ABSTRACT
The urban schools invariably have the distinction of being the focus of political attention, especially given concerns about students' performance and achievement. This chapter describes the specific details of one local struggle to establish professional learning communities of teachers and academic partners to focus on poverty and cumulative multiple deprivation in a network of urban schools in a former industrial northern city of England. It gives voice to some of the inherent difficulties for a professionally determined local solution facilitated by teachers coming together, working collaboratively and building theoretically informed practical knowledge about poverty and cumulative multiple deprivation given support from academic partners. The profession may balk at the term radical, which is something to broach, and maybe it comes down to the teacher unions to organize the professional concerns of teachers and academic partners in urban schools. Collectively it is better to orchestrate a choreography of urban schools policy conflict.
