Architects of Collaboration: Reflections from Leading Education Locally 2026

On 24 April, AEPA welcomed colleagues from across England to Mary Ward House for the AEPA Annual Conference 2026: Leading Education Locally. The day brought together school leaders, partnership leaders, policymakers and system thinkers around a shared conviction: education systems thrive when they are rooted in place.

Christine Gilbert, AEPA Co-Chair, opened the conference with a powerful image: if the government’s white paper, Every child achieving and thriving, offers a blueprint for education, then AEPA members are the architects and engineers. Partnerships are the people who understand the local landscape, know where the foundations are strong or fragile, and can turn national ambition into practical, collective improvement.

That metaphor ran through the day, as speakers returned to the importance of local partnerships as engines of improvement. Schools do extraordinary work, but some challenges cannot be solved by autonomous schools working alone.

Inclusion, attendance, enrichment, SEND, workforce development, transition, disadvantage and family support all demand something more connected. They require a civic architecture: schools, trusts, local authorities, health services, community organisations and families working around children and young people.

This is where area-based education partnerships could have a vital role to play. By bringing schools and local partners together, partnerships create the conditions for improvement that is both ambitious and rooted in local context.

In conversation with Baroness Estelle Morris, AEPA Co-Chair, Georgia Gould, Minister of State for School Standards, emphasised that place matters because ‘outcomes for all children matter’. A place-based approach helps prevent children ‘falling through the cracks’.

An emphasis on place and local partnerships also challenges the system to stop seeing schools in isolation and instead ask what ‘fabric of support’ is needed around them. Georgia’s Gould’s reflections on SEND, inclusion, mainstream support and local cluster working echoed a central theme of the day: real partnership is the means by which ambition in the White Paper becomes reality.

Margaret Mulholland’s keynote sharpened this further. Inclusion, she reminded delegates, must not be reduced to structures or labels. It is about belonging, relationships and the universal offer in every school.
SEND and inclusion are connected, but not identical. If we are serious about equity, the work must sit at the heart of school improvement.

Local partnerships are well placed to make this practical: sharing expertise, building professional learning, distributing knowledge beyond the SENDCo, and helping schools ask together what inclusive practice looks like in their context. Margaret emphasised that it will be local relationships that will drive change.

Dr Tim Coulson’s, DfE Regions Group, contribution reinforced the need for the Department for Education to know the whole education system better, moving beyond MATs as default support organisations for RISE.

Area-based partnerships have often filled gaps that others did not see. They bring coherence where boundaries, structures and accountabilities can feel fragmented. They can help ensure that school improvement resource is not confined to one part of the system, but is available across a local area.

The workshops brought energy, challenge and realism. Delegates welcomed the direction of travel on collaboration and inclusion, while recognising the difficult questions: funding, accountability, workforce capacity, local variation, governance, and the sustainability of partnership work.

Collaboration requires facilitation. It requires time, trust and infrastructure. It also requires funding.

The day ended with optimism. AEPA’s role is not simply to respond to national reform, but to help design the better future those reforms point towards.

As school-led, place-based partnerships committed to excellence and equity, AEPA members are uniquely positioned to build the connective fabric of the education system.

The message from the conference was clear: the blueprint matters, but the architecture of change will be local.