Providing challenge, supporting improvement: Being a peer as part of the sector-led improvement programme

Through its peer challenge programmes and other peer-led improvement support to councils, the LGA manages the deployment of over 3,000 peer days a year, delivered by hundreds of officers and councillors. This is an impressive investment by the sector in its improvement, and a powerful demonstration of the ‘sector-led' approach.

This collection of insights from officers, councillors and others who have contributed time as peers show the clear benefits of giving and receiving challenge and support.

Those benefits are wide, varied and sometimes personal. But there is a common theme that runs through many of them. Peers clearly recognise a wider responsibility to the sector and show a willingness to volunteer time to contribute to this. They do so on the basis that there is almost always learning for them, and their organisation. Sharing knowledge and learning is a key feature of the interaction that occurs across all forms of peer-led support and challenge.