Collaboration of schools and networking have been an important topic in recent educational research (Hargreaves, 2019; Chapman, 2013; Daly, 2010; Hopkins 2003), but have not been widely described in the post-socialist context. Thus, the aim of this study is also to add to filling this gap in international educational research and describe networks in the context of the Czechia as a post-socialist country.

The Czech educational system is highly decentralized with an extreme level of school autonomy, but with a low level of support provided to individual schools. The middle level of school governance was abolished as a (over)reaction to previous restrictive centralization in the Communist era (Kučerová et al., 2020). Moreover, the school choice mechanisms inhibit the co-operation between the schools in the same geographic area. I want to learn about the emergence of school networks in this adverse context.

Main goals of this study is to describe the school network growing around the Gymnázium Přírodní škola (Nature Grammar School), the transfer of values, innovative approaches to teaching and organizing school life and other methods and innovations between schools in this network and to describe collaboration between the schools by the prism of the network theory.

Through the gathered data, I will answer the following research questions regarding specific aspects of the Gymnázium Přírodní škola system, how these are implemented in the school and how they are reinterpreted: Which of the Gymnázium Přírodní škola model's key characteristics are transferred relatively easily (or easily adopted and implemented)? How do they change throughout the process? Which characteristics are not being adopted by other schools? What is the outcome of an incomplete model transfer in relation to the specifics of the school attempting implement the model? Why did individual schools join the network? How the decision was made?

More general questions are:

How the (never ending) post-socialist trasnformation interacts with the innovation processes? What are similarities and differences between the school network building in Western Europe and a CEE country?

The work will be based on the theory of networks (Daly, 2010; Muijs, 2010) and theory of change (Fullan, 2007; Chapman, 2013), both with a focus on education, specifically on alternative and innovative schools. In my paper, I will present pilot data from one school that is a part of the given school network, and I will describe the methods and limits of the data gathering.

The design is a case study with embedded units of analysis. Our case is a network of schools growing around the Gymnázium Přírodní škola (grammar school). Embedded units are individual schools within this network. It is a private grammar school in Prague set up in 1993. Its capacity is roughly 80 pupils distributed to 4 classes. Some of the school characteristics that are innovative in the local context of the are: This school puts emphasis on pupils taking responsibility for their own education, underlined by a system of ‘conditions’, very similar to a ‘credit’ system in higher education. There are frequent field trips organized in the form of project learning where pupils cooperate across grades and also project-based learning outreaching to the different communities around and outside the school, leading pupils to solve problems surrounding them in ‘real life’. Important part of school culture is a well-established pupils self-governing body. Units of analysis (schools) selected for my study represent typologically diverse environments, namely: a) a relatively stable primary school near the capital (private one), b) a grammar school in its phase of transformation in a suburban area, and c) a public primary school with an alternative approach to education. This selection is important as it represents the situation of Czechia; the heterogeneity of selected cases (private schooling vs. public schooling, schooling in the capital vs. schooling in a suburb area) points to inequalities which are typical across the Czech educational system. The main data sources are school documents, an ethnographic observation and interviews with main stakeholders around the network, including teachers, school leadership and pupils. Based on the data analysis, I will create narrative descriptions of each school case, following the chronological evolution of each school before and after joining the loose network with Gymnázium Přírodní škola. Each school description will include its specific context. In order to identify commonalities and distinctions in innovation transfers across individual schools in the network, descriptions of the individual cases will be compared. Finally, I will provide possible explanations of the commonalities and differences among the studies units.

The success rate of individual schools adopting the model varies. Some schools adopt and implement the model quite successfully, whereas others struggle with the partial implementation and try to modify the model according to their needs. The differences in each school's outcomes at this stage of research could be explained by the importance of the specific traits of people in the schools' leadership (as proposed by e. g. Hopkins, 2013), the different phases of development each school is in, and the extent to which each school adopted the model. Confirmation of these working propositions is subject to further research as part of this work. A specific of educational system in Czechia which will most probably influence the differences in each school's success in transferring innovations from Gymnázium Přírodní škola is the high level of school autonomy across the system, supporting the heterogeneity of the schools.

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