This article looks at two complementary areas of the literature – School peer review and Organisational Resilience (OR). OR is analysed from a sub-set of data gained from a mixed methods Implementation and Process Evaluation (IPE) of the Schools Partnership Programme (SPP) led by the Education Development Trust (EDT). This evaluation was part of an effectiveness trial over 3 years (2018–2021) funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in England. Our research question was, to what extent did the Schools Partnership Programme build organisational resilience in participating primary schools?

The SPP is a large school improvement programme that coordinates clusters of schools who work together to self-evaluate, peer review and support each other over a sustained period. The programme provides the methodology, facilitation and support materials with the concept of peer review at its heart. School peer review refers to collaborations between schools involving mutual or reciprocal school visits to collect data, learn from the other school’s context and provide feedback on an aspect of school function. Despite on the surface resembling school inspection visits, school peer reviews are markedly different, as the reviews are voluntary, reports are kept internal to the schools, and the focus of the evaluation is decided by the schools themselves. The benefits of peer learning between schools have been well documented (OECD, 2013), with evidence from Belgium, England, and the Netherlands. In England, Peer reviews have shown to promote lateral improvement, system leadership, and moral and professional accountability (Godfrey, 2020).

OR has been defined as ‘maintenance of positive adjustment under challenging conditions such that the organization emerges from those conditions strengthened and more resourceful’ (Vogus and Sutcliffe, 2007, p. 3418). Among the mechanisms of resilience that help combating threats to organizational health, Vogus and Sutcliffe (2007) identified early anticipation of potential threats and deviations from normal organizational performance. Staff within resilient organizations have a sense of collective efficacy, i.e., they have a belief that they will be able to make a difference to performance despite external challenges. The behaviours associated with OR include questioning assumptions and received wisdom, discussing human and organizational capabilities, learning collectively from errors, and distributing decisions to the people with greatest expertise, regardless of rank. Affectively, resilient organizations are more ‘hopeful’ than ‘optimistic’, based on a realistic assessment of their situation and resources to cope with threats. After reviewing the literature, Duchek (2020) suggests that the main antecedent of OR is the organisation’s knowledge base. Organizations need to develop a broad understanding of their field, avoid getting stuck in surface explanations and encourage a diversity of skills, personalities and perspectives in decision-making that promote creativity and innovation. Duchek (2020) also argues that underpinning the development of this knowledge base, are the drivers of resource availability, social resources and power dynamics. 

A sample of 422 primary schools that took part in SPP (treatment group) and their comparisons are analysed, applying the organizational capability-based theoretical framework. We describe ways in which SPP ‘learning map’ addresses the (i) anticipation, (ii) coping and (iii) adaptation stages and the extent to which SPP helped building OR. Taking this theoretical framework as a foundation is a novelty, as despite OR being prominent in the academic literature, there is scarcity of international research examining OR within the school sector. 

An independent evaluation of SPP was conducted by a team at UCL Centre for Educational Leadership (Godfrey et al., 2023). This was set up as a quasi-experimental impact evaluation using school-level matched difference in differences involving 422 primary schools in the treatment group and 374 in the comparison group. Secondly, an embedded mixed methods Implementation and Process Evaluation (IPE) combined numerous data collection strategies to gain in depth understanding of the mechanisms of the program, and answer questions of fidelity, adaptation and differentiation. This paper draws on Duchek’s (2020) OR framework to analyse IPE on schools’ OR. The IPE included initial and final surveys of treatment schools and explored the counterfactual using interviews and surveys with comparison schools. We conducted intensive case studies of two clusters of five treatment schools each, one in the north and one in the south of England, the former being in a more deprived, urban setting and the latter in a wealthier, rural area. For each case study we conducted two sets of interviews with key staff, shadowed their training and some of their reviews. We also interviewed senior leaders in comparison schools, observed EDT training, and the reviewing process in one more cluster, outside of our case studies. We supplemented our IPE with additional group interviews of key stakeholders, including SPP permanent staff, associated staff (facilitators), partnership leads, and Improvement Champions (IC). Our own independent evaluation data was supplemented by evaluation records from the SPP project team. We thus triangulated our data collection from multiple data collection methods (interviews, observations, and surveys); and data sources—including headteachers, senior and middle leaders and other program staff, across different schools and regions; and over various time points. Validity was further strengthened by researcher triangulation and through holding regular team meetings in which we discussed emerging findings.

Regarding context, treatment schools faced several challenging external factors, such as increased student deprivation, the COVID disruption, changes to the external accountability framework and competing demands of other partner organizations. Regarding internal factors, they dealt with teacher attrition, the need to develop leaders, upgrade their pedagogical skills and support underperforming students. Our findings suggest that SPP supported the development of OR in SPP primary schools in several ways. SPP schools exhibited (1) knowledge building through training, the review process, professional dialogue, learning from each other, as well as receiving and giving feedback. Regarding (2) resource availability, schools used SPP as a scaffold to build improvised strategies to access and mobilize shared human and physical resources; (3) social resources were built in the SPP through social capital, sharing of knowledge, enhancing a shared vision and trust. Finally, (4) SPP promoted lateral power dynamics driven by professional learning and accountability which enhanced trust, knowledge sharing and motivation to improve. Unlike the business literature, our school data suggests that singular exogenous threats are less likely to be existential in the way they are to some firms in the private sector, rather, schools deal with multiple and complex demands. This may suggest partnerships, knowledge sharing and building social resources are even more important for schools to flourish. Overall, this paper extends the understanding of school peer review approaches for school improvement and adds to the OR international literature by presenting features towards building system resilience.

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