ABSTRACT

The chapter discusses the strategies undertaken by a group of schools serving low socio-economic status (SES) communities, clustered around a provincial city and nearby small towns in a regional area of Queensland, Australia, as they each, and together, negotiate NAPLAN. It discusses collaboration across schools that were discovered took form in response to systemic pressures from offices at a distance. Each school in the region was required by the state education department to develop a plan for improving NAPLAN results by 3" per year. There was a strong sense among many school and system staff that this was not a target that could be met, given cohort effects, severe disruption to the school year caused by local floods, staff turnover, and the time required for students to increase engagement and achieve successful learning. Both the potentials and the limits of cooperation that form in reaction to powerful external forces are explored in the chapter.