This paper reports on the fourth year of a collaborative enquiry based study across a network of eight schools in a district in England characterised by cultural diversity and disadvantage. Over four years a total of eleven out of a possible fifteen schools have been involved. With the support of researchers, each school’s equity team identifies an issue of inequity that they want to investigate and tackle. They then design, conduct, make sense of, respond to and share their enquiry experiences in and across their schools at regular meetings and workshops. Researchers record and analyse the network’s activities and factors that appear to help or hinder its developments. The equity teams comprise staff with diverse roles and status. The enquiries have enabled many of them to voice and act on their previously overlooked perspectives, often surfaced through their investigations of students’ views. This democratising process has led all the teams to decide to involve students as co-researchers in their enquiries. This paper explores the contextual factors that appear to have affected the schools’ efforts to improve equity.