Educational governance is inherently complex. As Snyder (2013, p.9) explains ‘what works for one child, teacher, district or system is not guaranteed to work for another’, and ‘what works for one element of one system may not work for other elements even within the same system’. Ensuring that all students have good learning opportunities requires new ways of coordination and the collaboration between organisations, such as schools, youth services and special needs centres. The added value of inter-organizational networks in addressing complex issues has been well established in the literature (Angeli et al, 2022) including in education (Ehren & Perryman, 2018). Rhodes already highlighted the relevance of networks to address public challenges in his 1996 article ‘The New Governance: Governing without Government’. This, and other publications recognize the emergence of new organisational forms in the public domain where state funded agencies and non-state actors work in concert to advance purposes that would otherwise not be possible (Provan and Kenis 2008). Such collaboration is particularly needed when there are issues or challenges that go beyond the span of control of single organizations and can only be effectively addressed when a multitude of actors, including private, non-profit and community organizations, work together and contribute relevant knowledge or other resources to achieve joint action towards a common purpose or outcome. Relying on such networks has far-reaching consequences for existing accountability structures, most of which have the individual school as the object (Ehren et al, 2017). This paper presents the outcomes of a scoping review which looked at the types of accountability emerging in situations where value is created by collaboration in organizational networks. Our paper starts by describing different types of interorganisational networks by their internal structure and conceptualizes relevant accountability approaches for such networks. We then present findings from our review which indicate that, regardless of the specific governance and structure of educational networks, the formal top-down oriented process of accountability prevalent in bureaucratic systems remains common. There are some examples of alternative approaches, but these only seem to emerge where networks had a clear collective outcome to work towards, where members shared values, faced clear incentives to work towards these outcomes and there was external legitimacy for the network. In many studies however, educational networks were initiated to improve school-level outcomes on external standards which meant that traditional top-down accountability approaches prevailed.

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