Governance, leadership and management in federations of schools

Abstract

In England, ‘federations’ are defined as groups of schools that have a formal agreement to collaborate with the aim of raising achievement and promoting inclusion and innovation. Such federations can involve different numbers and/ or types of schools, and a wide range of priorities and targets can be agreed, some have strong links with other agencies and services while others do not. And perhaps, most importantly, they exhibit a range of structures. At one end of the continuum a federation can be ‘integrated’, ‘tightly coupled’ or ‘hard’ by creating a joint governing body with legal responsibility for all the schools involved. Conversely, a much more ‘loosely coupled’ structure is possible where a formal agreement is made between a group of schools to work together on a particular issue or range of issues; these federations tend to be considered ‘soft’ federations. These collaborative arrangements exist in diverse geographical and socio-economic contexts. Federations are viewed as an important element to central government policy and a potential mechanism for the raising standards through collaboration. Since 2002 the ‘New Labour’ government has invested over $30 (US) million into the ‘federations Policy’.

This paper presents a number of findings from the case study strand of a three-year study investigating the impact of 37 federations (see Lindsay et al., 2007). Maximum variation sampling (Maykutt and Morehouse, 1994) was used to select 10 case study federations. Key stakeholders were interviewed during three rounds of field visits to each case. Documentary evidence from each case provided important contextual information and provided a source of triangulation. Within and between case analysis from case studies (Miles and Huberman, 1994) highlighted a number of key themes, patterns and trends which have implications for the development of collaborative strategies attempting to re-structure and re-culture schools and their communities. This paper explores issues of leadership, management and governance in developing federations. Findings suggest localized ownership and control of the process within the context of interdependent relationships have supported the development of a range of models of governance, leadership and management in federations aimed at improving schools facing challenging circumstances

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ORCID for Daniel Muijs: orcid.org/0000-0002-0131-8921

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