Many educationalists support the idea of collaboration between our schools and professionals. However, a new research review has challenged this outlook. SecEd invited its author, James Croft, to put forward his argument

In a recent review of the research on collaboration for school improvement – Collaborative Overreach – I stated that despite the popular rhetoric about its importance, there is precious little evidence of collaboration’s impact on pupil attainment.

This was, coincidentally, published at the same time as a Department for Education (DfE) report produced by Dr Paul Armstrong (of the University of Manchester) to much the same conclusion.

While qualitative studies addressed to showing how important it is for staff development and support number in their thousands, you can finger count the number of quantitative studies that have even attempted to address impact on learning – and none of these are free of significant methodological weakness.

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