Summary - This case study looks as how Kent is clustering more than 600 schools to improve primary education across the local authority. 

Brief description of the project

Kent is a large LEA with 617 schools of various types, many with a history of fairly autonomous working. Of the 617:
61 are Foundation schools 89 are Aided. In September 2003, in order to move from a competitive model to one of shared responsibility, all 617 schools agreed to be grouped into 23 collaborative clusters, each cluster being cross-phase and serving a defined geographic area of the County.

The model originally envisaged 25–30 schools in each cluster, but as existing networks and transfer patterns wanted to be retained wherever possible, it ended up with variations of between 18 and 40 schools.

The principles behind the new structure were:

1) No child and no school left to fail
2) Every child in a cluster community the responsibility of all the schools, not just of one
3) A more strategic central local authority and more operational accountability at local level
4) Head teachers joint managers of the whole education service.

Governance

Each cluster has an elected Board of head teachers (typically five: three primary, one secondary, one special) who:
Set and monitor an annual Cluster Action Plan after consulting with all the head teachers in the Cluster.
Ensure that the day to day work of the Cluster progresses in accordance with the direction set out in the Plan.
Service delivery

In order to deliver services locally, approximately 200 staff have been devolved to 23 cluster teams. Each team is:
Led by a senior local authority officer (a Local Education Officer) who is jointly accountable to the Chair of the Board and the Assistant Director of Education (Operations).
Made up of a variety of staff, for example educational psychologists, welfare officers, specialist teachers, advisory staff.
Head teachers, Cluster Management Boards and local education officers are in the driving seat over the deployment of cluster support teams to ensure that local needs are met and priorities are targeted to achieve achievement levels. As a result, head teachers have become joint leaders of the education service.

Communications

To support good communications within and across clusters the LEA has built a dedicated extranet site (ClusterWeb) to support electronic communications between the local authority, schools and staff. The site provides constant access to all key education resources and hosts 23 individual portal websites to support each cluster in sharing best practice, news and information.
Outcomes of the project
Some comments from the evaluation carried out at the end of the first year of Operations are:

‘We teach children to share, to work and learn together, and to help one another. As a collaborative of schools, we practice these values ourselves in order to raise standards for all, and to ensure no school fails.’'
Shepway Rural Cluster

‘All schools within our cluster have mutual interests and believe that by working collaboratively, we can achieve far more than by working in isolation. Our main aims are to provide the best possible educational and pastoral opportunities for all our pupils and the highest quality professional development for staff and governors.’ Ashford Rural Cluster

It is still early days but already clusters are beginning to:
Drive multi-agency developments within their areas.
Deal collaboratively with problems.
Present solutions which previously would have been seen as top down directives from County Hall