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School leaders, community cohesion and the Big Society

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posted on 2016-06-13, 11:00 authored by Don Rowe, Nicola Horsley, Tony Thorpe, Tony Breslin
This report summarises research conducted on community cohesion in English schools in 2010. The research uses an opportunity sample of 27 primary and secondary schools in three local authorities to generate insights on how the duty to promote community cohesion has been interpreted, enacted and accounted for since its beginning in 2007. The significance of this report is not in the sample size or spectrum but in the themes that emerged from semi-structured interviews. A related document, Teaching, Learning and Community Cohesion: a study of primary and secondary schools’ responses to a new statutory duty, which provides guidance for teachers and school leaders, is also published by CfBT (Rowe et al, 2011). The background to the duty to promote community cohesion, including its inception as a policy and its roots in other measures, is discussed in an opening section. The findings from group and individual interviews with teachers and school senior leaders are analysed under themed headings. Finally, some pointers for future policy development, including links with the ‘Big Society’ agenda, are discussed. The main messages of this report are that: • nearly all teachers and schools welcome community cohesion and agree personally and professionally with its underpinning values, although they interpret the duty very differently, according to their school context and present practice • schools have had varied success in implementing the duty, paying more attention to action than to underlying social policy coherence, but in most cases the duty and the fact that it was to be inspected has resulted in schools developing and improving their provision • some teachers are not clear about current guidance and inspection criteria, while a small number of teachers have objections to the legal and/or inspectable status of the duty • strong resonances and opportunities exist for the development of schools’ achievements in the light of the recent Education White Paper (Department for Education, 2010), a growing focus on localism (CLG, 2010) and the emergent policy focus on the Big Society

Funding

Funding for this study was received from CfBT Education Trust.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Citation

ROWE, D. ... et al, 2011. School leaders, community cohesion and the Big Society. Perspective Report. CfBT Education Trust.

Publisher

© CfBT Education Trust

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2011

Notes

This is a report.

ISBN

9781907496431

Language

  • en