Leading an amalgamation

Joining two organisations together is a difficult task requiring real leadership. We've been working with a number schools in North East Lincolnshire to help them to make a success of the process of amalgamation. Like many local authorities the drive from North East Lincolnshire council to reorganise is driven by a complex set of factors - changes in funding and shifts in local demographics to name but two - but is underpinned by a philosophical commitment to the primary school ideal. There's also an aspiration to use the process as a catalyst for other improvements in the service offered to young people.

We've worked with the LA and with school leaders to help them to move through the complex and dynamic environment that amalgamation seems to create. We've facilitated a community of practice and brought new process and thinking to bear. We've also learned about the things that seem to make a difference in the early stages of the process. Through engaging with the practice of school leaders in Cleethorpes, Grimsby and Immingham a number of effective practices can be identified. We've given these a working title of 12 smart moves and we'd be keen to see if these moves have currency beyond NE Lincolnshire. It would be great if anyone had stumbled across other practices that seem to help schools going through similiar restructuring.

1. Create opportunities for cross school working and consciously try to get people out of their organisational silos. Curriculum teams that cut across key stages and phases are a useful vehicle for facilitating this.

2. Identify some real work – that is an authentic priority for all – and do it. Work moderation and assessment provide great opportunities for this to happen.

3. Consider how the key and statutory processes of school life might be used to add to building for the future. For example, performance management provides a legally binding mechanism to engage individuals in professional conversation and gain insight into their work.

4. Create opportunities for staff to mingle in professional and social settings and prepare senior staff to broker relationships across the divide of the pre-existing schools while this is happening.

5. Create time for thinking and planning. View this time as sacrosanct and develop systems and processes that are well understood by all colleagues and offer a means for others to deal effectively with most day to day issues that emerge.

6. Find learning opportunities that are novel to colleagues in both key stages to create equity around the development and improvement processes. Where these have greatest leverage the opportunities are well aligned to school priorities. The power of these novel approaches in bridging divisions between groups lies not so much in the practices themselves but in their capacity to change the dynamic of conversations between colleagues.

7. Look for quick wins that demonstrate that change is happening and that it is a force for good in a school. Often the changes are symbolic. Quick wins include improvements to learning environments and paying attention to colleagues working conditions. Other schools have built capital from school wide events that bring people together around a common task or experience.

8. Draw upon external expertise can be a powerful source of support and development. This can manifest itself as external change agents who are able to offer perspectives and ideas to the whole staff in order that necessary developments are not resisted because their source is a person within the school. In other cases colleagues have made good use of external mentors who provide critique and guidance at key moments.

9. Engaging children in the development of the school in a real way can be a route towards addressing the poor behaviour that is often noticed when schools are amalgamated.

10. Visibility and overt modelling of behaviours and attitudes is crucial. When creating a new ethos – as opposed to grafting the ethos of one school onto another – takes time and effort. Leaders have found success in being highly visible and modelling behaviours. Additionally some colleagues note that creating small units of children into houses that cut across key stages and create opportunities for children and staff to work together. This has been particularly important where scale and physical arrangements within school mitigate against the whole school assembling together on a regular basis.

11. Plan the succession of leadership carefully. Where this happens and attention is paid to the relationships between the heads of school being amalgamated this is a powerful means for enabling the process to be effective for children and in maintaining the esteem of the professionals involved.

12. View early arrangements for structure and procedure in school as provisional. Systems and structures are essential but the ones that are designed to survive the hurly burley of a new organisation in turbulent times may not be the ones which will lever longer term success.

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Building Social Capital across Local Area Partnerships

“Teachers think social workers are the hardest people in the world to work with and social workers think teachers are the hardest people in the world to work with and they are both right!!”

This was the wonderful quote we got from a senior social worker whilst working on a local area partnership leadership development programme in Hull. What she alluded to in a light hearted way was that multi-agency working has a number of challenges which are regularly rehearsed, but one which isn’t often widely acknowledged is that the participants in those partnerships come from different professional cultures.

The shared professional culture which is held implicitly and embedded in the ways in which professionals work together, also binds them together at times to the exclusion of ‘outsiders’. This is often described as ‘bonding social capital’. This is the social capital that develops within groups as they come to know and understand one another and build common purpose. While high levels of bonding social capital are really important to have within particular groups when the imperative is to work beyond the boundaries of your group it needs to be balanced by developing high levels of ‘bridging social capital’ with external partners.

We have recently engaged with the issue of building bridging social capital in their work with Leeds with an informal partnership called NEtWORKS. NEtWORKS is an informal pabrings together Schools, Children’s Centres and other local organisations in the area surrounding Meanwood, Moortown and Chapel Allerton in North East Leeds. This partnership is one of the 38 clusters created across Leeds to help deliver services to children and young people.

Enquire worked with the Local authority Extended Services Adviser and the leadership of the partnership to design and facilitate a work-shadowing programme for colleagues drawn from the various partners in the locality. This included colleagues from schools, children’s centres, careers, youth service, social care, police, integrated processes, attendance improvement service, youth offending service and the voluntary sector. Pairs of participants worked together for a day on designing a rich opportunity for one another to engage in reciprocal work-shadowing opportunities. On final day was one of conversation as they shared their experiences with the other members of the group.

The response from participants has been fantastic. One colleague told us that,

"This project has inspired me to pursue my aspiration to work in a more creative & innovative way to ensure an effective multi-agency approach to improving outcomes for families"
While another testified that,
"Integration of services and staff needs commitment of time, space and support at all levels. No effective work can be done until staff have 'integrated themselves together'. This should not be seen as a luxury, an ‘add on’ or something to be done incidentally.”
And another said that,
“the work has provided me an opportunity to enhance my knowledge of children’s services and the organisations which deliver across the North East Leeds cluster. I believe that the development of our ‘community of practice’ will lead to greater understanding and knowledge and a better service provision within this cluster.”

We know it’s made a difference to attitudes, to the quality of relationships and to common understandings of how the different professionals in the group work and the accountabilities they work to. What we don’t know, and its too early to say yet, is what difference engagement in the programme will make to practice and provision.

So the question those within the design and development team are asking themselves is;

“Does building social capital across services within a locality create the conditions for developing better services for young people and their families?


How are you meeting the challenge of building social capital across those traditional boundaries of organisation and professional culture?

Have you any experience of programmes which endeavour to build common understandings across services?

Can you share any powerful images of successful local area partnership working?

Also read http://www.enquirelearning.com/leaders.asp