Leading and Managing Extended Schools

Ensuring Every Child Matters

David Middlewood, Richard Parker

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412948302, 9781412948296
• eBook ISBN: 9781446243725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

?This is a stimulating and well-researched book that will interest anyone who cares about how our schools should evolve? - Matters Arising

?What are schools for? What happens when school walls come tumbling down, and school and community become inextricably linked, offering a range of extended provision to young people and opportunities for lifelong learning to adults? How would you lead such a school? David Middlewood and Richard Parker draw upon their personal and researched experience, to explore school leadership within a community which has an extended school at its heart. This is an engaging and purposeful book for researchers and practitioners alike? - Professor Ann Briggs, Newcastle University, Chair of BELMAS

This book shows leaders of all types of schools how to become effective in extended schooling and fulfil ?Every Child Matters? (ECM) requirements, by building on and adapting their current practices. The authors explain the context of Extended Schools, in the UK and elsewhere, and outline the features of effectiveness in schools and their leaders.

The authors provide practical advice using case studies from a range of settings which show what can be achieved across a wide variety of contexts. ?Points to consider? give advice to readers at all levels, covering staffing and resourcing, as well as the creation and development of successful partnerships in the community.

This book is an essential resource for leaders beginning in extended schools, and leaders already working in extended schools across nursery, primary and secondary settings. It is also relevant to governors, inspectors and advisers and leaders studying masters and doctorate courses in Leadership and Education Policy.

Part 1

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The Concept and Context of Extended Schools

Introduction

For those with the view that there is nothing new in education or indeed in politics, the notion of schools being integral to their communities seems ironic. State schools in England and Wales, for example, were specifically designed in the nineteenth century to meet the basic needs of local communities, and only the wealthy or aspiring sent their sons away to private schools for a ‘proper’ (i.e. academic) education. Apart from some Boards of Governors, the actual people of the communities were not involved in school, except for ensuring their children attended school and were later supported in terms of homework, school functions and fund-raising. In researching for this book, and talking with men and women who had been secondary school pupils in the 1950s, a common image is of them looking over the fences in school holidays at school playgrounds and playing fields which lay deserted, while they played games or kicked footballs in the streets. ‘They were sacrosanct’ said one man, ‘and it never occurred to us to question the situation of waste.’

When the possibilities of extended and full-service provision schools are considered, and the ideas of ‘open all hours’, staggered hours of learning and part-time attendance changing the very nature of a school are reflected upon, there can be a realization that the extended school really has the potential to represent the biggest change in education for more than a century, as some of its exponents claim. In this first section, Chapter 1 examines the need for this change and how it has gathered impetus. Chapter 2 discusses some of the huge implications these changes have for those working in schools and living and working in their communities. Chapter 3 addresses the impact these same changes have upon our notions of what leadership in education involves, both conceptually and practically.

1

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What are extended schools and why are they needed?

This chapter considers the following questions:

• What is meant by extended schools and how did they develop?
• What other educational developments link with it?
• What are the indicators of effective extended schools?

While extravagant claims have been made for various educational reforms as being the most important, none can have been as far-reaching as that for the development of extended schools, because its ultimate aim must be not to transform schools, or even education, but to transform communities. As West-Burnham (2006, p. 103) suggests:

Pivotal to the long-term development of extended schools is the notion of community-moving from schools in a community through community schools to communities which include schools as part of their educational provision. There is a very important symbolic and semantic point … when we will stop talking about extending schools and start talking about developing the community.

In one sense, this concept is revolutionary; in another, it is entirely logical, since what is the purpose of education if it is not to change, develop and improve the world in which we live? It is only revolutionary in terms of how we have come to perceive schools, as institutions separate from communities, with a specific purpose of preparing children and young people for adult life – especially through the gaining of qualifications.

From separation to community awareness

In the UK, despite the pioneering efforts of Henry Morris in the 1920s with the Cambridgeshire Village College, and the building of Community Colleges in the 1960s, the widespread model was of schools separated from their local environment, except for the provision of formal Adult Education Classes. Tim Brighouse, in a speech in the 1970s, described the typical purpose-built community college as a castle, neatly situated outside the population centres and ‘surrounded by a lovely green moat’. Clearly, the drawbridge could be drawn up if the community needed to be kept out!

It is interesting to note that earlier efforts in both the USA and the UK were more successful in rural contexts – Barnard’s and Dewey’s ideas of the school as an embodiment of a democratic community in the USA were perhaps more easily realized there than in the growing turbulence of modern urban life.

In this urban context, the Children’s Aid Society (founded in 1853) was involved in the USA’s first compulsory education laws, and was eventually responsible for the creation of New York’s first vocational schools and first free kindergartens. Until the 1980s however, the Society remained focused on health services and the integration of these with schools did not emerge until the programme for community schools got under way in New York. In both the USA and the UK, schools were for teaching and not much else.

This perception of schools as separate educational providers was gradually accompanied in several developed countries by a narrowness of focus as to the purpose of schooling, with a massive emphasis on testing and examination results, shown most powerfully perhaps in England and Wales. This performance culture (for an overview, see Gleeson and Husbands, 2001) was accentuated by the marketization of education and competition between schools. While parental involvement in their children’s education was increasingly acknowledged as important, it was usually seen in terms of parental support for schools, rather than in terms of any kind of partnership for learning.

By the late 1990s however, Fullan (1998, p. 2), using an image similar to Brig-house’s, could describe the fences of the school in several countries as ‘tumbling down metaphorically speaking … as government policy, parent and community demands, corporate interests and ubiquitous technology have all scaled the walls of the school’.

Fullan was describing developments in school reform in countries such as Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. In the last two countries in particular, there were a number of factors which made policy-makers, educationalists, public-service leaders and managers come to realize the dangers and impracticalities of schools operating in comparative isolation. These factors include:

1. A clear recognition that education alone could not be some kind of panacea for all of society’s problems. In an increasingly globalized and competitive economy, the drive for a well-educated workforce as the key to economic success remained – and still remains – a central purpose, in developing countries as much as if not more than in developed ones. However, deficiencies in educational systems, including those of the United States and the United Kingdom, for a significant cohort of the future adult population and workforce, prompted Mortimore (1997) and Lewin and Kelley (1997) to suggest that the success of education in being effective in changing society was dependent on the complementary inputs from a variety of other areas.
   The fact of the matter is that education is just one factor – albeit an important one – in an overall mélange of conditions that determines productivity and economic competitiveness as well as the levels of crime, public assistance, political participation, health and so on. Education has the potential for powerful impacts in each of these areas if the proper supportive conditions and inputs are present. (Lewin and Kelley, 1997, p. 250)
2. An accumulation of research which showed that a huge variety of factors influenced the way in which humans learned effectively. Only some of these factors were possible for schools to utilize. An awareness of how the brain works, different styles of learning and of teaching, multiple intelligences, emotional intelligence, learning personalities and technological developments are all examples of ‘new’ knowledge which effective schools, looking beyond test results and wanting to see learning as central (Middlewood et al., 2005), have been able to use to a greater or lesser extent to improve learning and attitudes towards education.
   However, diet (and health generally), inadequate parenting, endemic circumstances of poverty, unemployment, social attitudes such as racism, ‘gang culture’ in crime and drug contexts are all examples of factors which hugely influence learning but on which schools have only limited influence. This is partly because of the simple fact that, however good a school is, a person up to the age of 16 years spends only a small percentage of his or her life at that school.
3. The undeniable links between the significant proportion of the school population emerging from the system as failures and their later (sometimes simultaneous) susceptibility to an involvement in lives which include unemployment, poverty, poor health (even lower life expectancy) and crime. The emergence of an ‘under class’ of a disaffected and detached section of society seemed to exemplify the gaps between the so-called ‘haves and have-nots’ in industrialized wealthy nations. Access to the professions, for example, was automatically denied for those disadvantaged because of their failure to gain relevant qualifications.
4. The pressure on public-service systems, including education, caused by increasingly pluralist, multi-ethnic societies, as immigration to Western nations on a large scale increased significantly.
5. An awareness in those nations that legislation alone concerning equal opportunities for people regardless of gender, race, disability, religion, sexual orientation and age – however well intentioned – was proving inadequate in an attempt to develop harmonious societies.
6. The economic realization that the enormous financial resources given to supporting those at a disadvantage were failing to repay society through helping them to overcome their deprivations. In changing economic circumstances, especially of an ageing population, the need to move the focus to preventative and away from remedial measures became imperative.
7. Lastly, but by no means least, a number of extremely high-profile cases (notably in England, the Victoria Climbié Inquiry) focused public attention. While shocking the public into the acknowledgement that such things actually occurred, they equally significantly pointed out the explicit failures of the public services to prevent or alleviate them. In particular, the failures in communication and cooperation between social services, law and order, education and health authorities were stark in their weak accountability and poor integration (Gelsthorpe, 2006). As the Judge at the Climbié Inquiry noted:
   We said that, after the Maria Caldwell case, it must never happen again. It clearly has. We cannot afford to let it occur ever again, without being aware that everything in our power was done to prevent it.

From community to integration

For all its value, community education as known was essentially of a reactive nature. Communities and services waited to be called for by the schools and colleges to provide what they had to offer. Education still appeared to be incapable of proactivity in its relationships with its communities.

In the United States, a series of initiatives in the early 1990s – of family resource centres, full-service schools, youth service centres, Bridges to Success, etc. – were attempting to offer ‘school-based health, social service and academic enrichment programs’ (Dryfoos et al., 2005), and Community Schools with strongly integrated services began in 1994 in New York City. Dryfoos et al. (2005) identified the five elements of that community education provision as:

• early intervention
• parental involvement
• after-school enrichment
• individual attention
• social capital.

In 2001, the US Act, ‘No Child Left Behind’ (NCLB), attempted to enshrine rights and access to fundamental provision for all children in legislation. (But see Chapter 10 for important differences between NCLB and ECM).

In Scotland, New Community Schools began in 1998 with similar aims and the final evaluation report (Sammons et al., 2003) stressed the effectiveness of their multi-agency approaches amongst other benefits, as well as identifying many issues as yet unresolved.

In England and Wales, the Government’s Green Paper of 2003 paved the way for the two seminal documents, Every Child Matters (2004) and the Children Act (2004).

Every Child Matters (ECM)

The five envisaged outcomes for every child underpin everything that the provision of services for children should strive to achieve and would be assessed by:

• being healthy (physically, mentally, emotionally, sexually)
• being safe (from bullying and discrimination, from neglect, violence, etc.)
• enjoying and achieving (being ‘stretched’ at primary and secondary schools, supported by families)
• making positive contributions (developing enterprise, decision-making, supporting the community and the environment)
• having economic well-being (having continuing post-school education/training, decent homes, access to transport, reasonable income).

It is easy to relate these outcomes to the point made above about how far conventional schools, even effective ones, can impact on some and not on others. It is also clear that the fact that every child matters means of course that every person matters, as it is children who will be the future transformers of society.

One further important point is worth stressing here. Obvious though it may seem, the word ‘Every’ in ECM does include every child, regardless of background, socio-economic con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on the authors
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Glossary
• PART 1: THE CONCEPT AND CONTEXT OF EXTENDED SCHOOLS
• PART 2: WORKING WITH THE PEOPLE
• PART 3: RESOURCES AND CONCLUSIONS
• References
• Index