Collaborative Approaches to 14-19 Provision - Communities and ...

14-19 PATHFINDERS: THE SECOND YEAR92. In the final section of this report we address the issue of sustainability which was aprominent concern in many pathfinders. This had many facets, but in the context of thissection of the report we suggest that the orientation to collaboration which has beendeveloped within individual pathfinders may be highly significant in sustaining collaboration.As we focus ever more strongly on the issue of sustainability in the third year of ourevaluation we anticipate being able to elaborate the different orientations more fully.93. The concept of levels of collaboration is also useful in understanding some of theobstacles to its achievement. While there were examples of schools and colleges holdingthemselves aloof from collaboration these were comparatively rare. There was widespreadwelcome for the general notion of collaboration. However, in many cases the devil ofcollaboration lay in the detail. This emerged particularly in relation to 14-16 timetablingwhich was identified by several coordinators as a significant obstacle to collaboration.Several pathfinders had made determined attempts to tackle this issue and had gone someway towards introducing elements of common timetabling at 14-16. However, fullsynchronisation of 14-16 timetables, which would allow a substantial expansion of theoptions open to students, was very difficult to achieve. This was because suchsynchronisation would likely involve changes in the timing of school days, introducerigidities into timetables and have knock-on effects on the 11-14 and 16-19 phases. Thesetimetabling issues, in turn, had potential implications for sustainable funding, since schoolscould only save on staff costs and therefore, they argued, sustain the cost of off-site learningif such learning could be timetabled.94. These examples serve to illustrate the point that strategic agreement to collaborate,even when reached in good faith, was not always easy to implement in practice at differentlevels,Focus of Collaboration95. This dimension of collaboration concerns the topics or content of collaboration, thatis, what it is that the pathfinders collaborate about. In order to analyse this we have drawnupon a set of themes which were developed in order to describe the pathfinder initiative as awhole. These themes were derived from the pathfinder prospectuses and the wider 14-1932