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Next Practice in System Leadership

Next Practice in System Leadership (NPSL) is the first of four Next Practice projects being developed by the Innovation Unit to explore radically new approaches to 21st Century issues through disciplined innovation.

The National College for School Leadership is the national partner for the NPSL project, helping to engage and support the schools involved and also to mainstream the lessons that emerge.

Our current thinking is that Next Practice in System Leadership involves approaches to leadership and/or governance that:

• do not, to the best of our knowledge, exist elsewhere in the same form (in terms of structures, scale, pace of change, or range of partners involved),
• enable groups of schools, or schools and other organisations, to sustainably deliver new, enhanced or more coherent services, and which
• aim to achieve significantly better outcomes for their young people and their communities than can be achieved by schools working on their own.

Field trial sites

There are 16 field trials and the focus for their work varies from whole town 14-19 provision, to joined up Every Child Matters (ECM) arrangements, 0-19 full-service provision and even authority-wide educational transformation. The organisational arrangements within which leadership and governance is exercised are even more varied. There are 'hard federations' of schools or academies and a geographically dispersed coalition or 'chain' of schools. There are whole town models. One for 14-19, some for ECM and one for fully integrated provision. There are campus approaches, a 14-19 family of schools and two approaches to authority-wide transformation co-designed and led by school and local authority leaders.

What they have in common is the commitment to new forms of sustainable leadership and governance appropriate to these purposes and challenges.

The field trials are potential sources of learning for the wider system. Making this innovative practice and learning available to others was from the start an explicit purpose of the programme for The Innovation Unit and NCSL.

The 16 field trials are:

Further information

• The Next Practice in System Leadership project is now complete. Information on the outcomes of the project is available on the Models of leadership section of the website.
• If you are interested in joining the Community of Interest for the project where you can find out more and hear about events and opportunities to visit the schools, please email systemleadership@innovation-unit.co.uk.
• To read the blogs done by school leaders involved in the projects and to join in the debate about the future of leadership, join the Innovation Unit talk2learn community.
• Further information about the project can be found on the Innovation Unit website.
• Feature article on Next Practice in the September 2007 issue of ldr magazine.

More about System Leadership

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