Education, Disadvantage and Place

Making the Local Matter

Kerr, Kirstin, Dyson, Alan, Kirstin Kerr, Alan Dyson, Carlo Raffo

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781447311195
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447311218
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Educational Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

In England, as in countries across the world, shrinking public funding, growing localism, and increased school autonomy make tackling the link between education, disadvantage and place more important than ever. Challenging current thinking, this important book is the first to focus on the role of area-based initiatives in this struggle. It brings together a wide range of evidence to review the effectiveness of past initiatives, identify promising recent developments, and outline innovative ways forward for the future. It shows how local policymakers and practitioners can actively respond to the complexities of place and is aimed at all those actively seeking to tackle disadvantage, including policymakers, practitioners, academics and students, across education and the social sciences.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

England¹ is, in global terms, an affluent country. Yet, like many other affluent countries, it is characterised by marked inequalities of outcome. Put simply, different individuals enjoy, among other things, different levels of income, educational achievement and health. It may be the case that some of these inequalities are due to individual differences that it is difficult to do much about. However, it is certainly the case that they are also strongly related to individuals’ social characteristics – to social class, ethnicity, gender and disability, among others (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2010). Through what appear to be complex but powerful processes, these characteristics translate into advantages and disadvantages for individuals in relation to achieving good outcomes. Often, those individuals and groups in the most unpromising circumstances are simply characterised as ‘disadvantaged’, though it is worth remembering that there are likely to be distinctive patterns of advantages and disadvantages in all people’s lives.

Historically, policymakers have felt that they can and should do something to tackle inequalities that arise in this way. Anti-poverty strategies, gender and ethnic equality policies, welfare policies, and universal access to high-quality public services are among the many ways in which policymakers have sought to eliminate the disadvantages experienced by different parts of the population. By and large, these policies have been universal in nature, or have been targeted at particular social groups wherever they may live. However, policymakers have also been aware that inequalities have a spatial dimension, that different places are unequal and that some places are characterised by multiple forms of disadvantage. As Tony Blair, the ‘New Labour’ prime minister from 1997 to 2007, observed:

When we came into office, we inherited a country where hundreds of neighbourhoods were scarred by unemployment, educational failure and crime. They had become progressively more cut off from the prosperity and opportunities that most of us take for granted. Communities were breaking down. Public services were failing. People had started to lose hope. (Social Exclusion Unit, 2001, p 5)

Such places are often simply characterised as ‘disadvantaged’ (or, indeed, ‘deprived’ if the emphasis is on limitations in economic and other resources), though, as with individuals, the reality is that advantages and disadvantages form distinctive patterns in each place. Nonetheless, policymakers have long felt that something must be done about those places where disadvantages are most concentrated, demanding a policy response that is different from, and additional to, whatever else might be done nationally. To a large extent, these differential responses have been achieved through a strong system of local government, able to distribute funding and configure resources to meet the distinctive needs of particular administrative areas. However, there has also been a sense that something extra is still needed in the form of even more nuanced and more customised responses to disadvantages, as they are experienced locally, in particular places.

This extra response has often taken the form of what have come to be known as ‘area-based initiatives’ (ABIs). ABIs have, over time, come in many shapes and sizes. Traditionally, they have tended to be government-led initiatives that have offered additional resources and flexibilities to professional and community leaders in disadvantaged places. In return for this, local leaders have been expected to tackle the presenting problems of the places where they work and to achieve improved outcomes, specified more or less precisely. Within these broad parameters, there have been all sorts of variations in design. Some ABIs have enjoyed considerable freedom to design a local response, while others have been required to implement measures determined by central government. Some have pursued a broad agenda and sought to tackle all the perceived problems of disadvantaged places simultaneously, while others have focused on specific issues – improving health outcomes, increasing employment opportunities or raising levels of educational attainment, perhaps. Some have defined their areas broadly, working across administrative boundaries and even encompassing whole city regions, while others have worked on a much smaller scale. Much more recently, and particularly so since 2010, we have found increasing instances where what we see as a new and distinctive style of ABIs have started to emerge. In contrast to ‘traditional’ government-led initiatives, these are being initiated and led by local stakeholders in response to locally defined concerns, using locally available resources.

This draws attention to two important characteristics of ABIs as a general policy vehicle, which are central to the arguments in this book: first, it indicates that ABIs are far from homogeneous; and, second, it indicates that they are not a static model of intervention. There is, of course, particular interest in what we term ‘traditional’ (ie government-led) ABIs. Not only have they been the most ambitious, best-resourced and best-evaluated of all attempts to tackle the problems of disadvantaged places in a coordinated way, but it is also clearly important to understand the potential role of such initiatives in national policy. In this book, however, our concerns are somewhat wider. We are interested not only in what central government might do in regard to disadvantaged places, but also in how initiatives might be developed locally and evolve beyond their traditional forms. Therefore, when we use the term ‘area-based initiative’ – and cognate terms such as ‘area approach’ – we are doing so to refer to all kinds of attempts to marshal coordinated approaches to the problems and possibilities of disadvantaged places in general. However, we also distinguish broadly between ‘traditional’ (ie government-led) and ‘new style’ (ie locally led) ABIs, and later on, we will identify distinctive approaches to – or overlapping ‘generations’ of – ABIs within these.

Reflecting for now on ABIs in general, over the years, whatever form they have taken, ABIs have had a mixed press from researchers, and have moved in and out of favour with policymakers. In England, there was a surge of interest in area approaches during the New Labour years between 1997 and 2010, when government-led ABIs of many kinds were introduced in an effort to ensure that no one would be ‘seriously disadvantaged by where they live’ (Social Exclusion Unit, 2001, p 5). Most of these were, however, relatively short-lived and have now disappeared. More significantly, the outcomes from them were, as we shall see, mixed at best. There appear to have been some limited positive outcomes from such initiatives, but there was little evidence that these led to a fundamental transformation of disadvantaged places, or that the outcomes of people living in those places began to match those of populations elsewhere. There was even less evidence that inequalities across the country as a whole were substantially reduced. Indeed, spatial distributions of disadvantage have remained stubbornly entrenched, yielding only marginally to policy interventions (Dorling et al, 2007; Dorling and Pritchard, 2010; Fahmy et al, 2011; Lupton et al, 2013a).

Not surprisingly, this has led some critics of ABIs to draw the blanket conclusion that they are, all-in-all, a failed experiment, with no real role to play in serious attempts to tackle disadvantage and inequality (Durose and Rees, 2012). Yet, this conclusion runs counter to two compelling arguments. The first is that there is a powerful rationale for adopting an area approach to problems that appear to arise in particular places. As Smith (1999, p 49) articulates it:

the key reason [for area approaches] is that some areas suffer disproportionately high levels of economic and social deprivation, including very high levels of worklessness, poverty, poor health, high crime and fear of crime, and need special attention. Although some issues can only be addressed through national level mainstream policies it is the case that some problems occur because of local area related factors and it is therefore appropriate to address them at the local level.

On the basis of this rationale, ABIs ought to work, and if they do not, the problem may be with the way they have hitherto been conceptualised and operationalised, rather than with any more fundamental limitation. That ABIs are, in our view, still evolving and far from static in their formulation suggests that more effective conceptualisations and operational arrangements can be achieved.

The second argument is that even though outcomes do not appear to have been transformed, ABIs of one kind and another do seem to make some difference locally. As researchers who are concerned to support local efforts to tackle disadvantage, we spend much of our time engaging with local ABIs of different sorts and gathering evidence about their impacts. While we see much that is far from perfect, we also see high levels of collaboration between professionals and services, and well-thought-out strategies for tackling disadvantage. Above all, we meet children, families and other residents who give powerful accounts of how their experiences and opportunities have been changed by the work going on around them.

Of course, ‘ought’ and ‘seem’ offer poor arguments in the face of robust evaluative evidence – and it is in order to resolve the contradiction between these two views of ABIs that this book has been written. We start from a hunch that many of the inadequacies of past ABIs are actually inadequacies of conceptualisation. Policymakers, we suspect, have sought to improve outcomes in the most disadvantaged places without fully understanding either the complex nature of disadvantage or, more particularly, the complex nature of the processes operating within and through places that create and sustain disadvantage. We suspect, therefore, that although their approaches may have varied, most ABIs in the past have been designed in ways that would make widespread transformational outcomes unlikely – and that policymakers and critics alike have expected too much from them.

However, our experience also leads us to suspect that there are other ways of ‘doing’ ABIs that would mark a fundamental shift from previous traditional approaches. The shift we have in mind is both conceptual, in terms of how places, and the processes that create and sustain disadvantage in places, are understood, and practical, in terms of how ABIs develop their strategies and governance and accountability arrangements. Indeed, as noted earlier, new ways of ‘doing’ ABIs, where initiatives are initiated, led and developed over time by local stakeholders, are already beginning to emerge on the ground. This suggests that more effective ways of conceptualising and operationalising area-based approaches are not only possible, but actively being sought. What these new-style ABIs might achieve is yet to be seen, but we believe that it is essential that they are seen as contributors to wider strategies for tackling disadvantage in future. As the country passes through hard economic – and, some would say, political – times, a new style of ABI may well have an important role to play in helping those working at a local level to make a real difference to what happens in their areas.

This book, therefore, tries to explore some of the more fundamental conceptual issues around ABIs. We consider how ‘place’ can be understood in relation to ‘disadvantage’, examine the conceptual flaws in previous ABIs and seek to develop a rationale for a new approach to area-based intervention. In doing so, we use our position as university-based education researchers to draw on the research literature on previous ABIs, and on the wider scholarly literature around disadvantage and place. We believe this will offer a corrective to two common tendencies, for ABIs to be developed, firstly, on the basis of inadequate conceptualisations of disadvantage and place and, secondly, without learning from previous experiences. In addition, we spend much of our time working closely alongside policymakers and practitioners as they struggle with the complex problems of tackling disadvantage ‘on the ground’. In this role, for instance, we have worked to support the development of a series of extended school initiatives, and to evaluate these in ways that capture their complex, long-term goals. This enables us to bring to bear an understanding of the practical challenges posed by ‘wicked problems’ of place-based disadvantage.

In drawing together these conceptual and empirical insights, our view is that practical strategies for tackling disadvantage are limited without adequate conceptualisations, but, equally, that powerful conceptualisations are limited if they are not then operationalised in the field. We therefore use our experiences as ‘real world’ researchers to consider some of the practical implications of rethinking ABIs. Our aim in doing so is not to produce yet another ‘how to do it’ guide to developing and managing an ABI. This is not least because we believe that if ABIs are to make a valuable contribution in future, they must be locally owned and developed in response to local issues. However, we do see ABIs as a practical and practicable approach to tackling disadvantage. We think that, formulated appropriately, they can make a difference, and we hope that policymakers and practitioners will use our thinking to inform their own work.

Education-focused area-based initiatives

We have learned much from examining a wide range of ABIs, and hope that our work will have implications beyond our own field. However, our particular interest as educationalists is on those ABIs that have had a distinct focus on education in general, and the education of children and young people in particular. Not surprisingly, the factors that lead to disadvantages in relation to other outcomes also tend to be implicated in educational inequalities. Disability, gender, ethnicity, the effectiveness of family support, access to high-quality schools and teachers, and health and well-being, among others, also help determine who does well and who does badly. However, the economic background of learners, in particular, has significant implications for their educational outcomes, with those from poorer backgrounds tending to do significantly worse than their more favoured peers (see, eg, Cassen and Kingdon, 2007; Schools Analysis and Research Division Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2009; Perry and Francis, 2010). As we shall see elsewhere in this book, it is not so much that relative poverty ‘causes’ poor educational outcomes in some linear way, as that it is associated with a range of disadvantaging factors in the home, school and neighbourhood and seems likely to exacerbate the effects of other disadvantaging factors where they are present. The mechanisms linking economic background to disadvantaging factors and so to outcomes are complex, therefore, but the linkages are strong.

It follows that places where economically poor families are concentrated – and the schools that serve such places – are likely to contain a relatively high proportion of learners who face educational disadvantages and who achieve at low levels. Not surprisingly, therefore, successive governments have developed initiatives targeted at such places that seek to tackle this problem. There is a relatively lengthy history of such initiatives in England, stretching back at least as far as the Educational Priority Areas prefigured by the Plowden Report (Central Advisory Council for Education [England], 1967) in the 1960s, and even to earlier initiatives such as Henry Morris’s efforts to support the rural communities of Cambridgeshire through the establishment of village colleges (Morris, 1925). More recently, New Labour governments introduced a rapid succession of ABIs in education, from Education Action Zones (DfEE, 1999a), to Excellence in Cities (NFER, 2007) and City Challenge (DfES, 2007). Many of these initiatives were focused primarily on improving the school system, and were unequivocally area-based. However, there were others – Sure Start being one, and Extended Schools and Services another – where the education focus was part of a wider agenda, or where the focus on area was variable. Likewise, there were others again – New Deal for Communities being a case in point – where the primary focus was on regeneration but where education was seen as a contributory strand (Batty, 2013).

The English context – not least because of the intensive use of ABIs during the New Labour years – is therefore of particular interest when exploring what can be learnt from previous area approaches, and how they might develop in future. But it is also important to note that, in some form or another, ABIs form part of the policy landscape in many countries. There are, for instance, Zones d’Éducation Prioritaire in France, the Harlem Children’s Zone and Promise Neighborhoods in the US, Territórios de Intervenção Prioritária in Portugal, the One Square Kilometre of Education in Berlin, and Educational Priority Zones in Cyprus (for a review of some of these, see Edwards and Downes, 2013). These examples occur in countries with demographics, histories and education systems that are very different from those in England, and the implication would seem to be that ABIs address a concern that is common to many education systems, and may well reflect the inequalities found in many relatively affluent societies and the strategies available to policymakers to tackle these.

Nonetheless, the use of education-focused ABIs does present policymakers with something of a chicken-and-egg dilemma: if poverty and its associated disadvantages are seen as a primary cause of poor educational outcomes, then addressing these underlying issues is paramount. However, education is also widely seen as a route out of disadvantage, with improved educational outcomes being seen as central to enabling better life chances. As one secretary of state for education declared:

That is why I see my department as the department for life chances. And that is why I see it as my job to boost social mobility.… Our task is to make sure that for everyone involved in learning excellence and equity become and remain reality. (Kelly, 2005)

Policymakers, therefore, have to decide how to balance these concerns – to improve educational outcomes as a means of tackling disadvantage, or to tackle disadvantage as a means of improving educational outcomes.

In England, as in many other countries over recent decades, there has been a strong emphasis on the former strategy, in the expectation that raising standards of performance across the school system as a whole must necessarily benefit the most disadvantaged students. In this context, education-focused ABIs become either redundant or narrowly focused on driving up attainment in the most poorly performing places, as, for example, in the case of City Challenge. However, there has also been a sense that neither raising standards nationally nor focusing on standards in disadvantaged areas will be enough to reduce educational inequalities unless the underlying social and economic causes of disadvantage are also addressed. As an influential report by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) (the education inspectorate in England) argued:

Schools, and other educational institutions, can do more to improve their own effectiveness, to plan to en...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Notes on authors
• Acknowledgements
• One: Introduction
• Two: Why place matters in education
• Three: Local education systems as products of place: a case study
• Four: Learning from the past
• Five: Learning from the present
• Six: A rationale for a new generation of area-based initiatives
• Seven: Developing understandings of place as a basis for Intervention
• Eight: Evaluation and monitoring
• Nine: Governance and accountability
• Ten: Children and places in hard times: some concluding thoughts
• References