Lately, the German school improvement discourse is being affected by the emergence of a new player: the so called Local Education Office (Berkemeyer, Otto & Olschewsky, 2010). Especially in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, this player seems to gain in importance. Up to today, Local Education Offices were founded in 46 of the 53 local governments in North Rhine-Westphalia. The foundation of all Local Education Offices is based on cooperation contracts between the local governments and the state government, which define more responsibilities in terms of education for the local governments. However, there is only little information about how the acteur faces these new challenges.

One of the most important tasks for this acteur is the implementation and management of educational networks. In the network based school improvement project “Schulen im Team – Transferregion Dortmund” the Local Education Office is in charge of managing and supporting school to school networks. All in all 36 schools are organized in eight networks for a timeframe of four years (2009-2013). Every participating school selected two teachers as their network coordinators for the actual collaborative work in the network.

The research focus is the performance of the Local Education Office. In particular, we concentrate on the role which the Local Education Office plays in supporting capacity building provided in the school to school networks in the project. Following Levin and Fullan, we define capacity building as a procedure with the attempt to increase the “collective effectiveness of a group to raise the bar and close the gap of student learning” (Levin & Fullan, 2008: 295).

The Institute for School Development Research evaluated the project at the beginning of 2011. In this paper, we discuss the following central questions:

·            How can a local school network management be designed to be supportive?

·            How is the support system perceived by the schools?

To answer these questions, we focus on the economics-based concept of Ritter & Gemünden (1998) of external network management in organizations including initiation, exchange and coordination emphasized by the authors.

Berkemeyer, N. / Otto, J. / Olschewsky, C. (2010): Schulträger im Wandel. Zur neuen Rolle des Schulträgers in der Reform des Schulsystems. In: Böttcher, W. / Dicke, J. N. / Hogrebe, N. (Hrsg.): Evaluation, Bildung und Gesellschaft. Münster: Waxmann. Bos, W. & Tarnai, Ch. (Eds.). (1999). International Journal of Educational Research: Special Issue: Content Analysis in Educational Research, 31 (8). Levin, B. & Fullan, M. (2008): Learning about System Renewal. In: Educational Management Administration and Leadership 36 (2). Download: http://ema.sagepub.com/content/36/2/289 [01/16/2011] Ritter, T. & Gemünden, H.G. (1998): Die netzwerkende Unternehmung: Organisationale Voraussetzungen netzwerk-kompetenter Unternehmen. In: Zeitschrift Führung und Organisation 67 (5), 260-265.