Evaluating your partnership

What are the benefits of evaluating our partnership?

Checking the effectiveness of your partnership will give you a sense of progress and direction for the future. Evaluation strategies are designed to demonstrate improvement in pupils' learning experience that contribute directly to the quality of learning in schools.

The key purposes of an evaluation strategy are to:

• Identify how partnerships relate to the ethos of schools and contribute to wider educational policies and goals
• Reflect on and improve partnership activities
• Identify curricular impact and staff development needs
• Collect evidence about the impact of the partnerships on students' and teachers' learning
• Plan for progression and continuity in pupils learning
• Build on pupils', parents' and communities' experiences
• Inform others of what works and what doesn't
• Be accountable to your school community and to external funding bodies
• Identify longer term impacts.

How do we evaluate our partnership?

The main challenge in evaluation is developing a systematic approach to gathering information and evidence about the partnership, and using that information to inform the further development of the partnership.

The partnership evaluation tool gives you a framework to examine your partnership using eight criteria.

What questions should we ask?

You can develop your own evaluation framework by asking three key questions:

How are we doing?

• What are the aims for the partnership/project for the year?
• What aspects of the partnership/project are most important to us?

How do we know?

• What have we agreed to measure?
• How would we describe 'good practice' in these areas?

How would we find out?

• What are the possible sources of evidence?
• Are there any areas where we lack evidence?
• If so, how do we find out about and judge these areas?

School partnerships are dynamic; they evolve and adapt in response to changing circumstances and as they develop, so too will your evaluation questions and approaches.

It is essential to keep the educational aims of your partnerships in mind and to revisit them from time to time to assess:

• how successfully they have been achieved
• whether they need to be revised in agreement with your partner school
• how they might be developed in the future.