Search

This paper explores how a small but growing number of schools in England are gradually extending their roles to act as, what I term, agents of "slow renewal": supporting long-term change in children's complex family and community environments, through a series of strategically-aligned, small-scale, locally-bespoke actions, intentionally planned to bring about incremental change. An empirical illustration of one such school is presented and its core features explored via four core concepts: socio-ecological perspectives on children's outcomes, soft-systems change, assets-based development, and liminal space. Through this, the paper contributes a set of integrated conceptual principles on which schools working to support slow renewal can act and which challenge the values of market-driven education systems more generally.

Internationally, Out-of-School Time (OST) provision is widely seen as providing professionally-supervised activities through which young people, living in high-poverty contexts, can improve their after-school safety, as well as academic and personal development outcomes. However, even when practical barriers to access are removed, participation is typically low, with little known from young people's perspectives about why this is. To address this, findings are reported from a qualitative study with young people (aged 11-15) living in Hollyburgh, a high-poverty neighbourhood with wide-ranging OST provision. This explored young people's endogenous views about the neighbourhood assets currently available, and those they would ideally like to have, to support their pursuit of positive educational and wider outcomes. OST provision, both currently and ideally, emerged strongly as themes, with OST providers' responses to the young people's view also being sought. In general, the young people appeared unwilling to participate in Hollyburgh's current OST provision, associating this with the supervision of those involved in anti-social behaviours and with negative perceptions of their local area more generally -- views reinforced at least partially by OST providers. It is argued that to change such perceptions, OST provision must be explicitly understood as a contextualised activity, with the potential to create spaces in which young people and professionals can co-develop more positive -- and affectively just -- discourses about young people living in high poverty areas. This presents an important challenge to the OST field's current direction of travel towards implementation science and the identification of decontextualised, replicable, "high quality" provision.

Asset-based approaches to public service reform suggest a need for policymakers to shift attention from 'fixing' the perceived deficits of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, to recognising and building on the resources, or assets, they hold. However, these approaches have also been critiqued for interpreting assets so broadly that they effectively become meaningless, or so narrowly that they perpetuate deficit views. To counter these tendencies, a new conceptually and methodologically robust endogenous assets-mapping approach is proposed. This has been designed to enable nuanced insights into the assets young people living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods may draw upon to pursue positive educational and wider life outcomes. The approach's utility is illustrated through the case of Ayesha, a 14-year-old student with a difficult relationship with school. The paper concludes that an endogenous assets-mapping approach can help to generate more positive narratives for vulnerable learners living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods than schooling may typically enable.

Background: Internationally, young people experiencing poverty and related disadvantages do least well in school. These inequalities tend to be concentrated in places with high levels of poverty and poor outcomes across multiple domains. Although place-based initiatives are sometimes used by policymakers as a vehicle to improve outcomes, such programmes often fail to engage meaningfully with local resources, further marginalising disadvantaged communities. Purpose: This article considers what asset-based approaches, which seek to understand existing resources (assets) in disadvantaged places, might bring to such situations. Focused on a disadvantaged inner-city neighbourhood in England, it explores professionals' and young people's understandings of assets through an assets-mapping approach. Method: During a two-year study, a university researcher was embedded in a secondary school, and 10 students (aged 13) were trained as co-researchers. Utilising visual mapping methods, they conducted 17 focus groups (45 minutes each) with around 225 of their peers in total. In addition, the researcher conducted 14 semistructured interviews with a group of local multi-agency professionals and with the co-researchers. Data were analysed thematically. Findings: The analysis indicated that professionals and young people understood the neighbourhood's assets in relation to perceived 'lived territories'. Professionals described different residential groups as 'owning' different geographical 'territories', identifying professionally-led institutions as assets that could transcend these. Conversely, young people talked about 'territories' primarily in terms of power and control: they identified self-defined social spaces, away from professional scrutiny, as among the neighbourhood's most valuable assets. Conclusion: Exploring the students' and professionals' contrasting positions through Giddens' notion of regionalisation, which distinguishes front spaces (i.e. professional and public-facing) and back spaces (i.e. private and personally developed), suggests that the tangible nature of assets is perhaps less important than the different power relationships at play within them. The study highlights the necessity of working in partnership with young people throughout the development of place-based initiatives.

Community schools have long been accepted as an institutional mechanism for intervening in the relationship between poverty, poor educational outcomes, and limited life chances. At a time when public services are being retracted, and disadvantaged places are being increasingly left to struggle, community schools are poised to become more important in offering a response to the needs of children, families, and communities in these places. Yet, despite their apparent promise, community schools remain badly under-conceptualized. As an international field, research on community schooling has rarely articulated or questioned how--by providing additional learning and leisure opportunities and personal and social supports--community schools might create a viable intervention in the relationship between poverty and poor outcomes. This paper explicitly addresses this significant challenge. Conceptualizing empirical findings emerging from a research-practice partnership, it identifies the core features of a new institutional design for community schools which can help to clarify their potential contribution to addressing disadvantage. Marking a considerable shift from a traditional design of simply adding new services to the school day, it argues that community schools will need to operate as social enterprises with networked governance arrangements, and to develop strategies which engage with children's social ecologies, and are risk-reducing and resilience-building within these. This, in turn, sets a new agenda for significantly advancing the field of community schooling by further defining--conceptually and empirically--the core elements of a new institutional design as identified here.

The Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) is arguably one of the most extensive extended education approaches established to date. It has sought to create a seamless programme of support for children living in Harlem, from birth to early adulthood, in family, school and community settings. The evidence on HCZ's impacts is limited, but its approach nonetheless has many proponents internationally, who see it as a means to further an extended education agenda. In this paper, given the lack of robust evidence on HCZ, we seek to advance an evidence-based rationale for adopting a 'children's zone' approach. We conclude it may have the potential to achieve greater impacts than more limited school-led approaches to extended education.

Advancing equity is a major challenge facing education systems globally. This creates an imperative for researchers to work with policymakers and practitioners to affect change. There have been many attempts to do this using various forms of action-oriented research and a considerable body of knowledge exists about their strengths and limitations. The paper describes the development of a methodological approach, Design-Based Equity Research (DBER), which draws on these existing traditions but is also distinct in its explicit consideration of values. It is marked out by a process of knowledge generation, in which researcher and practitioner knowledge meet, in context, to produce new knowledge about ways in which broad values of equity might be better realized in future practice. The paper explains how the approach was developed, conceptually and empirically, through a series of studies carried out over the last twenty years. It concludes that the process has the potential to generate two important types of knowledge: substantive knowledge about how equity can be realized in practice, and processual knowledge about the DBER process itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The field of school-community relations is well established in the scholarly literature. However, its largely descriptive and fragmented nature has served to disguise its conceptual complexity. To date, the sets of assumptions about school-community relations which underpin the literature, and the opportunities, tensions and limitations inherent in these, have tended to remain implicit. Consequently, while stronger school-community relations have typically been seen as desirable--and especially so as a mechanism for tackling neighbourhood disadvantage--the more contentious issues of what, precisely, they should be seeking to achieve, how and whose values they should promote, have far less often been discussed. This paper foregrounds these issues. Purpose: A conceptual map of the scholarly literature on school-community relations is developed, surfacing the sets of understandings embedded in the field by academic authors. The map is intended to act as a heuristic tool, helping readers to navigate and critique the field and to identify gaps in the literature which must now be addressed. Design and methods: A review was undertaken of the subset of the school-community literature concerned with the role of schools in relation to geographically located communities experiencing economic and associated forms of disadvantage. The scholarly literature published in English since 1990 was searched, using strings of search terms representing "school" + "community" + "disadvantage." A process of conceptual synthesis was used to surface the understandings embedded in the literature, with 60 texts being read and summarised in detail by a minimum of two reviewers. Two external advisory groups of academic experts (a UK-based cross-disciplinary group, and an international group of education specialists) supported the review process by identifying relevant literatures in their specialist fields and national contexts, and by challenging and elaborating the reviewers' emerging interpretations of understandings embedded in the literature. Findings and conclusions: The field is dominated by texts which take for granted the leading role of professionals (for instance, teachers, principals, public service officers and policy-makers) acting on agendas determined outside communities, and which have a tendency to cast communities in the largely passive role of responding to school-initiated interventions. A smaller subset of literature focuses on community-initiated actions and most often reports examples of parents developing programmes to support students' learning. While these offer important critiques of professional, deficit-driven conceptualisations of communities, they still tend to locate communities as supporting professional agendas rather than as having opportunities to shape these from a community standpoint. The field is also dominated by accounts of ameliorative actions taken to alleviate the acute symptoms of underlying disadvantage and there are very few accounts of actions seeking to transform local circumstances by tackling underlying inequalities. This weighting may reflect the opportunities for action most readily available to schools and communities wishing to tackle neighbourhood disadvantage. The most productive avenues for future research may therefore lie in exploring how possibilities for ameliorative action can be strengthened and can bring together professional and community perspectives.

Internationally, Out-of-School Time (OST) provision is widely seen as providing professionally-supervised activities through which young people, living in high-poverty contexts, can improve their after-school safety, as well as academic and personal development outcomes. However, even when practical barriers to access are removed, participation is typically low, with little known from young people's perspectives about why this is. To address this, findings are reported from a qualitative study with young people (aged 11–15) living in Hollyburgh, a high-poverty neighbourhood with wide-ranging OST provision. This explored young people's endogenous views about the neighbourhood assets currently available, and those they would ideally like to have, to support their pursuit of positive educational and wider outcomes. OST provision, both currently and ideally, emerged strongly as themes, with OST providers' responses to the young people's view also being sought. In general, the young people appeared unwilling to participate in Hollyburgh's current OST provision, associating this with the supervision of those involved in anti-social behaviours and with negative perceptions of their local area more generally – views reinforced at least partially by OST providers. It is argued that to change such perceptions, OST provision must be explicitly understood as a contextualised activity, with the potential to create spaces in which young people and professionals can co-develop more positive – and affectively just – discourses about young people living in high poverty areas. This presents an important challenge to the OST field's current direction of travel towards implementation science and the identification of decontextualised, replicable, "high quality" provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports early findings of a longitudinal research project on the experiences of beginning teachers in England. In the first phase of the study (2003-2004), data were generated via: (1) in-depth, face to face interviews with 85 student teachers throughout England; and (2) self-completion questionnaires, returned by 4,790 student teachers across a range of initial teacher preparation (ITP) routes. Through these methods the study set out to explore student teachers' accounts of their motivations for entering ITP, their preconceptions and expectations of teaching and ITP, and their early experiences as student teachers. A number of general themes were found to cut across all of these areas, and are presented here as core features of the experience of becoming a student teacher. These relate to the concept of teacher identity, the role of relationships, the notion of relevance, and the central presence of emotion. (Contains 2 tables and 8 notes.)

In this article, the authors argue that if pupils are to make educated choices about their roles in Europe, it is important that a European dimension be included within education. These authors see three concepts as integral to a European dimension--identity, cooperation, and integration--and suggest that for the full potential of European dimension to be understood, these concepts must be seen as interrelated. Yet notably, while at key stages 3 and 4 of the National Curriculum for England and Wales, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority orders for citizenship explicitly refer to the European Union as an arena for "citizenly activity," the orders make no direct reference to developing a "European Identity" (DfEE/QCA 1999). The authors question whether, if within a European dimension, pupils are not encouraged to see a "European" aspect to their identities, they will be willing to engage with issues of cooperation and integration across the Union. With this question in mind, this paper explores aspects of a European dimension that teachers and those training to teach embrace when talking about European Unification. Established teachers' views are explored with specific reference to the communities in which they work and the programs of education for citizenship they have developed. Views of student teachers are offered to give a more general insight into the understanding of those entering the profession. (Contains 1 note.)

Asset-based approaches to public service reform suggest a need for policymakers to shift attention from 'fixing' the perceived deficits of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, to recognising and building on the resources, or assets, they hold. However, these approaches have also been critiqued for interpreting assets so broadly that they effectively become meaningless, or so narrowly that they perpetuate deficit views. To counter these tendencies, a new conceptually and methodologically robust endogenous assets-mapping approach is proposed. This has been designed to enable nuanced insights into the assets young people living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods may draw upon to pursue positive educational and wider life outcomes. The approach's utility is illustrated through the case of Ayesha, a 14-year-old student with a difficult relationship with school. The paper concludes that an endogenous assets-mapping approach can help to generate more positive narratives for vulnerable learners living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods than schooling may typically enable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This "Research in Progress" report describes the need to explore how the experiences of teachers following different routes into the profession compare, and how integrated their initial teacher preparation, new teacher induction and early professional development programmes appear to be in practice. The "Becoming a teacher" project (2003?2009), funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) and the Teacher Training Agency (TTA), and carried out by researchers at the University of Nottingham, the University of Leeds and MORI Social Research Institute, addresses this need.

This paper explores how a small but growing number of schools in England are gradually extending their roles to act as, what I term, agents of "slow renewal": supporting long-term change in children's complex family and community environments, through a series of strategically-aligned, small-scale, locally-bespoke actions, intentionally planned to bring about incremental change. An empirical illustration of one such school is presented and its core features explored via four core concepts: socio-ecological perspectives on children's outcomes, soft-systems change, assets-based development, and liminal space. Through this, the paper contributes a set of integrated conceptual principles on which schools working to support slow renewal can act and which challenge the values of market-driven education systems more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the argument that a European dimension be included within elementary, secondary, and higher education curricula in European Union countries. Identity, cooperation, and international economic integration are three concepts integral to a European dimension. The goal is to enable students to make educated choices about their roles in Europe. The attitudes and insights of established teachers and student teachers toward the teaching of European Unification and monetary union are explored.