Peer learning in curriculum partnerships

This article looks at peer learning and networking taking place within consortia, including learning visits and regional events.

Background

Peer support is about links between those who have insights to offer and those seeking solutions. A peer might be someone who is equal in status, a matched companion, or someone who works in a broadly similar area. Peer support can also occur between organisations.

Support can mean any kind of help. It involves the transfer of knowledge and skill through active helping and supporting from one peer to another (including organisations). So peer support might include advice, information, specialist inputs, pointers and guidance, team development, working together on a project, conversations, meetings and visits to share experience, warnings about how not to do it, sharing documents and checklists, and case studies.

Within the 14–19 Leadership and Management Development Programme, two formal peer support activities were deployed – regional events, where sharing and consensus building around common strategies were key outcomes and the learning visits programme. Both of these have separate contributory papers (see further information section below) and benefit from more extensive evaluation material. They will be mentioned here only to emphasise their place in the overall peer support strategy.

Peer learning and support has been well established in the education sector for many years. It was a fundamental principle built into 14–19 Leadership and Management Development Programme from the outset. Initial Pathfinder consortia provided lots of useful information and ideas to the subsequent Gateway cohorts that followed. Consortia evolved in many different structures and styles and as such encountered different challenges. More recently, many have sought to uncover solutions tried and tested within a similar consortium where experience of direct implementation can be explored, both failures and successes.

Since 2009 consortia have generally expressed a stronger desire to learn from practice in the field and as a result consortium advisers have sought ways to broker and enable such learning, taking into account the constraints to be overcome in finding suitable matches and in overcoming the administrative barriers. There was considerable variation on the approaches preferred by consortia. For some, informality was vital, enabling conversation and sharing quickly and without having to plan, organise and record. Others wanted a more enduring partnership, and some inspiration from a leading-edge model to benchmark against. Some local authorities had existing peer learning networks and schemes operating between schools providing more established ways and means of sharing. Where these were in existence, consortium advisers reported stronger propensity to network and share problems and solutions regularly, and as a result, a stronger likelihood of continued existence.

Attempts were made during 2009 and early 2010 to record the different types of peer support requests, offers and matches emerging at the conversations held by consortium advisers with consortia. This data proved patchy and unreliable to track without a proper database and activity coding, which only came into active service in April 2010. For some, the mere recording of such activity was reported as a disincentive to undertake it, which was a difficulty in assessing the scale and quality of various interactions.

Reach

In April 2010, research was conducted with consortia and workforce partners to try and learn more about current peer support activity and who was involved (see further information section). Around 30 consortium leaders responded. This revealed the following.

Peer support is reported as involving mainly consortium leads, exams officers and local authority 14–19 leads. Functional skills practitioners are reported as undertaking the least peer support involving other consortia, but indications are that this is changing rapidly.
It would appear that the North West, North East and Yorkshire and the Humber, and East Midlands have the most peer support activity of some kind taking place, although this is difficult to verify from the data we hold.
Peer support was mostly used by 14–19 team practitioners and managers by way of problem solving and sharing.

The learning visits and regional events contributory papers (see further information section) have more detail to offer regarding participation, the status of those coming and their learning outcomes.

The regional programme co-ordinators final regional reports (see further information section) cite a number of examples that demonstrate the wide range of peer support activity occurring in their regions.

Response and outcomes

The sheer range of activities that make up peer support is enormous and draws on collaborative techniques, meeting organisation and event management. There is general consensus about the usefulness of peer support, largely drawn from a positive experience of networking or focused conversation.

Where there is an established collaborative network , usually supported or even managed by the local authority, there is some optimism that peer support activity can thrive and achieve useful results. However, not every local authority is supportive and some even view out-of-area visits as a target for cutbacks.

The evidence from final conversations shows a mostly positive picture around the value of group networks particularly in key areas like quality, foundation learning and functional skills, where these have been identified as areas for rapid improvement.

Some local authorities have established networks at inter-authority level and view these as a useful strategy to explore common issues like transportation.

Inevitably concerns about funding pervade the current scene. Some saw the use of “rarely cover” as an integral factor in enabling peer support activity. For others it is the absence of time and effort to plan and explore.

Unfortunately there is no formal data to appraise the impact of this vast range of less formal activity. Nevertheless, it is happening and for many signals a positive strategy for moving forward.

Proposals and plans

During the early part of 2010, a peer learning research project (see further information section) was commissioned to explore peer support activity – where and how it was happening, what kind of impact was created from it and what might be the strategies to encourage and foster it in the future.

The project was intended to work with workforce partners and explore how they also deployed peer support activities. A steering group was created involving the Department for Education (then the Department for Children, Schools and Families), workforce partners and LMDP associates. A work programme was created and field research was completed by the end of April. Early plans were drawn up for a possible web-based peer support system but these were shelved after the general election in May. A user guide was created as part of the legacy resource materials.

Lessons learned

The Pathfinder principle works well to start but care must be taken to avoid overexposure and overload on the pioneers.
Once implementation begins and people have some experience, they are better equipped to pursue the knowledge they require. “They know what they don’t know…”
Peer support is usually a very motivating and energising experience.
Existing collaborative structures should be used and extended where possible.
Informal peer support can be just as influential as more formal activities.
There appears to be sensitivity to planning and recording in some quarters, increasing the level of formality and so inhibiting participation.
There is huge scope for more research looking into the impact as peer support activity is a whole. There are other similar fields which offer some insights like co-learning and communities of practice.
The understanding of different types of peer support activity, their effectiveness and how to choose the right one for the desired learning required, is not well documented or understood.
In a period of public sector austerity it remains a strategy to be actively pursued.
The brokerage provided by consortium advisers did provide a strong incentive to undertake peer support activity in some cases.