ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the opportunities and challenges of a large-scale educational development and research project. The English National College for School Leadership's (NCSL) Networked Learning Communities programme was designed to improve learning outcomes for children in individual schools. As a result of extensive co-design with practitioners to build ownership of, and support for, the project, an unexpected sense of energy and urgency grew around the design, raising its profile significantly higher than had originally been anticipated. The explosion in scale presented huge challenges to the thinking about the kinds of support that schools might need to change their organizations, their leadership and their continuing professional development (CPD) to accommodate collaborative arrangements. The NCSL was established in England in November 2000. At that time – and still, at the time of writing – it was the only national leadership development provider of its kind in the world.
