The pandemic strengthened working relationships between eight Scottish local authorities, leading to more willingness to collaborate and to learn new approaches to teaching practice.
That’s the finding of a recent evaluation report into the work of the West Partnership, Scotland’s largest Regional Improvement Collaborative by the University of Glasgow’s Robert Owen Centre researchers.
University researchers have been working alongside the West Partnership for the past four years, evaluating the effectiveness of its workstreams and programmes. The West Partnership covers eight local authorities—Glasgow City, North and South Lanarkshire, Inverclyde, Renfrew, West and East Dunbartonshire, and East Renfrewshire—and more than a third of Scotland’s school population.
Health, social and educational impacts
The health, social, and educational effects of COVID-19 are still being felt throughout Scotland’s educational system. The vision for Scottish education in 2023 is largely the same as it was in 2022: excellence through raising attainment and improved outcomes for learners.
The key findings of the report, WP Interim Evaluation Report, Phase 1: Defining and Understanding Impact, indicate that there is a sense that more significant impacts or changes occurred in 2021-2022 and that there is “no doubt that the effects of the pandemic strengthened relationships, (across the eight WP LAs), which led to more openness and willingness to collaborate, which in turn led to increased opportunities for practitioners to learn and try new approaches to practice”.
Participants were very clear that they perceived “added value” from the West Partnership to the work of their local authority, and that the Partnership had established “trust, honesty and openness” in its ways of working.
‘Collective agency’
There was also more of a recognition by the participants in 2021-2022, of collective agency being built, through collective capacity and a clearer association as to how this led to, or in some cases, was driving or accelerating improvement. Practitioners enjoyed the opportunity to discuss and reflect on teaching practices with their peers.
With school practitioners and LA officers collaborating across different parts of the system, the WP has “grown capabilities” within and across the system, leading to increased joint practice development and the generation of new teaching practices.
The West Online School (OS) is one of the Partnership’s success stories.
Recorded learning experiences
West OS was created by teachers and provides recorded learning experiences for children and young people in response to feedback from children, young people and their families and from practitioners.
The pandemic and school buildings’ closures accelerated the development of resources and skills. Systemic or transformative change has been though West OS in having a major impact in enhancing online learning in, across, out of schools and on the system more broadly.
With a rising cadre of middle managers skilled in practitioner enquiry (i.e. ‘finding out’ or an investigation with a rationale and approach that can be explained or defended, with the findings shared and usually carried out in collaboration with others), both direct and indirect effects have been seen at every level of the system.
The Partnership has grown staff capabilities in and across the system, with school practitioners, HTs and LA officers collaborating across geographical, organisational and sectoral boundaries.
The research report concludes that: “The balance has shifted from sharing practice to moving ideas, expertise and knowledge around the system towards higher levels of joint practice development and the generation of new practices.”