Growing innovative learning through meso-level networking

The strategies and initiatives featured in the ILE study are operating at the “meso” level, and their differing scale is described in this chapter. While networks and initiatives are constantly emerging and evolving, they often disappear as well. Growth depends on the emergence of healthy new learning-focused networks outstripping the inevitable decline or disappearance of others. The chapter extends the ILE framework architecture to accommodate the meso level and uses this to present the submitted strategies and initiatives: the degree to which they are learning-focused their balance of the formal and non-formal and the means of diffusion and innovation “contagion”. As well as extending the ILE framework, the chapter also uses the framework to ask how well the initiatives are applying it to themselves: how are these strategies applying the lessons of learning principles, designing and redesigning on the basis of learning evidence, and bringing in different partners in their operationalisation?