In France, as in the UK and other countries, schools have been conferred a degree of financial and pedagogical autonomy as a way to facilitate the adaptation of their action and curricular programmes to the local environment and to pupil diversity. Such move has generally been accompanied by facilitating frameworks and monitoring mechanisms. Despite a degree of policy convergence, the new modes of management of the education system implemented in England and France vary quite significantly as a result of their interaction with the specific institutional infrastructure of the country, its policy tradition and its national cultural ideology. Nevertheless, as a result of the changes implemented, both countries have sought to encourage renewed forms of teachers' work within the school through the development of more concerted working practices, among teachers as well as with education professionals. However, the government's call - or injunction - takes on significantly different forms in each country and appears to be driven by different agendas. Likewise, the secondary teachers interviewed in France and in England appear to have responded to them in different ways. The analysis presented here draws on a qualitative comparative research project which looks at 'Teacher Identity in Europe: secondary teaching in France, England and Germany' and which is part of a wider study funded by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS IFRESI) (2002-2004). This paper however, draws exclusively on the analysis of the Franco-English data and seeks to investigate the variations in the forms taken by each governmental call and by the collaborative working practices of teachers in each context. It also considers the configuration of French and English teachers' involvement in such practices. Thirty semi-structured interviews were carried out with promoted and un-promoted secondary teachers in France and in England, in six 'comprehensive' schools in urban and semi-urban areas of Lille and the Paris region in France, and of Leeds and Sheffield in England. As a complement to the teacher interview dataset, four interviews were carried out with secondary head-teachers, two in each country. This paper offers a cross-national and multi-level (cultural, political and organisational) reading of secondary French and English teachers' modes of participation into collective working practices and relates it to the forms of leadership currently encouraged and evidenced in secondary schools in England and France. Variations in practices can be linked to differences in teachers' collective professional identities, their institutional environments as well as more personal aspects of teachers' career trajectory and biography. In this study however, we will be considering only the first two of these variables as well as the forms of institutional support to change available to teachers in each context and the value system which underpin secondary education and schooling in each country.