Promoting educational equity through collaborative inquiry

It has long been established that, in general, pupils from economically disadvantaged backgrounds do less well educationally than their more privileged peers. While specific interventions can have an impact, however, sustaining and widening such progress has been less well demonstrated. The participating schools were tasked with working in collaboration with one another in order to develop new ways of working through the use of various forms of collaborative inquiry. This involved them in working in interdisciplinary environments, alongside academic researchers and colleagues from Education Scotland to create new ways of working to address the attainment gap. While there is a level of localised autonomy and prioritisation, this occurs within a framework of accountability that, at varying levels, involves ‘Key Performance Indicators’, along with associated monitoring arrangements. Most recently, this emphasis on strategic partnership working across the education system in Scotland has led to the development of the Regional Improvement Collaboratives