We are immensely excited to launch the HEP blog! We want it to be a platform to share the voices of our member schools and highlight thoughts from the team at HEP.

This is meant to be much more than a normal ‘blog’ – it is a place to generate a conversation among school leaders and teachers right across our family of schools.

We will be inviting you to contribute and we will be sharing thoughts reflecting HEP’s latest work, highlighting priorities and testing out what we think we’re learning as we go. So do join us!

We wanted to kick off with a session Fran Hargrove and I led for the AEPA – the national association of education partnerships – last year where we talked about the experience and what we’d learnt from setting up and running HEP.

It was quite a journey, with HEP originally conceived by a group of Headteachers, in the pub, in response to the 2016 White Paper Educational Excellence Everywhere.

At the time the DfE argued for a schools led model with all schools forced to academise and local authorities told to “step back from running schools and school improvement”. Six years on, this feels familiar with the next White Paper seemingly imminent.

We agree whole heartedly with taking a schools led approach. It has, however, been transformational to see this through the prism of a locally based education partnership owned and led by its schools.

Our family of schools includes all settings in Haringey and Enfield (whether academies or maintained) who want to work with us and with each other to take collective responsibility for our children and young people.

We designed HEP’s approach with schools at every stage and set up in partnership with Haringey Council. We now have 95 member schools including nursery, primary, secondary, special, alternative provision and an FE college covering early years through to post-16.

We have evolved rapidly since kicking off in September 2018 but we have always stayed true to our founding principles:

Thank you to all our schools and school communities for your ongoing incredible work. We can’t wait to share your voices on here and keep the conversation flowing.

James is Chief Executive of HEP. He was previously joint Assistant Director for schools and learning in Haringey Council and has worked in DfE and extensively in central government and consultancy. He is also a parent governor in the Borough.