Critical Friends providing support and challenge supporting improvement

The Critical Friend team is a focused network of experienced professionals in leadership and study support, some of whom have previously been centre managers. The team provides centre managers with a level of challenge and support that is differentiated appropriately according to each stage in the centre’s development. Critical Friends support performance improvement, capacity building and innovation through dialogue with centre managers, their staff, the host club, local authority (LA) officers and the DCSF.

The quality of the support is, to some extent, directed through the use of the Study Support Code of Practice which offers questions that challenge, clarify and deepen understanding through self-review, strengthened by the intervention that an external professional Critical Friend relationship and different perspective can provide. Key tasks for Critical Friends include supporting the work of the LA and its PfS centre in being clear about the expectations of PfS, its basic and core principles, including the need to reflect on evaluation findings, and to use these as a steer in developing local evaluation and impact studies.

The Critical Friend system is able to identify changes, improve communications, share intelligence and disseminate best practice in a number of ways by offering local and national input through induction, QiSS workshops, contributing to annual reporting, business planning, evaluation, conferences and to the documentation of best practice through publications.

The Critical Friend offers insights into the quality of the learning experience, how it varies and how it can be refreshed. Critical Friend visits to centres have a clear purpose and records of visit detail changes, explore ways forward, the potential for innovation as well as identifying actions for partners that are agreed with centre managers. In this way, the Critical Friend support becomes meaningful – suggestions for specific actions and different directions of action are offered, drawing on the latest thinking about what works and what doesn’t work from across the network of centres and in line with the DCSF’s strategic lead of the education and children’s services system. The role of the Critical Friend to support and challenge sits well within the rubric of this year’s conference of ‘Celebration-Challenge-Change’.