Issues of ownership and partnership in school‐centred innovation: the Sheffield experience

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Abstract
This paper is concerned with the bold attempt of one local education authority (LEA) to develop School‐Centred Innovation (s.c.i.) as the basis for an ambitious district‐wide strategy of curriculum change. The strategy known as the Sheffield Curriculum Initiative (SCI)1 ‐involves a substantial secondment programme in which teachers spend part of their time working back in school on specific aspects of curriculum innovation related to longer term plans of development. The Initiative is a major collaborative enterprise involving the LEA, its schools, and the University and Polytechnic education departments. The Sheffield Curriculum Initiative began in 1986 and is intended as a rolling programme that will eventually enlist all schools‐‐primary, special and secondary‐‐as well as the authority's tertiary colleges in the task of developing and revitalizing the 5‐19 curriculum. At the time of writing, the Initiative is nearing the completion of its second year. This paper draws on a substantial evaluation archive composed particularly of extensive interview data collected from secondees, other teachers, University and Polytechnic tutors, LEA advisers and officers. A principal focus of the paper is the development of the secondees as agents of change in their individual schools. As the secondees encountered the micropolitics of innovation in their schools in the attempt to negotiate their curriculum ‘commissions’ and communicate insights to their colleagues ‐‐ they became increasingly sophisticated in their understanding of the psychology of change. Headteachers and other senior staff, by and large, were unprepared for the radical challenge posed to the existing decision‐making structures of the school by the critical mass of the secondees in their midst. The second major focus is the nature of the relationships between the LEA and the schools on the one hand and the LEA and the University and Polytechnic on the other. These relationships are explored in terms of the effect of SCI on the two key roles of adviser and tutor. The paper attempts a synthesis of these concerns through a consideration of the interrelated concepts of ‘ownership’ and ‘partnership’. Ownership and partnership were crucial elements in the rhetoric of change that characterized the initial phase of SCI. To all those involved as participants in the Initiative they provided a powerful rallying cry; to the research community they forewarned of the complex social realities underlying the task of change.

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