Teaching Collaborative Governance Across Different Educational Settings

Across several teaching and training sessions, Edgar Quilabert used the project’s work on educational zones and collaborative governance to explore how education systems can move beyond the individual school as the main unit of organisation and improvement. The sessions were delivered to different audiences — postgraduate students, practising teachers and school leaders — at Mary Immaculate College, the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and the GLOBED Erasmus Mundus programme.

From school autonomy to collaborative governance

The sessions introduced different ways of organising public education, from Traditional Public Administration and New Public Management to the Neo-Weberian State and New Public Governance. Particular attention was given to the tensions produced when systems promote collaboration while continuing to organise accountability, resources, and decision-making around individual schools. Drawing on international cases and the ongoing Zona Nord pilot in Barcelona, participants examined questions of territorial scale, legal authority, leadership, professional cultures, resource allocation, and shared responsibility.

Turning governance problems into practical decisions

The sessions also moved from conceptual discussion to applied exercises. Participants worked with real dilemmas from Zona Nord, including how to build collaboration without undermining school autonomy, reconcile different professional cultures, engage distrustful families, and lead without direct control over staff or resources. In the GLOBED policy lab, students took the role of zone leaders and designed concrete responses to these problems, identifying their causal logic and potential risks. Across the sessions, the central question was the same: if educational challenges extend beyond individual schools, how should governance, leadership, and accountability be reorganised to enable collective responses?