ABSTRACT
The need for some form of external facilitation of networks is one of the most common findings within the early research on networks of schools. What is less clear is what these facilitators actually do and why they are seen as so important. You could develop a sneaking suspicion on reading some of the early research that as many of these accounts of university-school networks are often written up by the university staff that facilitated them that ‘they would say that wouldn’t they?’ In our own research (Day and Hadfield, 2004; Chapman, 2006), we have also argued the case for an individual, or group, external to the network having a role in its strategic development. In this chapter we are not going to spend a great deal of time defining the notion of facilitation; rather we are going to concentrate on the potential benefits of having a facilitation capacity that is external to a network.
