This article explores the development of school to school support and partnerships in England.  These partnerships have become a defining feature of what the Government calls the ‘self-improving, school-led’ system (DfE, 2010; Sandals and Bryant, 2014).  Most schools engage in partnerships that are informal and emergent, based on shared interests, concerns, or simply personal relationships.  Even partnerships that do have a more formal basis face sometimes fraught political and inter-personal adaptive challenges (Kamp, 2013).  The focus here, however, is on more formal arrangements that are structured through a policy-driven process.  These generally fall into one of the following non-mutually exclusive categories: