The original SEED proposal document described the aims of Focus Area 5 as being to “Develop a collaborative, innovative intervention and a practice of ‘collegiate learning’, to encourage integration of knowledge, method and practice that will lead to a community of practice within the consortium and thus influence project implementation and permeate the individual institutions/organisations in order for them to respond to the transformational policy imperatives.”
Subsequent discussions held between the RNI and the SEEDS consortium members clarified that, whilst developing a collaborative, innovative intervention as a specific outcome would be welcomed, particularly if arising spontaneously and promising to naturally enhance innovation and improve outcomes, the consortium would not require any formal collaboration(s) to be tabled nor would SEEDS develop any formal indicators to measure such.
All collaborations that have arisen so far appear to be informal and spontaneous, emerging from a conjuncture of opportunity with the specific requirements of a programme element in a project (for e.g. SAILI on MSEPS Holiday Programme).
A nascent ‘community of practice’ is nonetheless taking form, with a number of opportunities are noted for ‘sharing’ of ‘knowledge, methods and practice’ between members. Other terminology was also employed: members ‘talking to’ one another; holding ‘discussions’; others ‘strategised’: our survey revealed no incidences of formal planned collaboration between any of the SEEDS consortium though subsequent information indicates that some formal collaborations are imminent.
The SEEDS management structure, with some input from the chair and the project manager, has given rise to what one might call ‘structured blanket sharing’, through participation in Project Forums largely characterised by inputs that take the form of report-backs such as ‘my programme experience on XX is YY’’, perhaps still in contradistinction to signals required from within the consortium for ‘growing integration’ of a distinctive SEEDS’s ‘knowledge, method and practice’ capable of permeating and informing the programmes of individual SEEDS institutions/ organisations.
Further clarification, discussion and distillation of these latter elements into an overarching set of learnings that can be shared across the SEEDS consortium, and more widely with specific communities of practice, is not yet evident but promises to be a rich area of future activity for the SEEDS consortium as a whole.
Already in this MTR we can identify across all the SEEDS projects a set of common core/central issues confronting participating organisations as they seek to complement, support or fill gaps in formal government programmes. In addition there is growing clarity with respect to emerging ‘bottom-line’ priorities that are required for successful programming, product innovation, and piloting and take-up of systemic whole school development support – including minimum norms and standards that are required to sustain sustainable and effective professional development, curriculum materials and learning and teaching support and whole school organisational reform.
Further discussion and development of these issues within the consortium, as well as with the wider communities of practice in the province and nationally (including with the major education stakeholder in the province, the PDE), through enhanced engagement and debate will further promote the adoption of ‘best practice reform’ both within SEEDS as well as across the wider communities of practice.
The growth of informal, spontaneous sharing amongst the partners is also evidence of growing maturity and improved cohesion and collaboration within the consortium which also can be seen in instances of collegial communication, one of the goals of Focus Area 5.
There are still challenges to overcome in partners voluntarily talking responsibility for ensuring that their activities and their on-going learnings are regularly communicated with the SEEDS management, and hence fully reflected in SEEDS newsletters and on the project website. There is a scope to expand this flow of information between and across the projects through development of a more integrated and interactive website for improved data management and an enhanced platform for communication.
It should be noted that such collaboration as we have found seldom involved organisations active within the same subject or professional practice domain, such as for example in intermediate and senior phase maths and science school-based interventions or Whole School Development in ECD and primary schools. Reasons advanced included activities in different schooling phases, geographical, and concerns about duplication or overlaps. The concluding observations for the previous paragraph regarding information flow, and an improved communication apply here in full.
More common were discussions between partners with specific programmes and the SEEDS ‘platform’ programmes such as EMEP or ELRU – and to an extent SCIFEST AFRICA -- that promised to open up spaces within schools which could potentially be filled by that programme itself as opposed to any other or in another instance where a service organisation aspired to evolve the capacities to act as a platform to its own programmes.
We asked SEEDS organisations what were the obstacles in the path of greater collaboration and more formal sharing, and what were the factors standing in the way of greater reciprocity and purposive, critical, mutual learning, which the consortium could better harness to accelerate beneficial shared purpose. Without repeating much of the substance of the inputs from organisations and institutions raised in previous sections, the following issues/challenges to collaboration are in our view critical to understanding its absence in the consortium today:
“Mistrust amongst the partners is rife”
"The Consortium was formed to get the money…. We could have done things more coherently from the beginning. The problem was that this was sprung on us. It wasn't set up this way. Working together was a post-hoc imposition.”
“Most organisations just carried on as usual”
“The Consortium never planned for collaboration”
“SEEDS was not a carefully crafted strategy that has as its goals a particular set of outcomes”
“There is very little collaboration because there are no dots to join together in the first place”
“The nine service providers collaborated to get the programme going, but the funding was made available on nine proposals, it was not integrated. The common outcomes were never agreed on and so have not been attained. Nor has there been the development of a common indicator.”
“Look at the sheer diversity of organisations, even if you explicitly tried to put them together, how would you?”
“Many of the organisations are service providers, and when they work together, this is not an example of collaboration, but the provision of a service.”
“I don’t want to be compared with the other people”
“We are very different. We have to do things a certain way and can’t be seen to be associated with a proposal that is not done in a way, with a partner that has very different goals that are not fully acceptable to my Board. I am accountable to my Board … I can’t weaken my standing with my donors.”
“You partner with the closest fit. We are a very focussed programme with a focused target. We are the only one in this area. We don’t fit in with anyone.”
“[We] would not be any worse off without SEEDS. We would develop our own networks. We actually don’t need our SEEDS partners.”
“We don’t talk to each other. We don’t even know each other!”
“There's been a failure of collective leadership – not from the [project manager] but from the partners.”
"To expect partners after the fact, in some sort of altruistic way, to work together is being rather naive. For [the project manager] this has been an uphill battle, to try and find ways to get us to work together when in fact we had already decided to work separately. “
“The problem was with the EKN who sprung this on us. It wasn't set up as collaboration; the EKN should have defined a clearer set of objectives for us.”
“We see this as an’ opportunity lost’ for NGOs and higher education institutions to work together.”
“I have a sense of frustration with the opaqueness of SEEDS. There may be possibilities to partner but I'm not going to look for it. I have enough on my plate already. If it were more readily visible, then I could jump at it.”
“We don’t have the energy to work together in projects that not really possible to work in. It’s not that I am against the rest of the Consortium but, if you want to work together and solve problems, it must be a natural thing to work together.”
“I think the other consortium members see us as the ‘black sheep’: we just don’t seem to fit in.”
“Our project is very much academic in orientation and very different to something being run for example by GOLD. There is a big difference.”
"There is a lack of similar shared theoretical basis for SEEDS."
These wide-ranging comments are useful for tagging some of the obstacles that partners feel need to be overcome for further and deeper collaboration to occur, and for a common or core SEEDS approach or methodology to emerge that is shared across the consortium.
Though a minimal number of these inputs can be interpreted negatively, these are in no way reflective of pervasive pessimism or ill-will within the consortium: the overwhelmingly impression we gained in the MTR was that partners generally remain optimistic and positive in their attitudes towards the SEEDS programme and their consortium colleagues.
Nonetheless, a more fully developed SEEDS communication strategy, which includes in its ambit consideration of a set of defined, new activities (with or without a budget), as well as agreement on the key actions to be taken on the part of SEEDS partners in the various practice or action-areas together with additional support to be provided by the SEEDS management could be a critical intervention. Such a strategy could reshape existing spontaneous collaboration amongst SEEDS partners into a more structured, formal and output-centred programme of engagement and clarify elements critical to a common multi-disciplinary whole-school ‘SEEDS’ approach’ in the key Focus Areas or in the new areas of interest and importance (for example in the use of ICT in learning and teaching, or holistic whole-school based approaches to in-service professional development and support and so on).
As suggested before, linking this to a more effective communication strategy aligned to an interactive web-presence would ‘encourage integration of knowledge, method and practice that will lead to a community of practice within the consortium and thus influence project implementation and permeate the individual institutions/organisations in order for them to respond to the transformational policy imperatives.’
What is clear is that there are still obstacles to be overcome in presenting the collective and collaborative dimensions of SEEDS both amongst partners as well project beneficiaries and more widely.
It is worth noting that when we were piloting the beneficiary questionnaires, respondents found it difficult to identify what SEEDS stood for and we were requested to remove any reference to the ‘SEEDS Initiative’ or at least explain in full the relation of the project in question to SEEDS.
In the second instance, as a means of determining the extent to which participants in the various SEEDS projects were aware of the other components of the broader SEEDS programme, each survey participant was asked whether he/she knew of the purpose of each of the different organisations collaborating in the SEEDS consortium. A scan down each column reveals that some of the programmes are better known by non-participants than are those in a specific programme. SMILES emerges as the most widely known programme outside of its own participants.
We followed questions regarding perceptions of obstacles to further working together and deeper collaboration in the consortium by a request for suggestions of practical things that could be done at this stage to enhance the aims of Focus Area 5. Amongst the responses we received were the following:
“Perhaps we need to identify a number of schools where at least two of us work together?”
“Could we take a district where none of us are installed and roll-out the SEEDS initiative in that district?
“We could present linking threads to each other. This might improve collaboration between partners who see a common need, where there is overlap, and where we complement each other. We can do that now, all nine of us, sit down and naturally group ourselves.”
“We could plan now for specific programmatic linkages between SEEDs work with particular schools and so work together to establish a reliable ‘pipeline’.”
“We can bundle and cluster people together where there is more natural fit between them, such as all the maths people together”
“We can encourage those colleagues who want to work together to do so. Let them work it out before hand, and let each put in R50K, or R500K, whatever the SC agrees to. Maybe that will teach us to work together. That’s the way they do it in the Netherlands.”
“We can encourage service providers to come into an existing programme which acts as a platform for them to enter the schools, or the community.”
“We need some incentives to work together, to enforce working together."
“We can change dynamics in the SC – from project accountability to SEEDS accountability – too much of report back in the SC is “perfunctory feedback” – it says ‘I don’t need to consult any of you; this is what we have done’. Let’s stop ‘singing for our money’ and begin to talk about what we think SEEDS requires… and provide strategic feedback on our respective domains and how we as a SEEDS partner are pushing, driving the envelope and whom can help.”
“We need more dynamic and action-oriented sub-committees to drive performance and quality assurance in the various projects”
“We should put our ‘best practice’ reputation to the test! Explore whether what we say is ‘systemic best practice’ actually is and engage with those thousands of other practitioners and researchers out there!”
“What about agreeing on a four-year M&E for the SEEDS programme, with some mutual accountabilities? Isn’t it about time?”
“We could budget for a joint initiative in 2012 – concrete linkages to kick start collaborative initiatives in 2012 – we could focus on 2 different thrusts: targeting poorer/under-resourced schools/communities with services and programmes and ‘doing what it takes to get disadvantaged black students into university’”
“Where’s the SEEDS academic and professional practice output: we can collaborate on producing and disseminating ‘best-practice’ using best-practice techniques and marketing”
“In areas where we have failed – e.g. pre-service – can we go back there, or have a retrospective?”
Some of these proposals repeat the wording or spirit of the original Project Proposal calling for a collaborative SEEDS intervention in a specific number of schools, or across schools in various phases in a geographic area, a proposal which was exhaustively discussed at the programme outset but then rejected as impractical for a number of reasons already discussed.
Other proposals however focus on promoting collaboration such that the strategic lessons, norms and standards, and actions that are emerging as critical success factors in enhancing reforms in the future, are identified and drawn out and then embedded, together with other innovative practices and strategies for effective implementation, more deeply in the methodology of the consortium partners.
These latter suggestions amount to a series of powerful and potentially transformative proposals that could kick-start the development of a collaborative SEEDS ‘model’ (not collaborative project) which by definition would address the multi-sectoral, developmental and systemic outcomes envisaged in the SEEDS programme document.
What needs to be noted further is that the aims of the proposals identified in the previous paragraph, were elicited spontaneously through a participatory MTR methodology, and accord very closely in spirit to the commitments made in the SEEDS ‘Framework for Partnership and Collaboration’ committing the consortium to jointly explore “how it can yield long-lasting results that have an impact on the province by generating creative and innovative strategies within and beyond the consortium.” Through creative partnerships the SEEDS consortium further “will improve their creative potential and innovative output through creative products and services; through creative learners, innovative teaching and learning practice will be embedded in classrooms; and creative organisations will “develop an environment and culture that encourages creativity”.
In the first instance consortium members would complement their work across the themes by:
where possible, and logically, jointly selecting schools and communities
co-creating and/or sharing tools and materials
developing a network infrastructure of communication
opening, creating and maintaining co-operating networks
influencing provincial and national policies and practices
Secondly, consortium members would explore “how they can foster the development of creativity within their organisations through good practice related to their work, and contribute to developing and improving the culture of lifelong learning through creativity”.
