This paper reports on the work of a small group of Education academics to build a professional learning community in a regional university in the north of England. Their efforts form part of a "Leading Learning" school-university partnership serving schools in disadvantaged communities in inner city Leeds. This is designed to support teachers' professional learning and development and reclaim their sense of collaborative professionalism in a new era of austerity Britain. The account given here is about the new partnerships being created between and among academic colleagues, who are learning to work effectively with each other and their schooling colleagues on their collective professional learning and to build their collaborative sense of professionalism. The complexities of this task--of working in a professional learning community within Faculty in order to model and support a city-wide professional learning community with teacher partners, school communities, and civil servants in the local Authority--are framed in terms of knowledge-building for the improvement of educational provision for disadvantaged students in local schools and the university.