Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the Independent Schools Council’s Partnership Week 2020.

We are delighted to celebrate the success of cross-sector partnerships and welcome the hard work that has gone into promoting this work across our country by the Independent Schools Council (ISC) and others such as the Schools Together Group.

The department continues to encourage and support new partnerships between independent and state-funded schools. In line with the department’s joint understanding with the ISC, we want to see more schools forming impactful and mutually beneficial collaborations across the areas of curriculum development, teaching quality, governance and leadership, and other targeted forms of school improvement.

As disruptive as COVID-19 has been, we hope that more schools will see the opportunity to work together to find solutions to common problems and to build a more collaborative system. Partnerships Week and other forms of promotion, such as the ISC’s recently published Celebrating Partnerships booklet, are key to ensuring that more schools hear about the good work already happening in this field and encourage more to join.