Learning leadership in multiagency work for integrating services into schools

This chapter explores the nexus between professional learning, organizational leadership and service integration in the context of current shifts in English local authorities towards ‘joined up’ working. Its focus is the professional learning of organisations and individuals engaged in emergent forms of multiagency practice, wherein providers operate across traditional service and team boundaries to support children and families ‘at risk’ of social exclusion. It draws on evidence from the Learning in and for Interagency Working Project (LIW), a four-year Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) study of interprofessional learning in multiagency settings. One of the LIW Project’s concerns is with what might be termed ‘learning leadership’: defined here as the creation of environments that foster the kinds of professional learning necessary to develop on-going, integrated partnerships between service professionals. This learning in and for multiagency working demands a capacity to recognise and access expertise distributed across local systems and to negotiate the boundaries of responsible professional action with other professionals and with service users