By Rosalyn Black
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Back to new Transitions - Re-Engagement Edition

“There are very many schools for whom their community relationships and the support they are able to provide through them is now the limiting factor on their success in educating their pupils” (Craig & O’Leary, 2006).

Introduction

A new report being developed by Education Foundation Australia with funding from the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development argues that schools cannot by themselves meet the challenge of engaging, re-engaging and supporting strong educational outcomes for young people, especially where disadvantage is part of the picture.  New School Ties: Networks for Success proposes that Australian education systems be rebuilt around deep, collaborative networks that bring together schools and other sectors to address the systemic and structural barriers to educational engagement and success. The report builds on the findings of previous Education Foundation Australia research.

The Foundation's Case for Change project proposed collaboration between schools across the three different systems - government, Catholic and independent - and between education and other sectors to create collective responsibility for young people's engagement and learning (Education Foundation, 2005). It concluded that cross-sectoral collaboration remains at the margin in Australia and that there are systemic obstacles to upscaling it. These include a lack of policy support and a lack of proven models or examples of collaboration in practice.

The Foundation's most recent research project, Crossing the Bridge: Overcoming entrenched disadvantage through student-centred learning (Black, 2007), concluded that the fundamental model of schooling in Australia is not supporting educational excellence for students facing disadvantage. It proposed new models of schooling that include:

1. Funding partnerships between areas of government, business, philanthropy and community organisations to provide young people with powerful learning resources, meet their wider needs and engage and support their families
2. Schools from different sectors working together at a local or district level to share resources, meet the learning needs of all students in the locality and build value for their communities
3. Schools reconfigured as community learning hubs that offer education and other services for the entire community.

Why networks?

Cooperative networks have the potential to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for young people, but their take-up in Australia is still limited. At a time when the economic and social landscape of developed countries are shaped by connections and connectivity and the directions for 21^st century schooling focus on connectedness, the fundamental structures of Australian school education mean that schools still operate largely in isolation. Yet disengagement is best addressed by "multiple, integrated strategies involving students, schools, families, and other organisations within the community" (Butler, Bond, Drew, Krelle & Seal, 2005) and young people's learning needs can only be met through a variety of delivery systems (UNESCO, 1990).

‘Network' is one of a large number of terms that describe strategies for groups of organisations and sectors working together. It implies a formal, stable and widespread grouping of organisations that come together for a deliberate, agreed and common purpose linked to a specific region or local area (Chapman & Aspin, 2005; Edwards, Goodwin, Pemberton & Woods, 2000). The OECD defines networks as "purposeful social entities characterised by a commitment to quality, rigour, and a focus on outcomes" (OECD 2003, in Robinson & Keating, 2005).

Networks are part of a global trend by governments to improve policy development and service provision across a range of areas (see Robinson & Keating, 2005, for a comprehensive discussion of the growth of networks). They are seen as one of the most promising levers for large-scale educational reform, with the capacity to boost innovation, build school capacity for change and deliver educational excellence and equity. The United Kingdom, which is leading the field in the development of educational networks, claims that the impact of effective networks includes better engagement, achievement and transitions for students (Hadfield, Jopling, Noden, O'Leary & Stott, 2005).

In part, the school network movement is a response to the inability of the widespread school improvement reforms of the 1990s to improve student outcomes because they did not deal directly with the impact of social factors on student engagement and achievement (West-Burnham & Otero, 2004). As Tom Bentley writes, "schooling systems will not overcome growing patterns of exclusion and marginalisation by incrementally improving their attainment scores. Teaching, resourcing, leadership all matter, but they cannot work in isolation from the wider context" (Bentley, 2006).

More than partnership

The most prevalent form of collaborative effort for education in Australia is the individual, local school-community partnership. The local community provides the most immediate environment for schools to collaborate with groups and individuals who can support young people's learning: parents, local business, local government and community groups serving the area. Collaboration with the local community gives schools the chance to contribute to the community cohesiveness that will directly affect young people's life and learning opportunities. Internationally, the few schools that break the strong nexus between poverty and achievement tend to have relationships with the community that support the school and enrich learning: it has even been suggested that principals in these schools prioritise local community relationships more highly than principals in lower need schools (Kannapel & Clements, 2005; Mulford, Kendall, Ewington, Edmunds, Kendall & Silins, 2007).

However, individual school-community partnerships have their weaknesses. One of their greatest weaknesses is sustainability. Education foundation Australia has previously observed that "the landscape of school-community partnership is littered with discontinued or underutilised programs that leave little legacy except in the experience of individual students" (Black, 2004). It is hard to say how much this picture is changing, but building partnerships remains a challenge for schools in high poverty areas. These schools need connections with other public services such as health and welfare to engage and support their students but find it difficult to create these connections (Mulford, Kendall, Ewington, Edmunds, Kendall & Silins, 2007). As one school principal testifies: "partnerships with community are outside our experience and expertise. They take a lot of energy and there is no-one to do it all the time" (in Black, 2007).

Another weakness of many partnerships is that they bring about limited change because they do not alter the intrinsic operation of the school, the structures within which it operates or the fundamental model of schooling which it represents (Black, 2004, 2007). They do not sufficiently recognise the need for a "collective societal response" (Mulford, Cranston, Keating & Reid, 2007) to deal with the forces that challenge contemporary schooling. Engaging these forces requires new structural models where schools operate in deep and ongoing collaboration with one another and with both the local and wider community.

Structural models for collaboration

One model for more deeper and more sustainable school-community collaboration is the shared or joint-use facility where the school and community share key infrastructure such as information technology centres, libraries, sports and performing arts facilities. The benefits of such arrangements include stronger links between schools and communities and greater community involvement in young people's learning (Department of Education and Training, 2005).

This work needs to continue and to be taken further. A next step on from shared facilities is the co-location of the school with community services or its inclusion in a precinct that offers multiple services for the community, the kind of model represented by the United Kingdom's full-service Extended Schools program. At their most developed, these schools offer childcare, parental and family support, referral to a range of specialist support services, wider community access to information technology, sports and arts facilities and lifelong learning opportunities for the whole community (Coleman, 2006). They are a significantly more developed version of the Full Service Schools model developed in Australia to address the needs of young people at risk of not completing Year 12. Evidence from the United Kingdom shows that these redesigned and networked schools improve student engagement and achievement. They also strengthen the school's ability to respond to broader family and student needs (Department of Education & Training, 2006).

At the most ambitious level, schools can form part of a learning system that supports the learner through a range of networks and interlinked services at every stage (Bentley, 2006). This is already taking place in the United States and Scotland, where community schools in disadvantaged areas become a vehicle for neighbourhood renewal and a hub for services that build the capacity of their community.

One more local example shows how networks can support young people's engagement in education. The Derwent District of Tasmania is an area of high educational need. Real Learnings - Real Futures began in 2002 as a commitment by all ten secondary school principals in the District to work collaboratively to address issues of student participation, attendance and retention in the area and to generate opportunities that would be impossible for the individual schools to provide on their own. The network involves Bothwell District High School, Bridgewater High School, Claremont High School, Cosgrove High School, Derwent Support Services, Glenora District School, New Norfolk High School, Oatlands District High School, Ouse District High, Rosetta High School and the Derwent District of the Tasmanian Department of Education.

Real Learnings - Real Futures improves the range of learning experiences available to all students in the area. One of its key strategies is the development of student-centred learning across all of the network schools to make the curriculum more relevant and engaging for Year 9 and 10 students. Student-centred learning projects are based both in the schools and in the community. They include boat building, emergency services training, school farm programs, aquaculture, marine adventure courses, multi media, robotics and natural therapies. Most projects involve students from a number of the participating schools rather than single-school groups.

Provision of this range of learning experiences is financially feasible only because of cooperation between the schools. The network also maximises the use of limited school and District resources to meet the learning needs of students at risk of disengagement, building partnerships with other agencies and services to provide "an effective, seamless student support network" (Holdsworth, 2003) and deliver professional learning for teachers to support at-risk students.

A 2003 evaluation shows that the network builds on the strength of each participating school and enhances each school's capacity to efficiently and effectively offer activities to its own and other students (Holdsworth, 2003). It concludes that the benefits for all participating schools exceed what each would achieve alone. It also shows that the network is having strong positive outcomes for student engagement and learning. Students and teachers testify to increased student commitment, better relationships between students and the development of valuable student skills. 

Conclusion

There are numerous innovative but isolated examples like Real Learnings - Real Futures. Their success in supporting educational success for young people against strong odds points to the need for more work to demonstrate what collaborative policy and provision could look like for education systems, identify what is required to bring it about and formulate a more clearly defined role for government in creating joined up practice in education. New School Ties: Networks for Success sets out to do some of this work.

The report will inform a new book by Rosalyn Black to be launched in November 2008. Beyond the Classroom: Building new school networks will be published by ACER Press.

For further information about this research project, contact Rosalyn Black: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .  To read the previous Education Foundation Australia reports referred to here, see www.educationfoundation.org.au and go to the Research section.

References

Bentley, T. (2006). Futures for Learning. Presentation to OECD/Mexico International Conference, Emerging Models of Learning and Innovation, Merida, Mexico, June 14 2006

Black, R. (2004). "Thinking Community as a Social Investment in Australia", in Worldwide Partnerships for Schools with Voluntary Organizations, Foundations, Universities, Companies and Community Councils. Ed. Mitchell, S., Klinck, P. & Burger, J., Mellen Press, Canada

Black, R. (2007). Crossing the Bridge: Overcoming entrenched disadvantage through student-centred learning. Melbourne: Education Foundation Australia

Butler, H., Bond, L., Drew, S., Krelle, A. & Seal, I. 2005. Doing It Differently: Improving Young People's Engagement with School. Melbourne: Brotherhood of St Laurence

Chapman, J.D. and Aspin, D.N. (2005). "Why Networks and Why Now?" in International perspectives on networked learning. Nottingham: National College for School Leadership

Coleman, A. (2006). Lessons from Extended Schools. Nottingham: National College for School Leadership

Craig, J. & O'Leary, D. (2006). The Invisible Teacher: How schools can unlock the power of community. London: Demos

Department of Education and Training (2005). Schools as Community Facilities: Policy Framework and Guidelines. Melbourne: Department of Education and Training

Department of Education and Training (2006). The Impact of School Infrastructure on Education Outcomes. Melbourne: Department of Education and Training

Education Foundation (2005). Equity, Excellence and Effectiveness: Moving Forward on Schooling Arrangements in Australia. Melbourne: Education Foundation

Edwards, B., Goodwin, M., Pemberton, S. & Woods, M. (2000). Partnership working in rural regeneration. Bristol: The Policy Press

Hadfield, M., Jopling, M., Noden, C., O'Leary, D. & Stott, A. (2005). The impact of networking and collaboration: the existing knowledge base. A review of multi-agency and community-based forms of networking. Nottingham: National College for School Leadership

Holdsworth, R. (2003). Real Learning - Real Futures: A Derwent District Partnership. A Brief Evaluation and Reflection. Melbourne: Australian Youth Research Centre

Kannapel, P.J., & Clements, S.K. 2005. Inside the black box of high-performing high-poverty schools. Lexington: Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence

Mulford, B., Cranston, N., Keating, J. & Reid, A. (2007). The forces impacting upon schools and their public purposes. Part of the literature review for the ARC Linkage Project "Education investment in Australian schooling: Serving public purposes"

Mulford, B., Kendall, D., Ewington, J., Edmunds, B., Kendall, L. & Silins, H. (2007) Successful principalship of high-performance schools in high-poverty communities. Journal of Educational Administration, 46 (3)

Robinson, L. & Keating, J. (2005a). Networks and governance: the case of LLENs in Victoria. ARC Linkage Project Occasional Paper No 3. The University of Melbourne

UNESCO (1990). World Declaration on Education for All and Framework for Action to Meet Basic Learning Needs. Paris: UNESCO

West-Burnham, J., Farrar, M. & Otero, G. (2007) Schools and Communities: Working together to transform children's lives. London: Network Continuum Education

About the author

Rosalyn Black is the Director of Thought Leadership at Education Foundation Australia, an independent, nonprofit organisation with a focus on educational excellence and equality of opportunity. In her current role, she is responsible for the development of research projects that propose and drive new solutions for public education. Her previous roles include education policy analysis for state government and teaching and educational leadership in the public education system.

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