Growing the Top: A case study of designing an approach to creating effective external partnerships

Conflict of interest statement: The authors of this case study work for Challenge Partners, an education charity who operate a paid membership model for schools. Challenge Partners (2020) is a national learning network of almost 500 schools that supports collaboration between individual schools and within the education system as a whole. The organisation is built upon Professor Sir George Berwick’s principle of upwards convergence: a means of ensuring that ‘continual improvement is achieved in a sustainable way’ (Berwick, 2017, p. 2). There are two distinct parts to this (see Figure 1): firstly, reducing disparity for the schools at the bottom of the system by closing the knowledge gap, and secondly, ‘stimulating the top to rise higher so that the whole system moves on’ (Berwick, 2017, p. 2).   Figure 1: The upwards convergence principle   D