could create an attractive system leader exchange protocol which would provide alternative payment system. With centralised co-ordination of system leaders, more focus could be placed on training and QA procedures. 

Shared Performance Data Services
All members of the three TSAs would have opportunity to share their data and then have access to analysis and support services. We would continue to commission data services like iDASH and potentially scale this up to provide affordable data systems for schools, MATs and TSAs.

 
Martin Smith – 1st June 2018