Attitudes are so often fixed by where we were at the time. Schools working in partnership with other schools are a case in point. If your teaching values were moulded in the 1980s when competition was the order of the day, you might be suspicious of sharing your bright ideas or loath to accept that two schools working together could produce something which neither could manage on its own.

Yet school partnership is a concept whose time has come. The specialist schools movement has been re-branded to focus on families of schools and projects to support the work of many local schools.

The beacon status idea similarly focuses on sharing good practice with other schools. And that is also the idea behind much of the work done by advanced skills teachers.

Slowly, therefore, the culture of selfishness is being worn down. However, suspicion remains that too many projects pay lip-service to the co-operative principle simply in order to gain access to extra funding and that, once the money is secured, worthwhile partnership goes out of the window.

Yet there are certainly many examples of outstanding practice. It is perhaps time to carry out an audit of exactly how the concept of partnership is being developed nationally in our educational system and to share that good practice more generally. The Government has recently extended the range of partnerships available by sponsoring a large number of grammar schools to work with nearby secondary moderns.

One of the forerunners of this initiative has existed in Lincolnshire for nearly 18 months: my school, Caistor grammar, in partnership with a secondary modern, Tennyson high, Mablethorpe, has been one of five partnerships jointly funded by the Department for Education and Skills’

school effectiveness unit and our local education authority, although ours has been the only one involving a grammar and a secondary modern.

The CaistorTennyson partnership has been a real success story and has begun to have an impact on the way in which both our schools operate.

Of course, the money acts as a powerful motivator at first and has enabled partner schools to adopt some ambitious agendas. However, where an LEA and a group of teachers and governors have a will to work together and are excited by the possibilities, much can be achieved on a shoe-string budget.

Our partnership started with Brian Quinn, the head of Tennyson high, and myself formulating key principles. We then progressed to joint meetings with our senior management teams and followed those with an in-service training day when the staff - teaching and non-teaching - visited each other’s schools (no mean feat when we are more than 40 miles apart).

We moved on to sponsor a range of departmental curriculum development projects and one-off days where whole year groups from both schools have come together to do something special. These things seem modest and straightforward enough, and indeed they are, but in my experience they are unique. They should not be and it is time more schools moved in this direction.

Chief among our key principles has been our focus on raising pupils’

expectations and understanding: of themselves, each other and the world beyond their school gates. A week-long Outward Bound trip involving students from both schools and a local special school has had a powerful impact.

We were also determined to judge all that we did in terms of the impact it could have on our pupils’ learning - we want to make a difference for them. Our approach has been open-hearted - we wanted only to work with enthusiasts. Anybody who was not keen on the partnership should be allowed to opt out.

For the many enthusiasts, the core belief that everybody was of equal value in our two very different schools has been at the heart of all our business.

Finally, we have tried to live out our school’s mission statement: “We seek to use lively minds and to work hard and develop all our talents and to grow through sharing.”

We have grown as a school community through being involved in a partnership with another school and I would commend this approach to others.

Roger Hale is head of Caistor grammar school