Kirstin Kerr

Education, Disadvantage and Place: Making the Local Matter

Introduction Why place matters in education Local education systems as products of place: a case study Learning from the past Learning from the present A rationale for a new generation of area-based initiatives Developing understandings of place as a basis for intervention Evaluation and monitoring Governance and accountability Children and places in hard times: some concluding thoughts.

Exploring the European Dimension in Education: Practitioners’ Attitudes

22 Anne Convery is a lecturer in teacher education specializing in modern languages and a former secondary school teacher. She is an active member of the UNESCO Centre for Comparative Education Research and chair of Mundi, a development education center. Her research interests include the European dimension in education, citizenship, and identity. Kirstin Kerr is the research manager for the Centre for Equity in Education at the University of Manchester, which involves practitioners, policy makers, and researchers in development and research projects which seek to enhance equity in educational contexts. European Education, vol. 37, no. 4, Winter 2005–6, pp. 22–34.

Conceptualising school-community relations in disadvantaged neighbourhoods: mapping the literature

Abstract 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.

Teachers' experiences of initial teacher preparation, induction and early professional development in England—does route matter?

The last 10–15 years in England have witnessed a number of government-driven changes to initial teacher preparation (ITP) and the early professional development of teachers. One important development is that potential entrants to the teaching profession are now offered a wide range of routes for achieving Qualified Teacher Status. In addition, other initiatives, such as the introduction of the Career Entry and Development Profile, have sought to encourage closer integration between initial teacher preparation and the school-based induction of newly qualified teachers. Given this, there is a need for research that explores how the experiences of teachers following different routes into the profession compare, and how integrated their ITP, 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.

From school to children’s community: the development of Manchester Communication Academy, England.

This chapter describes a collaborative initiative undertaken by the authors and other local leaders to develop a new design for a secondary school. The Manchester Communication Academy (MCA) has been designed to improve outcomes for children, families and community groups in one of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the city of Manchester, England. The authors capture the distinctive features of what they call a work in progress. They illuminate both the underlying vision about how schools can become involved in tackling the interconnected problems of social and educational disadvantage as well as the architecture and more operational characteristics of this approach. Although young in its implementation and demonstration of impacts, MCA already provides an advanced exemplar for new institutional designs. MCA provides a coherent and comprehensive strategy for tackling disadvantage as part of a wide-ranging set of partnerships with community agencies and representatives. Significantly, MCA represents a private sector investment in the development of new school designs, and it may be a harbinger for future developments in England and other nations because of the manifest needs of businesses and corporations for a better prepared, healthy workforce. Overall MCA moves the international field beyond the additive model of earlier community schools, i.e., a model characterized by what can be called “one at a time program and service development.” Because MCA also is charged with teacher education responsibilities, it implicitly sends a strong message to higher education institutes about needs for innovation in preservice education. Last, but not least, MCA is an exemplar for area-based initiatives – complex designs that are tailor-made for particular populations in special, challenging locales. These new area-based initiatives provide important reminders about the importance of the local context and the manifest dangers of scripted implementation of exemplars developed elsewhere.