This book offers a global perspective on educational networks, reviewing theory and practice before setting out four lenses: educational effectiveness and improvement; governance theory; complexity theory; and Actor-Network Theory. Using these lenses, Greany and Kamp explore the limits and possibilities for collaboration by analysing case studies of networks in Aotearoa New Zealand and England as well as country-level overviews of networks in Chile and Singapore. The four lenses allow the authors to explore the implications of networks from different perspectives: moving from the level of the individual school, to the local and national systems that schools operate within, to the wider environmental factors that shape, and are shaped by, network activity in education. The authors examine why and how networks have become a feature of education systems worldwide and the implications for policy, practice and research. They consider how networks form, develop, reform, and achieve impact, but also why they can be challenging and often fail to achieve their ambitions. The book concludes by drawing out the implications for leaders and the further development of leadership at different levels of education systems, and by identifying further avenues for research.

In the face of today's complex policy challenges, various forms of 'joining-up' - networking, collaborating, partnering - have become key responses. However, institutions often fail to take advantage of the full benefits that joining-up offers. In this book, the author draws on ethnographic research into learning networks in post compulsory education and training in the state of Victoria, Australia, to explore why this might be the case and presents an argument for rethinking how joining-up works in practice. Throughout the book, Deleuzian concepts are engaged to forge a 'little complicating machine', one that involves the reader in rethinking the limits and possibilities of collaborative agendas. The chapters draw on diverse disciplinary discourses to construct a conceptual journey that includes the rationale for collaborative agendas, the means by which we seek to understand and govern them, the possibilities of knowing them as 'small worlds', the role played in them by social capital, and the nature of network sociability they demand. Overall, the book aims to provoke new connections for the reader, and new ways of thinking about networks, collaboration and partnerships - ways of thinking that are in tune with the agenda itself.

This book offers a global perspective on educational networks, reviewing theory and practice before setting out four lenses: educational effectiveness and improvement; governance theory; complexity theory; and Actor-Network Theory. Using these lenses, Greany and Kamp explore the limits and possibilities for collaboration by analysing case studies of networks in Aotearoa New Zealand and England as well as country-level overviews of networks in Chile and Singapore. The four lenses allow the authors to explore the implications of networks from different perspectives: moving from the level of the individual school, to the local and national systems that schools operate within, to the wider environmental factors that shape, and are shaped by, network activity in education. The authors examine why and how networks have become a feature of education systems worldwide and the implications for policy, practice and research. They consider how networks form, develop, reform, and achieve impact, but also why they can be challenging and often fail to achieve their ambitions. The book concludes by drawing out the implications for leaders and the further development of leadership at different levels of education systems, and by identifying further avenues for research.