English education has recently experienced radical policy reform in the areas of school autonomy and accountability. The key focus of this paper is on how schools might best navigate through these policy moves. It highlights how these moves have constructed schools, teachers and students in problematic ways but also how they are offering possibilities for improving the quality of schools and schooling. The focus here is on the promise and scope of school collaboration. The difficulties of creating socially responsive and responsible collaboratives in the current "heterarchical" and market-oriented policy environment are acknowledged. Guided by quality democratic governance, they are, nonetheless, presented as crucial in supporting schools to productively deal with the demands of this environment.