School-to-School Collaboration: Building Collective Capacity through Collaborative Enquiry

Abstract

Almost half a century ago, Basil Bernstein (1970) argued that schools could not compensate for all the ills of society. While structural inequalities mean that the relationship between poverty and educational attainment remains as steadfast as ever, there is some evidence that offers a more optimistic perspective. Some schools can, and do, make a difference to outcomes for children from high-poverty settings and support the development of more equitable education systems (Sammons, 2007). There is also increasing evidence to suggest that when schools collaborate with and learn from each other then they can have more impact on outcomes than when they work in isolation (Ainscow, 2016). This chapter draws on the experience of the School Improvement Partnership Programme (SIPP), a three-year, school-toschool collaborative initiative. The SIPP is designed to use school-to-school collaboration and collaborative enquiry to build collective capacity to create fairer and higher achieving educational systems. In doing so, the SIPP highlights the importance of evidence and research in giving teachers new and more diverse leadership opportunities, and therefore placing them at the centre of reform efforts. It illuminates the potential for leaders in networks to work collaboratively across schools to address key priorities and highlights the challenge of rethinking roles and responsibilities to enhance professional capital and teacher leadership both within and between schools to enhance collective capacity within the system. Numerous factors interact to determine children’s educational, health and well-being outcomes – and ultimately their life chances. Decades of investment and intervention have delivered some hard-won gains but the correlation between low socio-economic status and restricted life chances remains as seemingly intransigent as ever. Put simply, the odds are stacked against children being able to escape high-poverty settings. 32