Session Information
05 SES 01 A, School-Based Collaborative Approaches to Overcoming Disadvantage and Inequality in England, Scotland and Wales
Symposium
Contribution
This paper focuses on how schools and other agencies in a single city authority in England have used collaboration to integrate access to support for vulnerable families and those with special educational needs. The research focuses on an initiative which began in 2010 and has developed against a backdrop of extensive budget cuts and policy changes in a city that contains areas with some of the highest levels of social disadvantage in the UK. The research was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the collaborative arrangements that have been established and their impact on the children and young people they were developed to support. It used a mixed methods approach, combining in-depth interviews and focus groups with families, school staff, family support workers and other professionals with social network analysis and quantitative analysis of programme data. The outcomes of the research suggest that, although some progress has been made, some schools and other agencies have been slow to adapt to the diminution of local authority control and the appearance of new locality-wide partnerships that represent the ‘blurring’ of the middle tier (Hatcher, 2014). They also reflect previous research that has found that it takes time to build the relationships necessary to engage all the necessary partners in multi-agency collaboration (Cheminais, 2009) and suggest that many of the schools involved in the research have found it easier to build capacity through collaboration to support school improvement than to support vulnerable children and young people or tackle issues relating to deprivation or inequality.
References
Cheminais, R. (2009) Effective Multi-Agency Partnerships: Putting Every Child Matters into Practice. London: Sage. Hatcher, R. (2014) Local authorities and the school system: The new authority-wide partnership, Educational Management Administration and Leadership, 42, 3: 355-371.
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