In Germany, ten years of research and practice on Local Educational Networks revealed a gap between their aims and their realization in practice (Duveneck et al. 2019). Still, in Germany, around 80% of municipalities implemented structures for Local Educational Management. Analyses have traced their selective implementation back to the impact of wider social contexts and structural conditions (e.g. Emmerich 2017; Schmachtel 2017; Duveneck 2016). They point to the need to take the “underlying processes which shape outcomes in their target areas” (Kerr & Dyson 2017: 5) into consideration. However, “what is much less well understood is how, precisely, that contribution might be realized in practice “(ibid: 17). The question arises to what extent local impacts are possible and how they could be fostered by municipalities. Against this background the paper presents a pilot of a CPD approach based on Edwards (2009) notion of “relational agency” and discusses the potentials and pitfalls of this approach for fostering further developments in area-based educational networks. The pilot has been co-developed and carried out collaboratively between researchers and practitioners in September 2019 in Duisburg, Germany. Its approach operationalized the idea of relational agency into a reverse problem-centred role-play: actors from schools, youth work, administration and local educational offices took over a different professional role to theirs and engaged in a role-play in which they had to collaboratively work on a typical problem of area-based networking. These problems have been derived from previous model projects and focused on the general task to develop a more youth-centred educational landscape. Afterward the role-play, actors engaged into collaborative reflection on their experiences of swapping the professional perspectives. Assumptions were reflected, elaborated and the relevance of knowledge for collaboration was discussed. The approach aims to highlight the need for a more active fostering of interagency learning as a fundamental, but neglected precondition of area-based educational. Evaluations showed that many conflicts arose from a lack of knowledge on other professions. Edwards (2009) found that relational agency in multiprofessional networks requires a common knowledge base, it makes implicit assumptions on other professions explicit and by that strengthens the relational agency again. Hence, the pilot‘s approach bears important potentials for fostering collaboration across educational institutions and levels. However it also brings pitfalls with it, one of it being the repetition of the very same „collaboration mantra“ in area-based networks which might be seen as part of the problem rather than as solution.

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