That is the view of Steve Davies, managing director of the South-East Wales consortium – one of four regional bodies charged with improving Wales’ schools.
Mr Davies believes that real progress has been made in the three years since the consortia were established and there is now a “real commitment” and “tremendous amount of will” among senior leaders to discuss more openly the challenges they face.
He made the comments while giving evidence to the Welsh Assembly’s Children, Young People and Education Committee. He said: “We are under a tremendous amount of pressure to deliver and a natural instinct is to be getting your head down and getting on with it. We should have been doing it (collaborating) beforehand ... but we were too busy delivering.”
Mr Davies, who will take over as the Welsh government’s director of school standards in January, said the consortia had recently taken part in a two-day “practice-sharing event” involving senior management from each region.
The event involved good practice presentations, workshops and development planning for current and emerging school improvement programmes. He said: “I think it was an eye-opener for everybody there at how much we had learnt during those two days; people who were quite isolated historically – business managers who have a key responsibility in the effectiveness of the organisation had never met the other three and they shared some of the systems they were using.
“And also, collectively, they can bring more challenge to our colleagues in Welsh government because we’re finding that perhaps there are certain things that we thought it was only us where it wasn’t working.”
Wales’ 22 local authorities have been working through four regional education consortia since September 2012 and the subsequent transfer of some statutory education functions has increased their responsibility.
A “national model for regional working” was introduced in February last year to make clear the lines of accountability between local authorities and regional consortia, which are now directly answerable to elected members.
But progress has been patchy and separate reports published in June by the Wales Audit Office and inspectorate Estyn uncovered a number of shortcomings.
Estyn said all regional consortia had struggled to fill senior posts, which “adversely affected their capacity to direct and manage work”, and highlighted the “lack of a national strategic approach to develop senior leaders”.