Leadership for Learning Networks

Leadership for learning networks

This paper is number two of three papers prepared for a workshop at the

7th International BELMAS Research Conference partnership with SCRELM,

St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, 8-10 July

This paper is in draft form. Please do not quote without prior permission of the authors.

Michelle Anderson

Researcher

Networked Learning Communities

NationalCollege for School Leadership

Leadership for learning networks

Abstract

This paper discusses leading the development and sustainability of networks. It is one of a three-paper session at BELMAS. The context of our discussion, in this paper, is drawn from the NationalCollege for School Leadership’s (NCSL) ‘Community Leadership’ and ‘Networked Learning Communities’ (NLC) programmes. We pick up on the theme of leading and experiencing leadership in networks as a balance of forces changing over time (Lawn and Grace, Eds, 1987). Drawing on primary data from the programmes we propose that models of leadership for single institutions will not be enough to service and build capacity for interdependent relationships. Specifically, we focus our exploration of this proposition on the inter-relationship between structures, processes and people.

Introduction

Networks, collaboration, leadership, and into this mix, increasingly, the word facilitation are used and ‘shared’ liberally between practitioners, policy makers and researchers. One only has to think about the language you read or wrote about in the last bid; report; submission and dare we say it – conference paper! Our exposure to this language, while important to raise awareness and perhaps signify a directional shift in educational leadership, can also lead to familiarity – potentially a false familiarity. In this paper we propose that models of leadership for single institutions will not be enough to service and build capacity for interdependent relationships. As such, distributed leadership becomes axiomatic for a more socially just education system. We make this proposition, partly, because of what we are seeing emerge from our data. However, we also offer it as ‘marker’ around which to discuss, surface and problematise leading and experiences of leadership in networks.

Before exploring our proposition about leadership it is important that we pause to provide a brief contextual overview of the networks to set the scene for our discussion of the projects in this paper. Between them the two projects enquire into the nature of:

• Purpose
• Context and;
• People

in setting up and sustaining networks for leadership learning.

The projects in this paper

‘Community Leadership’ project

The NCSL community leadership strategy is supporting schools, community groups, and public sector agencies who wish to rethink their institutional role and relationship to the community and to each other. The community leadership network, which forms part of the strategy, has made a collective commitment to create a new system for school - community leadership and learning, a system that is more responsive to the realities and interdependencies of communities in today's world and will lead to demonstrably better outcomes for young people.

This network has arisen out of the growing understanding of how the effects of poverty, the families they are born into, the communities in which they grow up and the schools that they attend all affect the life chances of young people. In our communities where disadvantage is greatest, low educational outcomes and a widening gap between the highest and lowest achieving students is our greatest challenge. The community leadership network are aware that what happens beyond school has a significant effect on what happens in school and yet feel somewhat frustrated by the fact that traditionally, education, social services, health, police and other community groups have,in the main, operated in relative isolation. Each are providing what they believe is best for children, but can be restricted by structures, systems, funding and policies into operating more collectively and interdependently.

The policy agenda has now shifted radically in response to this challenge. The Green Paper ‘ Every Child Matters’, and the follow up ‘ Every Child Matters – next steps’, proposes to focus children’s services on schools and to foster multidisciplinary teams that address the needs of the whole child, the family and by extension, the community. Extended schools and full service schools provide one opportunity for educational leaders to develop multi-agency collaboration, promote a broader view of leadership and operate as agencies of social change and community renewal. Other schools are developing similar approaches through working in collaborative networks with a strong emphasis on community partnership.

The network grew out of a recent leading edge seminar at NCSL (November 03) challenged us to look beyond school improvement to community transformation. Participants explored the models of leadership that would be required of school leaders operating in a more interdependent, partnership oriented manner where the key focus was on the needs of the child rather than the needs of any one single institution or agency. It also explored the changes in leadership practice that would be needed to create an interdependent system which valued and promoted higher standards simultaneously with greater well being.

John West Burnham, speaking at this seminar said:

‘School improvement leads to bonding, introspection and detachment. While this creates institutional integrity, it compromises engagement and networking – the basis of the creation of social capital. If academic standards are to be raised in a sustainable way and broader educationalistsl aspirations achieved then educationists will have to see their role in terms of creating social capital rather than just improving classroom practice.’

This insight reinforced for many participants, the interdependence of the school and the community, and challenged the notion of any one single organisation or group meeting the complex needs of young people.

The new Headteacher Standards which have been in consultation for the last 9 months have responded to this wider agenda for schools and now include a new standard

‘Strengthening Community’. The actions proposed in this Standard include the development of a school culture and curriculum which take account of the richness and diversity of the school’s communities. It also includes taking account of a range of community based learning experiences, and collaborating with other agencies to provide for the academic, spiritual, moral, social and cultural wellbeing of pupils and their families. This standard is being seen by the community leadership network as providing them with an incentive for involving a range of schools and their communities in their own local network.

The network currently comprises 5 areas in England(rural and urban) and is planned to grow to 10 by April 2005. Following an initial residential event the network assessed the challenges and opportunities that would shape their work in the coming 18 months.

• Where is the knowledge in the system – nationally and internationally?
• What would a system which was configured to work interdependently to deliver better outcomes for children look like?
• What sort of forms of facilitation and ways of working do we need to develop to ensure that everyone in the network has a voice – how do we model community leadership in action?
• The system is powerful – it reverts to type; how do we ensure that we stay dynamic and open to new ways of working?
• How do we balance the tension between creating an organic people and child focused network whilst creating robust systems for support and delivery within and between organisations?

One of the discussions involved our understanding of the exchange of ideas and service within a multi organisational network. We wanted to move from exchanging services to exchanging thinking and ideas through to a collaborative sharing of purpose and a challenging of the status quo and of each other. The network agreed that true networked learning has taken place when all contributors to the network are changed as a result. As one participant remarked:

‘ I don’t think I have ever been in a network where real networked learning took place and led to systemic change, but this is essential for the development of authentic community leadership and school / community transformation’

The network also shared their understanding of social capital and used the following indicators as a useful way of gaining clarity on both the core purpose of the community leadership network and a useful way of assessing its impact over time. In a community leadership network you would expect to see the following emerging over time:

-A strong sense of shared values and social aspirations

-A shared sense of social/geographical identity

-Greater levels of trust, interdependence and sharing

-Collaborative action across the network and between agencies and organisations

-Greater levels of volunteering and social engagement across the community network

-Greater participation in faith based activities

-Higher turnout in elections

-Greater co operation on economic and social projects ( intergenerational )

-A greater sense of control and investment in the future.

‘Facilitating Learning Networks’ project

The ‘facilitating learning networks’ project[i] is one of many research and enquiry activities of the Networked Learning Communities programme[ii]. This project builds on other programme-wide activity focusing on a need, expressed particularly by co-leaders, to understand and feel confident in leading and facilitating a learning network. A key aim of the project is to improve our understanding of the working assumptions of leading; leadership and facilitation of NLCs.

Within the NLC programme 137 networks (representing ~6% of all schools in the UK) are involved in trying to build leadership and facilitation capacity. Approximately two-thirds of these, largely, school-to-school networks are now entering, or within, their second year of development. As such, people within the networks are in a good position to reflect critically on their first year of development as a NLC, identifying what they perceive as key challenges and successes. In this paper we will focus, particularly, on the accounts about and experiences of co-leaders. This role is noted by all we interviewed as being pivotal to the success of a NLC. So before we go on to describe the project’s data collection a brief overview of co-leadership.

NLCs were asked as part of their bid to identify people who would be responsible for co-leading the network. This role then positions people in an interface role between their individual organisation, the network and the programme. The role ‘co-leader’ was introduced deliberately by the programme to indicate a shift from a single leader towards a distributed concept of leading. How many co-leaders or who the co-leaders were left to the network to decide. Of the 137 networks co-leadership is represented as a combination of three or two co-leaders. Three networks have only one co-leader. Our most recent programme-wide figures on co-leader numbers and configurations (i.e. as at April 2004) show there to be 319 co-leaders in the NLC programme. These co-leaders are from schools; LEA; HEI and home-based origins. Of the 253 school-based co-leaders, significantly, 171 are headteachers. So within this project a key role we wanted to explore was co-leading and co-leadership of networks.

From the programme’s data we identified seven networks (one of these we used to pilot our interview schedule) from the north, midlands and south of England. The average size of each network was 16 schools[iii]. This project’s fieldwork is contributing to the development of, what we hope will be, a practical and helpful product for networks about facilitating learning networks. As such, we saw it as important to explore the concepts of leading and facilitating through the experiences of people from different vantage points (internal and external to the network) and roles associated with the network.

In this project all the networks have:

a mix of co-leadership combinations (i.e. two or three people with co-leadership responsibilities a mix of male and female and from a mix of roles – primary or secondary, headteachers; Local Education Authority; assistant headteachers. All had co-leading as a dimension of their full-time individual organisational role);

networked activity evident at different levels and thus have established or utilise other roles, internal and external, to the network (i.e. research and development coordinators; lead learners and other middle-leaders; link learners; strand leaders; knowledge managers; critical friends, such as, people from Higher Education Institutions; LEAs; Network to Network consultants; other headteachers; and NLG Facilitators);

a cross-phase configuration (except the pilot network which is all primary[iv]).

The data was collected through a combination of pre-telephone interviews; network visits and twenty in-depth semi-structured tape-recorded interviews. These interviews were transcribed and sent back to participants for their further reflection and clarification. The data is in its early stages of analysis and as such our discussion will focus on a key theme for this paper – the emerging findings in relation to the interplay between network and individual organisational roles. We would ask that you read this paper understanding that further analysis and cross-referencing of the data with other NLG programme-wide research and enquiry is being undertaken currently.

What the Community Leadership and the Facilitating Learning Networks projects provide us with are two examples of exploring networked configurations in practice. In the next two sections we take a closer look at, firstly, one case example and in the second section what people are telling us about the shifts and tensions in leading and experiencing leadership in NLCs.

Community Leadership – a case example

One of the community leadership network areas is Winsford in Cheshire. Winsford is a current networked learning community that is made up largely of schools. They now wish to extend and redevelop the network so that it has a community focus. One of the key aims of the network is to develop a virtual extended school model in Winsford that the community leadership network will work toward developing.

There are 17 schools in Winsford and 15 of them have benefited from a recent SRB project which has aimed to improve basic skills across the town. In addition they are all part of the ‘Winsford by Choice’ initiative and form the ‘Winsford Education Partnership’. ‘Winsford by Choice’ aims to work toward a whole town community, putting learning spaces and places at the heart of the community and available for all.

The vision for the community leadership network and virtual extended school is ‘a virtual one stop shop, open all hours, very inclusive and responding to different needs in the community’. There is also a commitment to link to the neighbourhood renewal strategy in order that the needs of the most vulnerable families and local communities in the town are at the heart of the extension of the network and the development of the town wide extended school.

The first 6 months of this developing strategy have engaged professionals in Winsford in some interesting initial dialogue. The following is a flavour of some of what has been debated within the broad areas of :

Values and philosophy

We have a dependency culture – how do we shift it to interdependency?

Achieving change means addressing how we communicate and who we communicate with

The ownership and involvement of all in decision making is important – we need to address areas some of us will be uncomfortable with

Its about changing what happens on the ground – is life any different afterwards?

Principles and processes

How will we measure success?

How will we achieve a collective vision and integrated decision making?

We will need to let others take the lead and manage our own fear and insecurity when we are not in the lead or when things don’t go as we expect.

Key themes and areas of work

Creating a shared understanding of ‘leadership’ and ‘ community’

Understand more about what is happening now – what do the community value?

How will we enable the whole community to engage in the design of ‘ what now?’

We need to find out what we have in common and where we are different ; where is the energy , where are the blocks ?

Questions / issues

Do we know who the community feel are the highly effective agencies and individuals in meeting their needs – are they part of this strategy ?

How will these shift power relationships – what are the implications for individuals and organisations?

Are we all clear about what we want – where is our own self interest in this and how do we declare it?

The challenge for the current Winsford networked learning community will be to move from a network which has been focused, largely, on school and organisational improvement and the raising of standards to one which is much broader and aspires to community and school transformation, the building of social capital and a more holistic approach to both improving standards and achieving greater well being for young people. The current network has bonded around a school agenda. While this creates network integrity, it may compromisewider community engagement and networking – the basis of the creation of social capital. If standards are to be raised in a sustainable way and broader educational aspirations achieved, then the network is aware that it will need shift to a role focused more on creating social capital and asset building rather than the current inclusive focus on improving classroom practice.