Conformidades ambientales en la construcción

schools did give many other examples of joint working on CPD and R&D.

When asked which universities they worked with and why, the lead schools and their partners tended to see historical links and personal relationships as key. Where schools had worked with a university taking PGCE placements in the past, trainee teachers had often then been taken on to work at the schools where they were placed, thereby strengthening the organisational links with the university at which they had trained. Equally, staff from the schools had sometimes gone to work at the university as PGCE tutors, again strengthening the organisational ties. These historical ties were important in two ways:

 they created a sense of inertia, in that it could be hard for a school to extricate itself from existing arrangements, partly because it would upset these personal relationships but also because of the logistical and time implications of ending one set of relationships and starting a new one. This inertia had to be balanced with the quality issues outlined below: put bluntly, how bad would a university provider need to be before a school would switch allegiance to a new provider?

 they gave a competitive advantage when it came to School Direct. Several of the schools had initiated School Direct provision with their existing university providers because it was the natural place to turn given the relationships that existed.

I do think that probably at the heart of it all is to do with personal relationships... one of my feelings is that once you have developed that relationship with somebody then that becomes very central and provides quite a lot... so you develop, networks develop out of personal relationships and the strongest ones do that. I don’t - I don’t necessarily want to chop and change the relationship... we do have a relationship with [HEI] in that sense because two of our former teachers here now work for them.

This focus on historical and personal relationships was balanced by a dominant focus on quality, credibility and reputation. The first two of these – quality and credibility - appeared to be inextricably linked, with the quality of staff at the university by far the most important factor. In order to be judged as high quality such staff needed to ‘know what they are doing’ in terms of understanding excellent teaching and providing real expertise, but also be reliable and accessible. Feedback from school staff appeared to be a common way that leaders judged these quality and credibility issues, along with the overall quality of the trainee teachers they supplied.

I’m a huge believer in credibility, straightforward. The quality, it is absolutely, you know places get names for the people that are on the end of the phone and you know I know with (university) a name gets mentioned and I am just not even going to bother picking the phone

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up. Now if you haven’t got the right staff in an organisation you are never going to get the name, you are never going to get the quality.

Well I think one of the things that staff were excited about was when I said that (university) were involved in the Action Research groups... somewhere with a reputation having an

involvement in it gave it credibility… they like the fact that the mentoring course is certified by (university)… so I think for credibility when you are selling things to staff and why it is

important and for their own CVs as well to be able to say that they have done something and I think that is important.

The third element – reputation - was linked to quality and credibility, but was also about a wider sense of prestige: is this an organisation that the school would want to be seen working with, will it boost the school’s prestige?:

They are very prestigious organisations and we want to work with the best. For most aspects of teacher training you want to be able to choose the best.

There were two further factors that the school leaders considered that were of a slightly different order to the quality, credibility and reputation ones, perhaps because they were a reflection on their existing partnerships rather than something that could easily be judged in a new partner. These were:

 a commitment to partnership working, and

 expertise, wider networks and a critical friend.

Commitment to partnership working was partly about the university staff taking time to get to know the school and being responsive to its particular ethos and needs, with a commitment to co-creating solutions. In a larger sense partnership working was also about the two institutions being committed to working towards shared goals in a long-term relationship, which was seen as essential for building trust. The particular focus for this shared vision was expressed by one leader as a mutual interest in professional learning and helping people ‘move on’.

So what I am looking for in particular is… this idea of shared vision, but also the co-designing aspect of it. What we don’t want, I think for our school or what our schools in the Alliance don’t want, is someone just to go in, be the expert and say, this is what you ought to be doing. What we want is that co-designing the projects that we are going to be involved in. So

working much more closely together.

We want to work with people who are reflective because there are quite a few things that we - we have quite a few approaches here that are not kind of standard, if you like...so we want to work with people who have got that sort of flexibility and would be willing to come in and have an understanding of how we work and can do things to work around that... We also want to make a long term relationship. I don’t believe that you can do any high quality CPD by having somebody come in once and bang, there you go that is it, that is the end of it.

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For me what it hinges on is the capacity and the willingness of both to work together, because you don’t want to feel it is just being done to you and I think those days are kind of gone in a way for teachers. What we want to do is say, look you know, we can bring this and you can bring that, if we put it together we have a much more powerful way of working together because if we work together we will develop and you will develop and something new emerges out of it, so I think that is, for me, the core principle really.

The expertise, wider networks and critical friend point reflected the strengths of universities in terms of their understanding of research and the research process, and a sense that the university could link the school into wider networks and ways of working that could be helpful. Linked to this was a recognition that schools are hugely busy places where it can be hard to think clearly, so it is helpful to have someone who asks hard questions and forces you to stand back.

Well I think in terms of the research you know, it is really invaluable to have the opportunity to work with a university because you know that is your area of expertise and you know you are standing back in a sense from the hurly burly of a school.. for someone to be able to ask you those questions, even though it might be uncomfortable, is invaluable and it really does help. I have had an awareness for some time that schools shouldn’t be working in isolation, schools should be involved with the other organisations out there that are doing all this kind of great research and looking at building networks… So I have been very interested in trying to find out how you develop that relationship.

The final issue that the schools considered was value for money. This was very much a live – and sometimes fraught - issue as schools developed their thinking and partnerships for School Direct. Assessing value for money meant balancing a hard headed economic assessment of which institution offers the best ‘deal’ and what the school could afford with a much more intangible assessment of the quality and partnership considerations described above. Interestingly though, the issue of money could also affect how the schools perceived the partnership commitment of a university: if it seemed that the university was charging for everything it did, rather than getting on and making the partnership work, then perhaps the university was not really partnership orientated?

The School Direct students who are training with us, they are like at the end of their first year and so what they are getting through our model is way stronger than what the university is offering. But the university is still tying up 90% of that funding and so we are doing nearly all of it for free. I think we get £2000 or something per student from the £9000, they are still delivering the PGCE aspect of it. Obviously that is down to us, we can change but we are not kitted up to take on the responsibility, but in reality we are doing a lot more of the work. I love working with (university), I love going down there, I love being in that environment, but it is frustrating that it is still, ‘These are ours, unless you pay us you are not going to get access to that’.

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Linked to this value for money discussion was sometimes a sense of slightly resentful view that unless the school is accredited as a SCITT, it is required to work with a university or other accredited provider.

We need [university] because we are not a provider, so we have to have a university, therefore they have quite a say in what has to happen in order for them to quality assure it. So we feel quite tied in there.

This requirement for working with an accredited provider, coupled with the tensions around how to split the limited funding available for School Direct trainees equitably, was leading one leader to re- evaluate the value that universities could bring:

I’m trying to think what we couldn’t deliver, because we are a large school we have got all the subject areas obviously covered… But I would be a bit scared of losing the link, now why would I? Why would I say that? I don’t know why I would say that. Because it is not even - I’m trying to think of all these things - it is not even like the experts are there to be the tutors and to do the observations because lots of us observe lessons, we know exactly what

outstanding means and things like that, so it is not even that. Oh dear this is awful isn’t it? It sounds as if I am really anti university, what do they do?

But for others the changing landscape was leading to a different assessment of how school- university partnerships might evolve. Several leaders spoke about a desire to develop more integrated ways of working between schools and universities:

There is a more blended or integrative approach so that we become almost part of each other’s teams. So like, you know, I mean it is nice for us to work together as an Alliance but it would also be nice for us to be able to go and say work with the PGCE students who are just at (university), you know how can we contribute to that? How can we learn from that? So a much more joint.. partnership… (I’d like it if) money is not our driving thing there, that it is about building our capacity to work together.

So I can see that that partnership is becoming more and more important and with the

universities who have the expertise in this area we have had lots of conversations about it as a group and that we didn’t want to offer something that was just rubber stamped by a

university; that we wanted to offer quality provision and for it to be a proper partnership. I think the next thing that we could really benefit from here is research being done within the school and we being part of that.

One leader expressed a powerful vision for staff in his school’s alliance to be able to see one

university as their lifelong learning partner, helpful to secure high quality professional development opportunities as they progressed through their careers:

I just think the sort of separation, the level of where the universities have always been perceived and where the schools are has always been too great. .. when I started teaching in 1995… I was enrolled on

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some courses at (university) and it was enormously exciting because I was given the library badge.. the course was insignificant, it was nothing, because I can’t even remember it. But what it meant was that for those three years I was linked to this university where I could go in and I could go to the bookshop and I could go to the library and I just had this access to it… And I think what is happening now is that that gap is closing very very quickly, certainly for.. this Alliance and you know, we are doing things like through our CPD we are offering 30 credits through (university) towards Masters and so that is where I would want it to go. I would want it to feel that for teachers that they have this lifelong learning link. They have got this institution that is part of their, you know not just professional

development for 12 months, it is a permanent part of their professional development while they are within… the Alliance.. I am sure that fundamentally there are all sorts of implications but you get the idea, it feels quite special.