I have pulled up stumps on this approach and gone back to my original function. It goes through the posts, looks for the Partner Level passed to it, and then retrieves a list of pages. I then display a styled list with the posts thumbnail as the clickable link. Will need to tweak for reach desired accessibility level, but thats for later. I appreciate your comments to this question.
For future reference:
function the_partners($cpLevel) {
global $wpdb;
$querydetails = "
SELECT wposts.*
FROM $wpdb->posts wposts, $wpdb->postmeta wpostmeta
WHERE wposts.ID = wpostmeta.post_id
AND wpostmeta.meta_key = 'Partner_Level'
AND wpostmeta.meta_value="$cpLevel"
AND wposts.post_status="publish"
AND wposts.post_type="page"
ORDER BY wposts.post_title ASC
";
$pageposts = $wpdb->get_results($querydetails, OBJECT);
echo "<ul class=\"logobox clearfix\">";
foreach ( $pageposts as $page ) {
$option = '<li>';
$option .= '<a href="' . get_page_link( $page->ID ) . '">' . get_the_post_thumbnail( $page->ID ) . '</a>';
$option .= '</li>';
echo $option;
}
echo "</ul>";
}