# 8 Learning through collaboration and peer learning

What is it?
Learning from peers and through collaboration can help with the design of new solutions, particularly multi-agency approaches to entrenched problems.

How can I use it?
Many local authority officers do not know their counterparts in other local authorities, but often face very similar problems. Networks can help practitioners to develop shared solutions, share risk and learn from past mistakes.

Local collaborations include Local Strategic Partnerships and Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, but there is also a value in networks beyond administrative boundaries. This allows participants to step away from the day job and benefit from different perspectives. For example:

1.    Professional action learning groups, for example:
•    Applied Next Practice: works with local authorities and local leaders to solve ongoing problems while sharing learning. The programme is based on ensuring work is ‘future-focused and user-focused’ and collaborative. A key aspect of the programme is partnership working – co-designing services and holding each other to account.
•    Neighbourhood Action Network: was designed to encourage and accelerate innovation in neighbourhood working. It involved 12 local authorities and four national organisations with an interest in the empowerment agenda and used action learning, action research and peer networking to share information.

2.    Peer support groups, for example:
•    Peer Support Scheme is delivered by Capital Ambition, the London RIEP. It has an officer exchange – where an officer from one local authority can assist another authority with a specific task related to service improvement. It has helped to build capacity and confidence, and improve services through sharing knowledge and experience.

3.    Multi-agency collaboratives, for example:
The Local Wellbeing Project brings together three local authorities, IDeA and London School of Economics to find new ways of increasing public wellbeing through mainstream local government services. It has used mixture of pilots and evaluation, action research and learning, peer support and pure research to develop and implement new approaches.

Where has it been used?
•    Professional action learning groups in Woughton, Milton Keynes:
o    13 schools (12 primary and one new academy) working together to address issues of surplus places, pupil achievement and aspirations
o    As a result, they established collective responsibility for the success of all children up to 19 years in the Woughton area.

•    Peer support groups in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham:
o    Borough invited an officer from the London Borough of Brent to advise them on how it could review the authority’s political structures to ensure it was able to meet the demands of changing legislation.

•     Multi-agency collaborations through Clinton Global Initiative