Michael Jopling
University of Wolverhampton
Michael Jopling is Professor of Education and Director of the Education Observatory at University of Wolverhampton. His research interests include school leadership, school networking and collaboration, and provision for vulnerable children and young people, and he has published widely in these areas.
This research examines the different ways in which schools in two small, coastal local authorities (LAs) in the North East of England have approached school to school support and collaborative school improvement against a background of policy rhetoric about the self-improving system and diminished local authority support (Jopling & Hadfield, 2015; Earley & Greany, 2017). The LAs were selected for the research because of their contrasting histories in terms of school performance. One had consistently performed very highly nationally in terms of secondary and, particularly, primary school data over a number of years. The other had been less successful.
The project adopted a two-phase mixed methods approach. The first phase examined school and local authority level performance and contextual data. The second phase drew on that broad analysis to inform qualitative semi-structured interviews with school leaders in the LAs. Overall, group and individual interviews were undertaken with 11 headteachers/principals and 25 senior and middle leaders in 15 schools, including two teaching school alliances, in the two LAs in 2017. The data collected were analysed using a two-stage analytical process based on framework analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and a theoretical framework adapted from a meta-analysis of research into school networking and collaboration (Rincón-Gallardo & Fullan, 2016).
The findings from the research focus on the different ways in which school to school support has functioned (or has not functioned) in the two LAs and the difficulties involved in working collaboratively in the primary and secondary phases. It uses all the data collected and analysed to challenge received wisdoms about differences in school performance regionally (and beyond), examine critically the ways in which schools work together to support each other, and assess the implications of this for policy and practice in collaborative school improvement.
References
Braun, V., and Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101.
Earley, P. and Greany, T. (eds.) (2017) School Leadership and Education System Reform. London: Bloomsbury.
Jopling, M. & Hadfield, M. (2015) From fragmentation to multiplexity: Decentralisation, localism and support for school collaboration in England and Wales, Journal of Education Research Online, 7,1, 47-65.
Rincón-Gallardo, S. and Fullan, M. (2016) Essential features of effective networks in education, Journal of Professional Capital and Community, 1,1, 5-22.
