In an era of increasing school autonomy and declining local authority support, the need for schools to work collaboratively is greater than ever. There are a variety of ways schools can do this, from loose partnerships to more formal arrangements involving shared governance.
In England, local authority maintained schools have the option of becoming a federation, in which the separate schools’ governing bodies become a single governing body with responsibility for all the schools in the federation. There are numerous benefits of federating – for example, Ofsted’s report Leadership of More Than One School found that federation led to:
Forming federations is becoming an increasingly attractive option for many schools, but there is little information available to schools considering it. At the National Governors’ Association we decided to do something about this, so after gaining funding from the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (BELMAS), we undertook a research project looking at governors’ and headteachers’ experiences of the federation process.
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