What if... 
(414kb, 8 pages)
Working collaboratively and creatively to achieve results
The demands placed on school leaders have changed radically over the last three decades, with much greater devolution of budgets and decision making to the front line alongside a parallel increase in accountability.
Headteachers in England today take more decisions and bear more responsibility than anywhere else in the world except the Netherlands (Education at a Glance, OECD, 2004).
The danger of such a devolved and accountable system is that schools will become isolated and competitive, when what is needed is collaboration between schools and other agencies so that our best schools and school leaders are supporting those that are most challenged and so that all schools are working together to meet the needs of every child in their local area.
We know that such collaborative 'system leadership' approaches work - for example in the London Leadership Strategy, where an independent evaluation found that results increased above the national average not just in those schools that received support from more successful schools, but also in the schools that provided the support.
Of course, many school leaders have been actively working together through collaboration and partnership for many years - often supported by national initiatives such as Education Action Zones, Networked Learning Communities and Education Improvement Partnerships.
More recently, the advent of the 14-19 and Every Child Matters agendas have highlighted the need for schools to collaborate more widely in order to provide choice and joined up services. Over the same period we have begun to see the development of new structures and models for leadership and governance, such as hard federations, that help build capacity and embed collaboration, so that it is no longer solely dependent on the dispositions of enthusiastic school leaders.
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