Alright stop, collaborate and listen

In the next few weeks, colleagues from other parts of Thesis will be gearing up for The Collaboration Question, a one-day conference being held on 3 November. Wonkhe’s Editor, Debbie McVitty, has written about what the day is aiming to achieve, and is asking all those who are “collaboration curious” to sign up.

As part of my contribution to the day, I am currently working on something that I’ve wanted to do more about for years: why different phases of education in England have such wildly different systems for collaboration, and whether there is any reason apart from sheer historical accident for this.

For most of my career, I was a teacher in a school system experiencing significant reform, much of it led by and driven forward from multi-academy trusts (MATs), a form of legal entity which provided for multiple schools to band together to seek improvement and greater impact. I don’t propose here to get into the arguments about the private/public status of MATs which created such controversy in the school system, just to note that these MATs developed as the connective tissue between different schools under a single banner; they might be geographically close or found far apart, teaching very similar students or entirely different ages. Different MATs chose different levels of homogeneity between their schools, but the schools retained their identity; no MAT presents itself to the world as a single school with lots of sites.

Consider how different that is from the more common arrangements of universities over the past thirty years – institutions opened new campuses elsewhere (many now closed) or separate entities became a single legal body, but there was nothing like the rise of MATs in compulsory schooling. Vice-chancellors may aspire to run a bigger education institution, but few if any seek to oversee a chain of institutions. (Don’t @ me with the exceptions – that is what I’ll be investigating!)

That is not to say there are not lots of collaborations in higher education, but they tend to be charisma-driven and/or entirely unenforceable in the event one member of the band decides they want a solo career. This is also different to MATs: as I said, some trusts run their schools on a template, others enforce little to no common practice, but no matter how similar or otherwise the schools are required to be to each other, none can leave the MAT unilaterally. Some MATs have failed and been dissolved, some have surrendered schools they felt they could not run, others have had schools taken away if Ofsted decided they could not run them … but no school has pulled a South Carolina and declared their MAT joining to be null and void.

I worked for two MATs and spent time working with those employed in many more, so the MAT system is very familiar to me, and when I entered HE, I often wondered why something similar did not exist in this sector. After all, the four oldest universities in England have had a federated character for much of their history. But in the current moment of financial precarity, there exists no single, clear, well-legislated-for model by which universities could enter purposely enduring arrangements short of merger.

And that’s what I’ll be looking at with leaders of institutions over the next few weeks. I have asked some of those involved in running arrangements in HE which are a form of entanglement stronger than goodwill but short of comprehensive merger to speak to me about how their approach works, why it came about, and if it could and perhaps should be more easily utilisable for others.

I will also be speaking to leaders in other phases of education, including former colleagues still working at the top of MATs as well as FE college group leaders and others, to see how they reflect on those institutions and whether there is anything HE might learn. It is quite deliberately aimed to be an initial survey, not a deep dive, and despite my strong instinct that multi-university trusts might be a good thing for the future of the sector, I am genuinely interested in trying to understand if others share my view, and if not, what we should do to make powerful and enduring collaboration easier and more impactful in the current moment.

If you’d be interested in talking to me about this issue, do feel free to drop me an email on john@post18.co.uk, and if you’d like to know what (if anything!) useful I conclude, come along to The Collaboration Question on 3 November!