Local Learning and Employment Networks were introduced in Victoria, Australia in 2001. This partnership initiative was inserted into an existing network of agencies. Its sustainability meant creating and authorising locations to support community-based planning and school to work transitions for 15 to 19 year olds. While the fate of LLEN varied, some thrived by making space for learning within existing regional relationalities. This paper considers how this work was done. I use the concept of ‘educational work’ to understand the distinctive boundarying of space and knowledge that made, oriented and enacted LLEN spaces. Reflecting on three phases of data collection (2002, 2006, 2011) at one LLEN in Melbourne, I document the interruptive educational work that allowed the LLEN to knit itself into the existing education and employment space. This labour by key actors mobilised knowledge and power to define, authorise and govern the LLEN agenda and materialised LLEN narratives to form a governance structure that could focus on localised problem-solving to support disadvantaged youth. I argue that boundarying spaces is a distinctive kind of educational work. It is both interruptive and enabling because of the way it mobilises knowledge and organises authority.