The Learn Together Partnership

Background

The Education Authorities of the Greater Merseyside area (Halton, Knowsley, Liverpool, St Helens, Sefton and Wirral) have a long history of collaborative working. It was felt that there was a need to increase the level of joint activity to meet the challenges of high quality service provision within the emerging Children's Services agenda. The commitment to a partnership approach subsequently included Wigan and the new partnership was branded 'Learn Together' and launched.

In its start-up phase it was supported by The Innovation Unit and a Co-ordinator was appointed.

The partnership is strengthened considerably by the fact that the pace of change is broadly similar across partner organisations and this is reflected in a growing interest in committing to a measure of simultaneous change where possible. At the same time, it is recognised that specific initiatives will often be driven by sub-groups and sometimes by bipartite arrangements.

The Initial Agenda

The start-up priorities were determined by an initial 24-hour conference for members of the management / leadership teams of each partner organisation. Three key themes emerged from this conference:

• to establish a programme of mutual peer service review;
• to develop a programme of professional sharing / work exchanges;
• to commit to developing joint service delivery.

Peer Service Review

The pilot of this work was structured on a two-officer, two-session approach, linked to attendance and exclusion issues. Feedback from work undertaken so far suggests that this is a successful and valuable exercise and, in particular:

• it is important to involve 2 officers for ease of handling information
• these officers should be of good quality and expertise and well-versed in the critical friend role
• the area of specific focus needs to be very tightly defined
• documentation needs to be fit for purpose and should be carefully prepared by the host.

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Professional Sharing / Work Exchanges

This element facilitates opportunities for colleagues to work alongside peers in partner organisations in a structured way that supports mutual learning and skill development. There is a clear issue about the management of time commitments and it is widely felt that the maximum should be no more than 5 days per participant per year. The Chief Officers have also committed themselves to a series of bipartite and group work sharing activities, most significantly around the development of Children's Services.

Evidence suggests that the most effective professional sharing is within a framework which:

• has a sound contextual basis
• has clear objectives explicitly agreed between all parties before commencement, and which may be task-orientated
• has a clear element of reciprocation
• has an evaluative framework.

Joint Service Delivery

The inclusion of Joint Service Delivery as an operational priority was to:

• enable Authorities to work more effectively
• to facilitate a wider range of quality services to schools
• to maximise the use of the diversity of expertise which exists within the partnership.

This work has a key focus on CPD to schools, school governor training and procurement and brokerage of services to schools.

Other Activity

Other partnership activity included:

• a series of Briefing Sessions with the core purpose being the early dissemination of lessons learned from local involvement in key pilots. Areas covered so far include the New Relationship with Schools, Building Schools for the Future, Private Finance Initiatives and Academies
• a joint Chief Officers Group to explore key issues in greater depth
• a commitment to investigate ways of achieving a higher level of benchmarking, through a higher standardisation of Section 52 financial returns - this work having an initial focus on Early Years, SEN and Youth Service
• the development of a Joint officers' CPD Strategy and Networked Learning Plan which reflects the partnership's commitment to supporting networked learning in the wider schools community with a similar strategic approach
• the development of a Partnership Protocol which describes a set of behaviours and intentions and which acts as the partnership's key instrument of governance
• the development of close links with the North West LEAs Federation (NWLEAF), a collaborative involving 6 other Authorities in the region.

Key Challenges

Strategic and operational challenges for the partnership included:

• change management leading to full implementation of Children's Services
• the placing of peer review within the Joint Area Review framework
• development of the Networked Learning Plan;
• the development of local authority roles as parental advocates
• how to support networked school collaboratives through inter-authoriity networking.

Further information

A partnership website is available at www.learntogether.org.

Other information is available from the Co-ordinator, telephone 01744 623823, or by e-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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