In my conversations with heads no-one ever argues with the principle of collaborating with other schools. What could make better sense than learning from other people’s successes, sharing problems and drawing on outside perspectives to measure and challenge your own work?
But (and there’s often a But…) collaboration is seen as soft, a nice-to-have that tends to be edged out by the day to day demands of a fast-changing, highly accountable system. Perhaps unconsciously, it’s seen as incompatible with a world where schools are essentially competing with each other. When collaborative networking happens – I often hear – it’s among high performing schools who have the headroom and confidence to innovate. And even if it gets under way with a bang, it tends to tail off rapidly.
Those are all fair comments, but it’s never been more important to overcome the challenges and make this thing work. After years of rapid, often contradictory change, more and more educationalists can see that it shouldn’t be policymakers, the media or the vagaries of the economy that call the shots in education. Schools need to power schools. And the only way we will pull that off is by working more systematically together.
So that’s why, after 30 years in the business of collaboration, SSAT is stepping on the gas. We have redefined our name – to the Schools, Students and Teachers network – to reflect our commitment to helping school communities to learn from and support each other. We are also bringing in a sequence of measures to make our networks truly productive for members, including a new team of SSAT relationship managers with a brief to match-make among members and disseminate insights from the network.
At the heart of our plans, we will be emphasising what we see as the three essential ingredients of collaboration between schools:
Purpose – defining what your network is setting out to achieve for your school and setting clear and realistic goals.
Format – giving your collaborative efforts a clear shape and routine, and finding channels for working together that are easy to access and – crucially – you know you can sustain.
Management – making sure someone (it could be SSAT) is driving the network and has the responsibility to ensure that it survives and delivers beyond the initial burst of enthusiastic support from participants.
‘Every network’, my colleague headteacher Caroline Barlow says, ‘needs a gardener to feed, fertilise, cross-pollinate and weed it.’
Let’s get our hands dirty!
