Next Practice in System Leadership - Knowsley

New district-wide governance and leadership models designed to ensure coherent services and strong community leadership and engagement - supported by movement towards three regional learning centre federations

Knowsley System Leadership and Governance, Knowsley, North West

The Local Authority is the third most deprived in the country and has a history of innovation to offset the challenging circumstances. A significant challenge for both leadership and governance in Knowsley is to meld the principles of system-wide education reform with the renewed focus placed upon neighbourhood and community regeneration by 'Concept Knowsley'. It is closing all of its ten secondary schools and opening seven new learning centres. It is developing radical federated leadership and governance structures designed to secure high levels of collective ownership. These structures will support neighbourhood regeneration and be integrated with the delivery of wider public services, in order to secure whole system transformation.

Leaders of the new Learning Centres will collaborate both within their federations and across the authority to transform learning and achievement. They are also evolving new models of leadership partnership between the Local Authority and secondary heads.

Through the field trial, Knowsley is also investigating ways in which new governance models are able to adopt aspects of system organisation devolved by the Local Authority so that the system becomes self-regulating and self-organising. Particularly, they are seeking:

• to find new ways in which governance is able to respond to the changing nature of learning
• to move to a form of adaptive governance which will play a more active role in change through a pioneering culture of creativity, innovation and risk taking so as to address the most deep-rooted social and education issues
• to establish formal and structured ways in which governance can respond to the rapid shift to partnership working both within the education community and with other stakeholders
• to establish new modes of accountability to local communities, parents and pupils.

Initially two field trials, the work has come together to build from the early successes and will expand to the co-design and leadership of Knowsley's new educational provision, together with new models of curriculum and learning for the Learning Centres.

Knowsley's Learning Centres have been in the news - see Council calls time on classrooms on the BBC website.

Meet Damian Allen  Executive Director of Children's Services in Knowsley.

View the presentation that Knowsley shared at the Community of Interest event at NCSL on Monday 17 September (available for download below in both PDF and Word formats).

Knowsley - 17.09.07 (25 KB)

Knowsley - 17.09.07 (71 KB)

Find out about our Community of Interest.