In this chapter, the light is directed at collaborative meetings as an innovation, in which both school and PPT (educational and psychological counselling service) participate. The meetings are understood as an arena for the development of collaborative skills, and as a pivot point for the development of a professional community. The aim of the meetings has also been to lay the foundations for an extended and improved collaboration between school and PPT, where one looks to a greater extent than previously at ordinary practice and at how this can take care of pupils with different needs. The school discussed in this chapter has itself chosen an approach to innovation both in terms of preparation and management of the meetings, how they are structured, and forms of communication in the meetings. Throughout the project period, we have seen challenges linked to the anchoring and institutionalization of new collaboration routines between school and PPT, but at the same time a development towards a more sustainable collaboration model. Based on our assessment, the innovation has over time contributed to the development of new and improved infrastructure for collaboration on inclusive practices in school.

The overall part of The Curriculum for Knowledge Promotion in Primary and Secondary Education and Training (LK20) states that the development of an inclusive practice requires a professional community that is able to explore values and practices, and that this presupposes good management and well-developed structures for collaboration. In recent years, it has become common internationally to talk about professional learning communities, originally referred to as a group of teachers supported by managers. The further development of the term now also includes other actors, and in the SUKIP project this particularly applies to PPT (educational and psychological counselling service). This chapter uses one of the SUKIP-schools as a case and shows how the management of this school in collaboration with PPT has established an innovation work with a more inclusive practice as its goal. Central to the school’s innovation project is collaboration on selected low-achieving pupils, where measures are developed on the basis of pupil data and these pupils’ learning development is monitored as part of the pupils’ community. The case illustrates how this is handled within an academic-professional logic, with a focus on changing educational practice. The chapter presents the role of management and discusses the importance this seems to have for the development of a professional learning community, where the school in collaboration with PPT can contribute to the desired change in practice and organizational learning. This is done on the basis of theory and research on professional learning communities and their management, and on the management of development work.

This chapter presents how inclusive practice appears in the SUKIP project. A widely used definition of inclusion within the field of education emphasises that inclusion is about increasing children and young people’s participation in kindergarten and school and reducing exclusion from the kindergarten’s and school’s culture, curricula and community. Today, more than 25 years after the Salamanca Statement, inclusive education is established as a central concept within the field of education in Norway as well as the rest of the world. At the same time, inclusion is a multi-faceted concept that must be understood in its socio-cultural context. The chapter presents the concept of participation and why the SUKIP project has chosen to use inclusive practice as a general term. It then analyses how inclusive practices are understood and used in a kindergarten and a school. The discussion focuses on the dimensions individual and community: the particular and the general; participation in play and learning; and that work on inclusion must involve all staff. The chapter ends with some reflections based on the findings.

As the owner of kindergarten, school, and educational and psychological counselling service (PPT), the municipality is responsible for the quality of all these units, which, among other things, means that these units have the right expertise and that they are able to utilize this in a developing collaboration to strengthen an inclusive practice. This follows from persistent education policy expectations about a general educational practice that can accommodate more children and pupils, and that EPS contributes to and supports such a development. In the SUKIP-project, the innovations have been about establishing an infrastructure for collaboration between EPS and kindergarten/school with this in mind. The project can be seen as an example of local competence development in line with the latest national grant scheme: The competence boost for special pedagogy and inclusive practice. Based on data from SUKIP, in this chapter we discuss the municipalities’ governance and management of the innovations within two different municipal contexts. The discussion is related to current political guidelines for competence and quality development in the education sector, where network management appears to be the preferred strategy. The analysis suggests that, despite certain problematic aspects, the network model has proven functional at unit level. At the same time, it seems necessary to acknowledge that some problems cannot be solved at unit level but must be addressed to the municipal level. Finding answers to such problems may require basic organizational development with learning loops both vertically and horizontally in the municipality.

SUKIP is a project within the FINNUT-program, a program which emphasizes the importance of research for the quality of the innovation itself by the fact that the researchers both support the innovation processes and the decisions that are made. Several advantages of such collaboration are mentioned, and the ambition of The Research Council of Norway (NFR) is that this potential is utilised. At the same time, great variations in forms of collaboration are pointed out, and the need to systematise experiences with good interaction models. The experiences from the SUKIP-project indicate that such collaboration can be both rewarding and challenging, varying with the various phases of an innovation project. Based on the project’s research methodology strategy, we have designed a cycle for data collection, data analysis, feedback/discussion and decision on change, especially for use in the innovation phase. In this chapter, the phases of the project and the reasons for and design of this cycle are presented. The experiences with the collaboration between researchers and practitioners in the various phases of the project are then presented and discussed in light of theories of innovation and collaborative research. Finally, a summary discussion is made of the challenges and opportunities that such a partnership seems to provide and how the potential of the partnership can be exploited.