City of San Fernando, Pampanga—The Information and Communication Technology High School or ICTHS, considered as the first IT-oriented public secondary school in Region III located in Sindalan, is one of the 362 leader schools tasked to support and help its respective partner school, the City of San Fernando West Integrated School, reach its full potential and consequently benefit the community under the DepEd School to School Partnership Program.

Through school-to-school partnerships, high-performing schools like the ICTHS can be instruments for reform by sharing their best practices and helping other schools improve their school performance using Learning Action Cells (LAC), the Continuous Improvement (CI) Program, and School-Based Management (SBM). This requires that high-performing schools become Leader Schools with active leadership roles, initiating partnerships with other schools and taking on broader responsibilities to help elevate the performance of other schools within their District or Division.

To cultivate partnerships between Leader Schools and nearby schools, DepEd has appropriated P900,000,000 to enable school-to-school partnerships. Leader Schools shall receive funds to provide technical support and assistance to nearby schools that have not yet reached their full potential in school performance. These school funds shall be used by Leader Schools for sharing their best practices and for partnership activities with their nearby Partner Schools.

Leader schools are mandated to share best practices on curriculum which include the best practices on Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment such as contextualization of learning materials and teaching guides, creation of teacher-made learning materials for use in differentiated and innovative instruction, capacity-building for teachers on content, pedagogy, classroom management, differentiated instruction, and inclusive education, conduct of activities for teaching and assessment including the purchase of supplies and materials necessary to conduct them, tapping Indigenous People (IP) resource persons from the community to share their knowledge and practices, implementation of LAC projects particularly for Special Education (SPED), Multigrade Education, and SHS; and organization, mobilization, and other supporting activities LAC Project Teams. Other best practices that may be transferred include programs and activities on leadership and governance and disaster risk reduction.

The DepEd Regional Office, through its Field Technical Assistance Division has given technical assistance services to division offices who have conducted their respective orientations to all their school leaders and partner schools which were pre-identified by the School Effectiveness Division (SED) of the Bureau of Human Resource Organization Division (BHROD) at Deped Central Office.•