Working together to improve urban secondary schools: a
study of practice in one city
Mel Ainscow and Andy Howes
June 2006
Paper prepared for ‘School Leadership and Management’
Working together to improve urban secondary schools: a
study of practice in one city
Abstract
Bringing about school improvement in economically poor
urban contexts remains a major challenge. In England the
emphasis on competition between schools has further
complicated this agenda. At the same time, there is evidence
of the emergence of a new policy emphasis that involves
support and challenge to school-led improvement efforts
through collaboration with other schools. This paper provides
an evaluative account of an attempt to use such processes of
networking across all secondary schools in one city. The study
suggests that schools working together can contribute to the
raising of aspirations and attainment in schools that have
previously had a record of low achievement, but that this is
never a straightforward process – schools are complex
organisations, and collaboration between them involves the
orchestration of action and purpose at many levels. The paper
concludes that the successful use of such approaches involves
dealing with a number of challenging dilemmas, and draws out
the implications for policy development.
The issue of school improvement in economically poor urban contexts remains a
challenge. Whilst existing research literature provides accounts of individual schools
that have brought about improvements in their work despite facing challenging
circumstances, there are fewer examples of progress that has been maintained beyond
a relatively short period of years (Maden, 2001; Harris et al., 2003; West, Ainscow &
Stanford, 2005). It is also the case that many of the examples that are described
involve schools that have chosen to participate in particular improvement initiatives
(Ainscow & Chapman, 2005). By their nature such schools tend to be exceptional
and it is, therefore, dangerous to build policies on the basis of such experiences.
During recent years schools in England have had to respond to a plethora of
innovations aimed at ‘raising standards’. This is one of the reasons why a close
scrutiny of what happened in the local authority we focus on in this paper is so
fascinating. It shows how collaboration leading to improvement was given impetus
by such external pressures. It also suggests patterns of collaboration between
schools that offer promising possibilities for achieving more sustainable
improvement.
The paper draws on the evidence of our evaluation of networking across secondary
schools in the city of ‘Bradcastle’. We start by describing the context and the
strategy adopted; we then provide a summary of findings, using extracts from case
studies; and we suggest an explanation for these findings in terms of the notion of
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coping with organisational dilemmas. Finally, this leads us to draw out the
implications for policy development.
Changing relationships
In recent years, structures and relationships within the education service in England
have been fundamentally reformed. These changes have been reflected most
significantly in the evolving relationships between schools and their local education
authorities (LEAs). This movement, from dependency towards greater independence,
has been consistently orchestrated through legislation and associated Department for
Education and Skills (DfES) guidance. It was summarised in the Government’s 1997
consultation document, ‘Excellence in Schools’, which stated: ‘The role of LEAs is
not to control schools, but to challenge all schools to improve and support those
which need help to raise standards’.
Relationships between schools have also been influenced by national policy changes,
in two main ways. On the one hand, competition between schools has come to be seen
as one of the keys to driving up standards. This was encouraged by the introduction
of grant-maintained status for schools (now known as foundation schools) and by
open enrolment, supported by the publication of league tables of school text and
examination results. Greater autonomy was intended to ‘liberate’ schools from the
bureaucracy of local government and establish what has been described as ‘school
quasi-markets’ (Thrupp, 2001), in which effective schools would have an ‘armslength’ relationship with the LEA and, indeed, with each other. At the same time,
various national initiatives, such as Excellence in Cities and the Educational Action
Zones built on and developed traditions of networking and sharing between schools,
focused on areas of relative social and economic disadvantage, and aimed to improve
the provision of education for children and young people in those areas.
Overall, the move away from a dependent relationship between LEAs and schools, to
ways of working that emphasise school independence has so far failed to provide the
system-wide improvement in achievement of the sort required by the community
(Ainscow, Howes & Tweddle, 2006; Ainscow, Booth & Dyson, 2006). At the same
time it is generally recognised that leadership for improvement efforts does need to
come from within individual schools. This suggests that attempts to move schools in
a more equitable direction are likely to be very demanding. They will, we suggest,
require an engagement with questions of principles and purposes within the education
system, and a greater emphasis on the sharing of expertise and resources.
Such an approach would be consistent with what Stoker (2003) calls ‘public value
management’, with its emphasis on network governance. Stoker argues that the
origins of this approach can be traced to criticisms of the current emphasis on
strategies drawn from private sector experience. He goes on to suggest that ‘the
formulation of what constitutes public value can only be achieved through
deliberation involving the key stakeholders and actions that depend on mixing in a
reflexive manner a range of intervention options’. Consequently, ‘networks of
deliberation and delivery’ are seen as key strategies. In the education service, this
would imply the negotiation of new, inter-dependent relationships between schools,
local authorities and their wider communities (Hargreaves, 2003).
We are now seeing the emergence of what as been described as a new school
improvement paradigm, one that places the emphasis on inter-dependence (Ainscow
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& West, 2006). Within such an orientation attempts are made to support and
challenge school-led improvement efforts through collaboration with other schools.
The strategy
Such arrangements require massive shifts in thinking and attitude if the potential
benefits are to be achieved. In this sense, the Bradcastle strategy was particularly
interesting in that it involved an attempt to create a whole-LEA approach, albeit
focused only on the secondary sector. In addition, the involvement of a private
partner and another LEA offered other resources that could be used to support
successful implementation, whilst at the same time bringing additional complexity
and, perhaps, other unknown risks.
This paper draws on the findings of the project evaluation that we carried out over a
period of two years on behalf of the DfES. The study involved both a formative and a
summative dimension. In this way, data about the processes were used to strengthen
the strategy, whilst, at the same time, constituting evidence that would help to make
overall judgements as to the success of the initiative. The evidence for the study was
collected through approximately thirty interviews, observations of some twenty-five
meetings and collaborative events, analysis of documents and statistics relating to
each school group and to the LEA. This amounted to approximately 25 days
fieldwork in the city over two years. In addition a repeated survey of staff attitudes
towards the project was carried out, with a total of 234 responses. Process and
outcome data were then analysed and compared in order to determine conclusions as
to the effectiveness of the initiative. As far as possible, findings were validated with
stakeholder groups in a final round of interviews.
It is important to understand something of the context of the LEA and its schools prior
to the start of the project. Its introduction reflected major concerns at the DfES about
levels of attainment at the secondary level in 2002. At that time there were nineteen
secondary schools in the city, with three in ‘special measures’ and four seen as having
‘serious weaknesses’ following inspections, and almost half causing concern through
relatively low level of GCSE results (the national examination taken by 16 year old
students). Some figures suggested that as many as 25% of students were migrating out
of the city at the transition to secondary school, and it was generally agreed that
children of parents more motivated towards education were over-represented in this
group. In addition, there were difficulties in attracting and retaining suitably qualified
teachers to the city.
It is impossible to be certain about exactly what relationships between LEA and
schools were like at this time. However, it seems that LEA resources to support and
challenge schools in raising standards were stretched. Some of those involved
described a ‘culture of dependency’ on the LEA, associated with a lack of ownership
of the school improvement agenda at the school level. They explained that whilst
some headteachers and staff were driving their schools forward, this was against a
background of widespread, relatively low expectations of city students. Others
thought that the LEA could have acted more strategically in relation to the issue of
admissions. Falling rolls, coupled with the increasing intake of some schools, were
generating the prospect of school closures, and planning for admissions was
becoming increasingly difficult.
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The improvement strategy was described as a ‘twin-track approach’. The first track
involved short term initiatives aiming to assist schools in raising standards for all
students, particularly to meet the Government’s ‘floor target’ requirements within two
years, in which 25% five or more A* to Cs grades in the GCSE examination was to
be achieved by all schools. These responses included the production of revision
guides in some subjects, booster classes for students just under the attainment targets,
and rapid introduction of alternative courses taught with additional staffing in key
areas. Some of these initiatives were put in place through coordination between
schools.
The second track was a longer-term strategy based on strengthening collaboration
amongst the city’s schools. As a relatively small LEA, Bradcastle’s education
department was seen to have insufficient resources to meet all the development needs
of schools, without input from expertise already located in the schools. Collaboration
was intended to facilitate more sharing of resources than had proved possible under
earlier schemes. The implication too was that changing relationships between schools
would gradually be mirrored by changing relationships with officers of the education
department. With this in mind, a school improvement adviser was allocated to work
with each school group.
The project involved the setting up of partnership arrangements within four groups of
secondary schools. These were unusual in that they were not based on geographical
proximity. Rather, they were created in order to achieve groupings that would each
include schools at different stages of development and with varied levels of
achievement, as measured by examinations. This also meant that schools within a
group were less likely to be in direct competition with one another. In addition, staff
members from the partner LEA were attached to each group.
Initially, those directly involved were headteachers and representative teams of staff.
However, variations developed almost immediately. In one case, school leaders
contributed monetary resources to a central fund, and then determined their priorities
for meaningful collaboration, given the particular circumstances of the group. By
contrast, another group held back, whilst in the smallest group, two headteachers
effectively determined the pace of what became a developing ‘federation’ (i.e. a more
formally constituted arrangement). But in all cases, it was mainly the school leaders,
supported by the framework of the project, who determined what collaboration might
mean in their group, and in their individual schools.
Processes and outcomes
The evidence we collected demonstrates how the strategy of collaboration between
schools was stimulated by the project in Bradcastle, and how it led to some serious
efforts and creative ways of using educational resources in order to improve
effectiveness across the education system. These efforts led to significant changes in
attitude and expectations amongst staff in many of the schools. In particular there
were changes in their views of other schools and their staff, the nature of the
challenges they faced, and in some cases, the potential for change through various
practical partnerships. There was also some evidence that these processes of change
were associated with improvements in student attainment in examinations.
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However, there was considerable variation between the school groups in terms of
both processes and outcomes, and it is this variation that provides much of the grist
for the arguments developed in this article. Taking outcomes first, causes are hard to
trace, so that there are numerous possible ways of explaining changes in student
outcomes in the LEA over the period concerned. Table 1 provides an indication of
attainment of successive pupil cohorts for each year from 2001 to 2004, across each
of the school groups. It shows that attainment in relation to national targets increased
between 2002 and 2004 in all four groups. Needless to say, these data are quite
limited as a representation of change in schools, not least because no value-added
data were available for the period concerned, so that no allowance for changing
cohorts is made in this analysis.
Nevertheless, crude as the measure is, this was the key indicator of success as far as
DfES, and consequently many in the LEA and in schools, were concerned. The
intention to raise raw examination results was one of the central purposes of the
collaborative strategy, and as such was central to many of the activities put in place in
schools across the city. The fact that the raw results rose was widely considered to be
significant.
Year
Group A
Group B
Group C
Group D
2001
32%
43%
33%
37%
2002
28%
31%
33%
39%
2003
37%
41%
34%
36%
2004
39%
38%
36%
41%
Table 1: Percentage of pupils in each school group gaining 5 or more A*-C grade
GCSE
Explanations for the variation between outcomes in groups of schools are beyond the
scope of our study, even in the more detailed case studies available elsewhere (Howes
& Ainscow, 2006). However, it is possible to distinguish activities in terms of the
intentions as to the impact on student attainments. The accounts illustrate the ‘twintrack’ approach mentioned earlier. Some activities aimed directly at attainment
statistics, whilst others focused on the development of capacity in the longer term.
What is even more evident is that patterns of activity varied considerably across the
four groups, and the nature of the impact appeared also to be uneven. And in terms of
relationships and connections, the four accounts also show how the groups developed
in very different ways, and give some indication of what changed in the groups. Space
precludes the inclusion of these accounts here; instead, examples of the variation in
activity and relationship are presented in cameo form.
Cameo 1: A focus emerges
In Group A, which included several schools facing challenging circumstances and one
high-performing faith school, almost a year passed before there was any significant
collaborative action involving teachers. But gradually, the headteachers moved from a
generalised exploration of possibilities, to a specific focus on the sharing of resources
between schools. In one instance this made it possible to retain a teacher who
subsequently became instrumental in facilitating school improvements activities. The
presence of a LEA adviser with an eye for collaborative opportunities was significant:
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We realised in a group meeting that we were all in dire straights in
English. None of us had a head of English, with the exception of one
school. The headteacher there said I’ve got an excellent teacher. The link
adviser knew the teacher, and she managed and facilitated the process. It is
a middle leader post, and the four schools interested share a quarter of the
cost (headteacher).
The additional English teacher explained that the different circumstances in the
schools demanded flexible responses:
I go to each school, and meet with the head of department; sometimes it
gets very busy. I’m like a member of department, training newly qualified
teachers, planning, doing demonstration lessons. It can be powerful, but
you need to know the group. Mostly I work with groups of teachers,
supporting department planning days… You get to see what is going on
elsewhere, and I keep asking different people, “have you tried this?”. All
five English departments have strengths, but I’m the link between them,
the buffer…. My own teaching has improved so much… Typically, I’ll do
a video of someone, and show it across the schools. That’s easier to
arrange than mutual observation, and becomes less of a show’.
Headteachers considered that such activities made a difference to staff thinking.
For example:
‘My staff feel more confident, even if it’s just through the opportunity to
get out and talk with colleagues in other schools, to see that the grass isn’t
always greener on the other side of the fence, that other people share
similar problems, and so the possibility is to come up with some solutions
together’ (headteacher)
Cameo 2: A federation based on trust
Given strong encouragement from the project to work together, two heads in Group
B, with very different experience and focus but with largely shared values, opted to
manage the process so that all activities fitted into their existing development
priorities. Their schools were very different. The headteacher of the voluntary aided
school, set up in the eighteenth century to serve the poor, considered that
collaboration with ‘a freshstart school’ (i.e. a reopened school with a new headteacher
and staff) serving a less advantaged area as falling within that tradition. Both schools
took some responsibility for students affected by the forthcoming closure of a third
school. Gradually, joint arrangements developed around staffing, 16 to 19 curriculum
options, and site supervision. In this way the schools became constituted as ‘a
federation’ (i.e. a more formally designated partnership).
The headteacher of the freshstart school reflected on the impact of the collaboration
on her individual actions: ‘The project takes pressure off people… Knowing that you
can ring someone… galvanises you to do things sometimes’
Cameo 3: A group developing an identity
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In Group C, there was evidence of a positive attitude towards the idea of collaboration
from the outset. It may well be that the ‘right mix’ of personalities among the
headteachers was significant. They consistently prioritised attendance at half-termly
strategy group meetings, where together they made sense of collaboration in their
context, and in so doing, developed a stronger group identity. Four of the five schools
agreed to pool a large proportion of the additional funds made available through the
Government’s Leadership Incentive Grants (contributing £30,000 each per annum for
three years) to fund collaborative processes. The other school was in special measures
and was experiencing budgetary difficulties – and significantly, was given direct
financial support by the group, so that they could remain as a partner.
With a part of that funding, the headteachers appointed a coordinator, at deputy
headteacher level, to work on deepening the collaboration. She saw this as a role that
demanded considerable skill in negotiating with the group of headteachers; each
having the will to collaborate, but also with their own agendas and distinctive styles.
She acted as a connector, or broker, facilitating support for various teachers at the
struggling school. She created links between various nationally driven initiatives that
were experienced in schools as ‘innovation overload’. But it was a role full of
uncertainty; going beyond what already existed, in the name of sustainable and
positive change – and all this necessarily without a guiding map to follow.
Unsurprisingly, then, the coordinator was faced with many personal dilemmas in
respect to where she should place her effort.
As the group became stronger, LEA staff began to consider which other
developments and initiatives should be linked to it, and at one critical point they
issued an agenda for a meeting to outline these. The headteachers reacted quickly to
this proposal, informing the LEA representative that they would construct the meeting
agenda, that a headteacher would chair the meeting, and that the LEA representative,
whilst a welcome partner, would be a participant. The headteachers felt themselves to
be exercising a powerful choice about their own future as a group. The LEA project
staff considered that this incident reflected the strengthening and maturing of
collaboration.
Cameo 4: The search for common ground
Establishing common purpose was highly problematic in Group D, and for over a
year, despite the commitment of some of the headteachers, there was little sense of
cohesion. Eventually, the LEA project facilitators pushed very hard for the
appointment of a coordinator, whose role was to pursue the development of common
interests in a practical way. Initiatives developed in respect of areas such as
vocational education. However, not all headteachers demonstrated commitment to the
group over the term of the project, but agencies outside the school found the group
structure very useful as a basis for developing projects with the schools.
In reflecting on the situation, two of the headteachers argued that the origins of the
problem lay in the way that project was set up. In particular, they argued that it was
imposed without reference to existing collaborative networks. Early on in the
initiative we had picked up similar views from staff around the city who felt that the
collaborative patterns that had previously existed within the Excellence in Cities
initiative should have been used as the starting point. Later on, however, such
arguments were rarely noted in our discussions in schools, suggesting, perhaps, that
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those involved had seen evidence that the new structures were having an impact.
Nevertheless, certain heads remained committed to the view that it was imposition
that had created the barriers.
Explaining differences
The findings of our evaluation study show that school-to-school collaboration has an
enormous potential for fostering system–wide improvement. Over a relatively short
period, secondary schools in Bradcastle demonstrated how such arrangements can
provide an effective means of solving immediate problems, such as staff shortages;
how they can have a positive impact during periods of crisis, such as during the
closure of a school; and, how, in the longer run, schools working together can
contribute to the raising of aspirations and attainment in schools that have had a
record of low achievement. These findings are, we believe, a significant contribution
to school improvement knowledge, particularly in relation to system-wide reform. But
there is more to learn – through attempting an explanation for the marked differences
between the four collaborating groups.
It is evident, even in the cameos presented here, that behind the differences in process
and outcome, there are considerable tensions playing out within and between the
organisations involved. An organisational perspective offers a valuable level of
explanation here, and a way for example of locating individual leadership as a part of
an under-determined change process (Glatter, 2006). In particular, Ogawa et al (1999)
provide a powerful analysis of ‘enduring dilemmas’ of school organisation which fall
into two groups: dilemmas around ownership, or what the authors term ‘social work
and relations’ (around the value of professionalism, competing goals, task structures,
and hierarchy); and dilemmas in relation to external influences (around persistence,
boundaries, and compliance). These dilemmas provide a valuable lens with which to
look at the varied patterns of collaboration that developed in Bradcastle.
We suggest that the development of collaboration within each of the four groups can
be explained as a result of staff in groups of schools grappling with such dilemmas
together and as individuals in relation to particular contexts. The nature of these
dilemmas will be understood in relation to these attempted explanations.
In what follows, then, key aspects of these processes are compared and contrasted,
and some explanations in terms of underlying organisational dilemmas are offered.
This analysis is structured in relation to five propositions that emerged from our
analysis, printed here in bold.
Firstly, collaboration was part of a process whereby individual schools and
groups of schools felt more of a stake in the process of school improvement. As a
result, they found themselves able to act together in various combinations to
tackle complex and deep-rooted problems in schools. These perceived shifts in
ownership had profound effects on the relationships between the schools and the local
authority. For example, a LEA officer responsible for school improvement expressed
satisfaction with ‘… strong groups of schools, if there really is co-ownership of the
school improvement agenda… All it does is to mean you need better arguments for
what you want to do. And you get the energy of these headteachers, focused on school
improvement. That’s wonderful’.
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The issue of ownership here is suggestive of the dilemma of professionalism: as in
cameo 3, there are inevitable tensions as professionals engage bureaucracies in
struggles for control, but the engagement makes possible a far broader range of
actions. In cameo 1, the English teacher represents one such professionally-oriented
action, determined according to the professional judgements of the group of
headteachers, but considerable time was needed to build trust and move beyond the
bureaucratic version of collaboration.
Secondly, the accounts reveal how collaborating schools contributed to a wide
range of improvements, whether in terms of resources for teaching and learning,
the provision and preparation of teachers and other staff, the development of
alternative curricula and activities, and the measures used to determine
successful teaching. The processes used had impacts which ranged between the
direct and short term, to the indirect and longer term. As we have explained, a
version of this distinction between short term impact and longer term sustainability
was written into the original project specification, with the first part of the twopronged strategy aimed at raising achievement by any means possible, as quickly as
possible. Mapping the key processes identified through the accounts in this way,
suggests a useful shorthand for understanding the nature of the different changes that
took place and the timescale for their impact:
DIRECT IMPACT <--------------------------------------- LONGER TERM IMPACT
Movement of human resources
Joint advertisements/appointments
Staff development activities
Widening opportunities for pupils
Drawing new resources
Mutual challenge
Re-defining quality
Sharing responsibility
Those activities with a more direct and immediate impact on achievement tended to
be relatively easy to implement. However, the accounts also demonstrate how
collaboration can help to foster more complex initiatives that may well contribute to
sustainable improvements. By their nature, these activities involve processes which
take longer to evolve, not least because they require the negotiation of common
priorities and shared values (Fielding, 1999). In one group, for example, debates
amongst headteachers became focused on the question, ‘What are our values?’ and on
finding ways of making better use of difference to stimulate creativity and action; in
another group, working practices focused on finding ways of reshaping parental
choices around the schools involved; and in another group, the issue of priorities for
development were comprehensively addressed through the development of a funding
submission to sustain the collaboration.
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The dilemmas faced here are around the nature of the goals of activities, and the
extent to which school leaders aim to meet organisational needs (represented by the
standards agenda, given the wider context of this project), or the needs of particular
individuals within the organisation (such as those on the margins of the community of
the school).
However, thirdly, our evidence highlights the fact that collaboration alone own
does not provide the models for development, and the accounts show that when
groups of schools are planning new initiatives, materials from external sources
can play an extremely significant role. Collaboration creates possibilities for
working together, but does not provide much of the focus. In one group, advances in
English drew on the expertise of an individual teacher, and work with local authority
consultants. In another, improvement in creative arts drew on expertise external to the
schools. In a third group, attempts to share good practice from within departments
were seen as relatively unsuccessful, compared with the coordinated access to
materials from other sources. In the fourth group, moves towards best practice in
vocational education again drew on the advice of staff external to schools.
Dilemmas of ‘task structure’ and ‘persistence’ are implicated in this element of the
process; the extent to which external bodies legitimately dictate the formality of a
task, and the extent to which it is legimate to adapt that task, is central to much of the
debate over appropriate activities.
In addition, and fourthly, there was an ongoing problem in relation to sources of
challenge. It proved difficult for collaborating headteachers, working hard to
share resources and build relationships, to address the pressing needs either of
individual schools or within the system, without the assistance of outsiders to the
group. The accounts demonstrate how important the role of LEA staff can be in
this regard. In attempting to develop such longer term commitments, members of
the school groups sometimes experienced what Johnson & Johnson (1994) see as
tensions between the desire for task completion and the need for social cohesion. This
dilemma over goals arises because group members engaging in task-related behaviour
have to balance the individual need for good relationships with the organisational
need to effectively address the task. This means that it is difficult to create a sense of
mutual challenge within such collaborative working arrangements. One LEA officer
explained the weakness of collaboration in these terms: ‘the primary thing is to
preserve the harmony of the group’. There were cases of explicit challenge within
groups, but they were often damaging to the group. So, for example, authentic peer
review amongst groups of heads proved difficult to engage without some form of
external structure – the dilemma around task structure resolved in this case in favour
of externally-driven formality.
It is not surprising then, that monitoring discussions and strategy meetings with
individual headteachers continued to be the most significant opportunities to present
and assist with the challenge of improvement. It strikes us that such discussions with
individuals who are driving for an increase in standards will continue to be an
important source of support and challenge to headteachers, whatever the nature of the
collaborative structures that exist. The key difference now is that the locus of
responsibility lies within schools, leaving ‘outsiders’ such as LEA staff, to use their
wider experience to support and challenge those who are working together to lead
improvement efforts.
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Finally, though, collaboration between differently-performing schools (serving
largely different segments of the student population, in socio-economic terms)
helped reduce the polarization of the education system, to the particular benefit
of students on the edges of the system and performing relatively poorly. Since
collaboration was about active involvement of staff from different schools, there was
plenty of interaction close to classroom practice, set within the context that schools
are working in every day. As a result, staff began to see and understand each others’
issues more clearly, and were able to contribute to resolving the tensions that
necessarily arise with the implementation of improvement plans.
Collaboration involves working not with an abstract or distant model of ‘good
practice’ but through learning directly from neighbouring schools what is possible in
the context of the inevitable tensions and compromises with which school leaders and
teachers have to deal. Our accounts show how headteachers with different priorities
tended to emphasise different resolutions of these goal dilemmas, and how these
differences could be very productive. It was also clear that where schools did work
together, possibilities were sometimes created which resolved these dilemmas (albeit
temporarily) in new ways. So, for example, in cameo 2 schools began to widen their
curriculum offer by systematically offering places on courses to students from the
other schools in the group.
Implications
All of this indicates that successful networking is not easy to achieve, particularly
within the English context, where competition and choice continue to be the driving
forces of national education policy, adding weight to the dilemmas faced by
collaborating headteachers. In essence, the experience and the analysis suggests that
school-to-school collaboration requires:

The presence of external incentives that encourage key stake holders to
explore dilemmas over their goals, in order to view collaboration as
potentially being in their own interests, as well as in the interests of their
competitors;

Leaders in schools and in local authorities who can cope with dilemmas of
professional and bureaucratic control, and centralised vs. decentralised
control, through commitment to effective dialogue and serious reflection;

The creation of common improvement agendas that are seen to be relevant
to a wide range of stakeholders, offering a basis for an accepted resolution
of the dilemma of the needs of individuals vs. those of the organisation;

External help from credible consultants/advisers (from the LEA or
elsewhere) who have the confidence to learn alongside their school-based
partners, and who are therefore able to assist in working with these
dilemmas within and between organisations; and

LEA willingness and desire to support and engage with the collaborative
process, so as not to destabilise effective temporary resolution of these
dilemmas.
It is our view that the absence of such conditions will mean that attempts to encourage
schools to work together are likely to lead to time-consuming talk, which sooner or
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later will be dropped. These conclusions are in themselves important for any national
initiatives, such as the Leadership Incentive Grant and the Networked Learning
Communities sponsored by the National College for School Leadership, that invest
resources in the idea of schools working in partnership.
The implications for leadership of these conclusions are particularly significant. Just
like many other social organisations undergoing significant transformation, in
schools that are under pressure to change the search is on for what Fullan (1991)
describes as ‘order and correctness’. Teachers searching for correctness will
inevitably experience ambiguity and a lack of understanding of the direction and
purposes of the change. Thus, the search for order is a search to determine what
actions to take when faced with ambiguous situations.
Weick (1985) characterises schools as ‘underorganised systems’ in that although
they tend to be ambiguous and disorderly there is, nevertheless, some order.
Furthermore, he argues, anyone who can help to create more order within an
underorganised system can bring about change. This may, in part at least, throw
some light on what occurred in Bradcastle. Unusual and challenging factors,
emanating as they did from both outside and inside the schools, created a sense of
ambiguity. The structural arrangements introduced by some of the headteachers
helped to resolve these, and, as a result, they were able to gradually drawing staff
together behind broadly similar principles. As Weick explains, because ambiguity in
organisations increases the extent to which action is guided by values and ideology,
the values of ‘powerful people’ (i.e. those who can reduce ambiguity) affect what the
organisation is and what it can become. Thus, according to Weick, those who resolve
ambiguity for themselves and others can implant a new set of values in an
organisation, which creates a new set of relevancies and competencies, and, in so
doing, introduces a source of innovation. In this way ambiguity sets the scene for
organisations to learn about themselves and their environments, allowing them to
emerge from their struggles with uncertainty in a different form than when they
started the confrontation.
It follows, therefore, that the perspective and skills of headteachers are central to an
understanding of what needs to happen in order that the potential power of
collaboration can be mobilised. Their visions for their schools, their beliefs about how
they can foster the learning of all of their students, and their commitment to the power
of inter-dependent learning, appear to be a key influence. All of this means, of course,
that replication of these processes in other schools will be difficult, particularly if
those in charge are unwilling or unable to make fundamental changes in working
patterns.
All of this suggests that the Government’s current emphasis on ‘independent state
schools’ and academies needs to be handled sensitively if it is not to further
disadvantage groups of learners who already underachieving. Whilst it is true that, by
and large, when schools improve it is a result of leadership from the inside, it is also
the case that the wider context influences the progress of such improvement efforts,
for good or ill. This is the power of what we have characterised as ‘interdependence’. It leads us to argue that, in order to improve, schools do have to
become more autonomous and self-improving; at the same time, it draws our attention
to the way that neighbouring schools can add value to one another’s efforts whilst at
the same time supporting a more equitable approach.
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This being the case, we suggest that in its efforts to improve education across the
country, the Government would be naive to overlook the influence of what happens at
the local authority level, particularly in urban contexts. Local history, interconnections between schools and established relationships are always there, even if
we choose to ignore them. This being the case, we suggest that real progress towards
a national education system that is geared to raising standards for all students, in all
schools, requires the systematic orchestration and, sometimes, the redistribution of
available resources and expertise at the local level, and that collaborative approaches
are a valuable element in achieving this.
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Correspondence: Mel.Ainscow@manchester.ac.uk
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