Challenge Partners
About: Challenge Partners’ mission is to reduce educational inequality and improve the life chances of all children. Through collaboration, challenge and leadership development, they are working to ensure that best practice becomes common practice across schools, enabling the whole education system to move up.
Challenge: Challenge Partners was formed by headteachers in 2011 to scale successful approaches from the London Challenge across England. Their vision was to be a national organisation who convened the best knowledge and leadership, alongside clear methodologies for school-to-school support, to mobilise and shape the national education system at scale.
Permira Foundation’s involvement: To strengthen the operation at its core and prepare for scaling, Permira teams have mobilised to support across digital transformation, financial planning and modelling, fundraising, cyber-security and senior leadership development. In 2019, we supported Challenge Partners in their acquisition of Jubilee Networks. Since 2021 we committed to leading the Board of Trustees and the Financial Audit and Risk Committee playing a crucial role in steering Challenge Partners’ growth strategy.
Impact: Over the last decade, Challenge Partners has built a 540+ strong network of schools and trusts unified by a common goal – to share challenge, collaboration and wisdom to reduce educational inequality and boost the life chances of all pupils. Permira Foundation’s investment has been pivotal to enable this growth and development of programmes at the charity. Challenge Partners is now a national charity able to accelerate the progress of disadvantaged children in areas of need, support leaders to grow and ultimately extend excellence across the system. It benefits over 400,000 pupils annually compared to around 250,000 a decade ago, representing 60% growth whilst delivering 98.5% positive feedback from their flagship Quality Assurance Review programme.
What’s next – our shared ambition going forward: Challenge Partners remain focused on growth, striving to reach 500,000 pupils per year by 2027. We remain a strong backer of this goal, providing strategic support at Trustee level, helping build their organisational resilience and being a consistent lead partner to enable their continued innovation and growth.