Beyond the School Gates

Can Full Service and Extended Schools Overcome Disadvantage?

Colleen Cummings, Alan Dyson, Liz Todd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415548755
• eBook ISBN: 9781136810183
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book, for the first time ever, critically examines the role of full service and extended schools. The authors draw on their extensive international evaluations of this radical new phenomenon to ask:

• What do extended or full service schools hope to achieve, and why should services based on schools be any more effective than services operating from other community bases?
• What pattern of services and activities is most effective?
• What does extended schooling mean for children and families who are not highly disadvantaged, or for schools outside the most disadvantaged areas?
• How can schools lead extended services at the same time as doing their 'day job' of teaching children?
• Why should schools be concerned with family and community issues?
• Beyond the advocacy of 'extended provision', what real evidence is there that schools of this kind make a difference, and how can school leaders evaluate the impact of their work?

This book will be of interest to anyone involved in extended and full service school provision, as a practitioner, policy-maker, or researcher.

Chapter I

---

Full Service and Extended Schools – an International Movement?

---

Working Beyond the School Gates

In countries across the world, a new approach to schooling has begun to emerge in recent years which calls into question what we have historically believed schools to be and to be for. Like their counterparts elsewhere, schools adopting this approach focus primarily on teaching children, and therefore on helping children develop knowledge and skills in the classroom setting. However, these schools are not simply concerned with children as learners. They are also concerned with the personal, social and physical development of children, and with how they can access the services they need to support that development. They are concerned with how children thrive – or fail to thrive – within their families, and therefore with how families can best be engaged and supported. They are also concerned with the communities within which children and their families live, and how these communities in turn can offer the best support for children’s development. In this sense, they define their role in terms not only of what happens in classrooms, but also of what happens beyond the school gates.

As a result, these schools tend to offer a range of services and activities which goes well beyond what other schools provide. In the USA, for instance, the Children’s Aid Society describes what it calls ‘community schools’ as creating a ‘web of support’ for children based on three inter-connected systems:

A strong core instructional program designed to help all students meet high academic standards;

Enrichment activities designed to expand students’ learning opportunities and to support their cognitive, social, emotional, moral and physical development;

A full range of health and mental health services designed to safeguard children’s well-being and remove barriers to learning.

Some of the specific programs and services that may be found in community schools include extended-day instruction and enrichment, recreational and cultural programs, on-site health and mental health services, social services, parent support programs, adult education and teen programs. Typically, community schools are open during the regular school day as well as afternoons, evenings and weekends throughout the year, and the population they serve includes students, their families and the wider community. Parent involvement, participation and sanction are key to this process.

(Children’s Aid Society, 2001, p. 16, emphasis in original)

The notion of a ‘web of support’ goes to the heart of what many of these schools seek to achieve, and what the circumstances are that have, in many cases, brought them into being. If, by ‘support’ we mean something like ‘nurturant environments’ (Irwin et al., 2007, p. 3), then all children need support of some kind if they are to grow and learn. Such support comes primarily from their families, though peer groups, communities, child and family services, and, of course, schools also have a significant role to play. Community schools and others working in the same way, however, tend to assume that some children face such significant disadvantages that their hard-pressed families alone are unlikely to be able to create the kinds of highly nurturant environments they need. Child and family services, they argue, have to step into this breach. In particular, the schools themselves have to use their privileged position as key players in all children’s lives to engage with families and communities, and to act as a hub for other services. Without doing so, indeed, they may not be able to effectively carry out their core task of promoting children’s learning. As the prospectus for ‘New (latterly, “Integrated”) Community Schools’ in Scotland puts it:

Through New Community Schools we will make a radical attack on [the] vicious cycle of underachievement. New Community Schools will embody the fundamental principle that the potential of all children can be realised only by addressing their needs in the round – and that this requires an integrated approach by all those involved. Barriers to learning must be identified at the earliest stage, and intervention must be focused, planned and sustained. A range of services is necessary to assist children overcome the barriers to learning and positive development – family support, family learning and health improvement. New Community Schools will ensure that such expert advice and support is at hand – not at the end of a referral chain to other agencies.

(The Scottish Office, 1998, foreword)

Not surprisingly, at a time when international comparisons have made countries acutely aware of equity issues in the educational achievements, well-being, and life chances of their children, initiatives such as these are appearing across a range of administrations. In recent years, for instance, there have been similar initiatives in many parts of the USA – particularly, though not exclusively, in the ‘big cities’ (see, for instance, Coalition for Community Schools, no date (b); Dryfoos and Quinn, 2005) – and in countries as diverse as Australia (Szirom et al., 2001), Canada (see, for instance, M Tymchak [chair] Task Force and Public Dialogue on the Role of the School, 2001), the Irish Republic (Ryan, 2004), the Netherlands (The Dutch Community School Steering Group, 2004), South Africa (Department of Education. Directorate: Inclusive Education [Republic of South Africa], 2005), and, doubtless, many more. They all share the view that schools have to offer a wider range of services to children – and, typically, to their families and communities – than has traditionally been the case. For this reason, they are often referred to as ‘full service’ approaches to schooling (Dryfoos, 1994).

However, it is with the question of what such schools are to be called that the first hints of complexity enter the story. Although ‘full service’ school is a common label, recognizably similar approaches might also be called ‘community’ school, or ‘multi-service’ school, or ‘school linked services’, or ‘SchoolPLUS’, or ‘Schools Plus’, or ‘extended’ school. To complicate matters further, in some countries – Sweden is an obvious example (Cameron et al., 2009) – approaches of this kind have no special name because many schools offer additional services and activities as a matter of course; it is simply ‘what schools do’. Even when the name is the same, the detail of what is on offer may be different. South African full service schools, for instance, do indeed offer a wide range of additional services like their counterparts in other countries – but primarily to children with difficulties and disabilities as an alternative to special school placement. Indeed, even within the same initiative and in the same administration, what individual schools offer may be quite different. As Joy Dryfoos, one of the pioneers of ‘full service’ schooling in the USA, puts it:

Although the word ‘model’ is used a lot, in reality no two schools are alike; they are all different. The quality that is most compelling about community school philosophy is responsiveness to differences: in needs of populations to be served; in configurations of school staff; in capabilities of partner agencies; in capacity for change in community climate; and in availability of resources. These programs are always changing in response to changing conditions.

(Dryfoos, 2005, p. vii)

Even our description of this approach to schooling as ‘new’ is somewhat problematic. It is certainly true that examples have multiplied in recent years, yet this is not an entirely new phenomenon. As early as the 1960s, when policy makers were looking to develop approaches of this kind amongst English primary schools, they were able to study established examples in Denmark, Poland, Russia, and the USA (Central Advisory Council for Education [England], 1967, par. 123). Certainly, in the USA, this approach has a long history, reaching back at least as far as the early part of the twentieth century, and having its roots in some quite fundamental assumptions about the role that schools should play in forging a democratic society (Dobbs, 2001; Richardson, 2009). As we shall shortly see, something similar could be said about the history of this approach in England – at least in terms of its length and the twists and turns it contains, even if the democratic imperative may not have been quite as marked.

Our concern here is to see what can be learned from these various attempts at broadening the role of schools. More specifically, we wish to examine critically the claims that changing what schools do in this way can have positive impacts on breaking the ‘vicious cycle of underachievement’, and can thereby contribute to greater social and educational equity. Such claims are, as we shall see, common in the policy and advocacy literature in this field. They are also exceedingly bold. It is well known that, even in affluent countries with well-resourced education systems, there is a stubborn link between childhood background, educational outcomes, and adult life chances (Raffo et al., 2007; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009). The strength of that link, and the inequalities into which children are born vary across countries, but schooling in its traditional form seems unable to level the playing field on which young people must begin their adult lives. If, therefore, changing the role of the school could break this link – or even weaken it significantly – that would be a remarkable achievement, and something of which all education systems would need to take note.

Evaluating such claims is no easy task when the approach to schooling out of which they arise does not even have an agreed name. For the purposes of this book, therefore, we have opted to combine the internationally recognized term ‘full service schools’ with the ‘extended school’ label that has been most widely used in England. The resulting hybrid – ‘full service and extended schools’ – may be somewhat inelegant and, as we shall see, is not without its conceptual problems, but it has the virtue of being likely to mean something to many of our readers. However, inventing a label of this kind cannot disguise the fact that it refers to many different initiatives, each taking a slightly different form, and each likely to be interpreted differently by participating schools. If there is indeed a full service and extended ‘approach’, it exists only at the level of some very broad principles – perhaps no more than a commitment to see learners in the classroom in the wider context of their lives outside those classrooms. Beyond this, the variability of this approach across time and place begs a series of questions. What additional services and activities should schools provide? How should they engage with families? What kind of working relationship should they have with other services – and, indeed, with which services? What kinds of education, social, and economic policies are needed to support schools working in this way? Above all, what evidence is there that the claims made for an approach of this kind are more than simply rhetorical?

We hope in this book to raise – and, so far as we are able, to answer – questions of this kind. Our conclusion is that full service and extended schools do indeed have much to contribute to efforts to tackle social and educational disadvantage. However, we also conclude that questions about the practicalities and impacts of such schools cannot adequately be answered without at the same time addressing some more fundamental issues. Widening the role of schools may do something to ameliorate the effects of disadvantage, but do we not also need to take into account everything we know about the structural causes of social and educational inequalities, and is it not improbable that schools alone can create more equal societies? Likewise, full service and extended schools may be able to support children, families and communities, but can we be entirely comfortable with the notion that school-based professionals know best what people living in disadvantaged circumstances need? Do we not have to take into account all we know about the power imbalances built into such an assumption, and about the tendency for professionals to view ‘disadvantaged people’ overwhelmingly in deficit terms? Above all, can we assess the role of schools in relation to social and educational disadvantage without also considering what kind of society we are trying to build, and what the role of schools might be in building this society?

Our positive conclusion about full service and extended school approaches is surrounded both by caveats and by possibilities. The caveats are about the limitations – and even dangers – of such approaches as we have known them hitherto. If, we conclude, such approaches have much to offer, what they can do is miniscule compared to the challenges posed by social and educational disadvantage, let alone by the task of creating more equal societies. Likewise, what they offer may be positively dangerous if it reinforces the relative powerlessness and marginalization of many people living in disadvantaged circumstances. On the other hand, the possibilities raised by full service and extended school approaches are also considerable. If, we argue, the work of schools can be aligned with more far-reaching efforts to tackle disadvantage, the potential for significant impacts is considerably increased. If, in particular, widening the role of the school can be taken as an opportunity to rethink what we expect from schools, there is the possibility of opening up a much-needed debate about how schools might help build our societies and, therefore, about what kind of societies we are trying to build.

Since the full service and extended schools ‘movement’ (if, indeed, it is such) is international in scope, we try wherever possible to consider these issues in the light of the international experience. However, precisely because such schools are outward-looking, their characteristics and approaches are shaped significantly by their local circumstances, and by the characteristics of the systems and services in relation to which they operate. For this reason, we wish to ground our arguments in a more detailed analysis of what has happened in our own country. England has a long history of schools seeking to work with children, families and communities outside their classrooms and beyond their gates – a history that illuminates many of the issues in this field. For a while in the 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed as though that history might have come to an end. However, during the years of the New Labour governments between 1997 and 2010, there was an upsurge in interest in ‘extending’ the role of schools, and we have been involved in a series of studies that have tracked and evaluated these developments. Our work in this field began over a decade ago, with a study of how schools did (or did not) contribute to the sustainability and regeneration of areas of concentrated social and educational disadvantage (Clark et al., 1999; Crowther et al., 2003). We were then able to trace a succession of government-sponsored pilot schemes (Cummings et al., 2004; Dyson et al., 2002), culminating in the ‘Full Service Extended Schools’ initiative (Cummings et al., 2005, 2006, 2007a) from which much of the evidence we present in this book is drawn. Our work continues. At the time of writing, the developments begun under the New Labour governments continue under a different (Conservative–Liberal Democrat) administration, and we are evaluating a major policy initiative to ensure that all schools offer access to extended services (Cummings et al., 2010).

Taken together, these initiatives have offered a unique opportunity to track developments over time across an entire national school system. Given that similar initiatives in most other parts of the world tend to be rather small-scale and localized, and, as we shall see, that evaluations in this field are typically small-scale and short-term, we believe that there is much to learn from this body of work. Moreover, it has become apparent that the initiatives in which we have been involved are part of a remarkable experiment, not only to turn every publicly funded school in the country into an extended school, but to incorporate the work of schools into a seamless network of child and family services. This attempt, for all its problematic aspects, has, we believe, opened up important new ways of thinking about the role of schools that we will return to towards the end of this book. It is, therefore, to the development of full service and extended schools in England that we now wish to turn.

The Story in England

A Remarkable Experiment?

The full extent of the experiment taking place in England became clear when, in 2005, the Westminster government announced that every state-controlled school in the country would be expected to offer access for children and families to a ‘core offer’ of five ‘extended services’: childcare, out-of hours activities for students, parenting support, swifter referral to specialist services, and community access to school facilities (DfES, 2005b, p. 8). What makes this initiative remarkable is not so much the individual services and activities that schools are expected to offer. In fact, most schools in England have offered at least some of these in the past. Nor is it the combination of all of these services and activities in single schools. Again, there have long been examples of schools offering a range of services to children, families and communities. Rather, it is the scale and ambition of the experiment that is striking. The intention has been not simply to develop a few exceptional schools working beyond the standard remit, but to transform the entire school system into one able to meet the demands of education in the twenty-first century. As the government’s manifesto for this new kind of school system put it:

Schools rightly see their central purpose as preparing children and young people for life … However, now more than at any time in the past, a changing society and economy place great demands on our school system. The future will require more of today’s young people to have higher-level skills and qualifications than ever before. It will require more of them to be equipped to cope with risk, uncertainty and change; and all of them to be able to make a positive contribution to an increasingly diverse society. We need young people to be prepared to face challenges and change; able to think, learn and work independently; able to show persistence and application; able to research in-depth; work with others, logically, analytically and creatively; and with the personal skills and attitudes to make a success of a range of personal circumstances. Meanwhile, as society becomes more diverse and complex and as family structures continue to change, schools now need to meet the needs of a much more diverse body of pupils, who bring to school a much wider range of backgrounds, experience, knowledge, beliefs and assumptions than in the past … A world-leading education system fit for the 21st century must respond to these challenges.

(DCSF, 2008a, pp. 11–12)

In this respect, as in so many others over the past two decades, the English education system is acting as what some US researchers have described as a kind of educational ‘laboratory’, where the effects of bold and ambitious reforms can be observed by other countries (Finkelstein and Grubb, 2000). Many working in the English system would doubtless argue that these reforms are often more problematic than at first they seem, and are rarely as successful as their proponents tend to claim. Nonetheless, their interest and significance for policy makers and practitioners elsewhere is beyond doubt.

The Historical Context

Despite the policy rhetoric about ‘21st century schools’ (DCSF, 2008a), the idea that schools should do more than simply teach children in classrooms, and that they should have some kind of wider involvement with children’s lives, with their parents, and with the communities in which they live, in fact has a venerable history in the English school system. Just where this history s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Full service and extended schools – an international movement?
• 2. What are they for?
• 3. Inside the schools
• 4. Challenges and possibilities
• 5. Issues in evaluation
• 6. Achievements and limitations
• 7. Rethinking full service and extended schools
• References
• Index