New Community Schools in Scotland: Issues for Inter-Professional Collaboration

Abstract

The issues raised for inter professional collaboration are reviewed through data derived from a case study of a Scottish ‘New Community School’ cluster. The attitudes of staff from Nursery, Primary and Secondary schools to collaboration are examined and differences discussed. The findings show that there were generally positive attitudes to collaboration but secondary school staff saw themselves as having the least to gain. In general staff need continuing support from managers and funders as well as persistence and patience in building up their work over time. In practice, however, both these criteria were difficult to fulfil. This suggests that it is better to go for small achievable gains as part of an overall longer-term strategy rather than big objectives that are difficult to reach. However, it was found that respondents were set major tasks to achieve and links were not made between the macro and micro levels of activity. It is suggested that collaboration is only one of many solutions to the problem of delivering effective services and there are a number of circumstances when it is best avoided. Such situations include when resources of time, energy and money are extremely limited, when organisations are unstable, when organisations have very similar functions or when continuing support is unavailable.