ABSTRACT
Whilst it is important to acknowledge the potential of consortia and of collaborative professional arrangements in the brave new world of the market, it is also important to raise questions about the adequacy of either as means to specifically educational ends. This volume’s rich and varied examples of schools and other educational institutions working together, forming consortia, and getting involved in a whole range of collaborative arrangements with each other and with parents, communities, and businesses will, I am sure, be both reassuring and exciting for many who feared the worst with the advent of ‘the education market place’, whether interpreted as education affected by the market place or, more seriously, as education reconstructed in the image and likeness of a market place. The degree to which they are reassuring will have a great deal to do with whether or not the exchange of goods and services in the market place has been of benefit to the educational experience of pupils and students. The degree to which they are exciting will have much to do with the capacity of these new forms and examples of collaboration to re imagination and enrich understanding of what the practice of education for human being and becoming might look like.
