Introduction In most countries it is the government that decides and controls the curriculum, which is predominantly subject dominated.  Evidence from England  (Cambridge Primary Review, 2009) and Scotland (Priestley, 2012) suggests that recent government control of curriculum, whether by input or output regulation, has seen a decline in curriculum capacity amongst teachers.  Teachers are becoming conditioned to ‘delivering’ curriculum in a model of school improvement that relies on neo-liberal mechanisms such as competition to 'drive up' standards as measured by test scores (Au, 2008).  An alternative apporach to school improvement is to regard communities as assets which can help to keep students engaged, with better prospects of greater social capital, more role models and more complex identities.  This is a protective factor in NOT slipping into the ‘precariat’ (Standing, 2011), taking advantage of progression opportunities in education training and employment (see Hodgson & Spours) and avoiding the worst effects of inequality (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010)..

Engagement or lack of engagement is a serious issue in many educational systems.  Anderson-Butcher et al. (p.161) argue that ‘This walled-in improvement planning reflects traditional thinking about schools as stand-alone institutions focused exclusively on young people’s learning and academic achievement, and also reinforces the idea that educators are the school improvement experts’.  They argue that resources, opportunities and assets are ‘walled out’, creating an unnecessary gulf between in-school learning and out-of-school learning.  They describe an Ohio model of school improvement as focusing on 3 areas:

1. Gaining influence over students out of school time;
2. Drawing upon family and community resources for education (an asset based approach);
3. Developing partnerships between families, schools and communities to overcome barriers to learning.

One model of drawing on communities for curriculum development is enquiry ir project based learning (Berger, 2003). However most schools find it extremely difficult to overcome the 'wall' that separates the school and community. For example,  Pozuelos et al. (2010) concluded from a study of inquiry based learning in Spain, that:

“There is a great deal of structuring around subjects and administrative

restraints on the timetable, and at times this prevents doing things which go

against the traditional way of doing things ... Inquiry based

learning runs up against the whole fixed and immoveable school machinery”. 

This traditional way of doing things has been described as the dominant activity (Sannino).

Brokerage (Kubiak, 2009) is therefore an important concept in the process of developing school community curriculum partnerships.  Brokerage is understood from the business context of putting two parties in touch for the purpose of achieving a mutually beneficial transaction.  From personal experience we are aware of some of the broker roles between schools and local communities, for example:

• Provides the link between the outside parties and school leadership team;
• Takes the lead on finding, making or booking resources inside the school;
• Accessing significant resources, such as IT, collections, sites and events outside the school

However because of our interest in community focused enquiry and project based curriculum we have been concerned to delve deeper into how this role is performed and what significance it has, in order that its significance is articulated and valued. So we had two questions:

Questions: 1. What brokerage roles are undertaken in school-community curriculum partnerships and how should we understand them?

2. What are some of the implications of brokerage roles?

Anderson-Butcher, D., Lawson, H., Bean, J., Flaspohler, Boone, B. & Kwiatkowski, A. (2008) Community Collaboration to Improve Schools: Introducing a New Model from Ohio, Children & Schools, Vol. 30 (3), pp. 161-172. Au, W. (2008). Devising inequality: A Bernsteinian analysis of high-stakes testing and social reproduction in education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 29(6), pp. 639-651. Berger, R. (2003) Building a Culture of Craftmanship with Students, Portsmouth: New Hampshire, Heinemann. Cambridge Primary Review (2009), Introducing the Cambridge Primary Review, Cambridge: Cambridge University. Hodgson, A. & Spours, K. (2013) Tackling the crisis facing young people: building ‘high opportunity progression eco-systems’, Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 39 (2), pp. 211-228. Kubiak, C. (2009) Working the Interface: Brokerage and Learning Networks, Educational Management, Leadership and Adminstration, Vol. 37 (2), pp. 239-256. Pozuelos, F., Travé González, G. & Cañal de León, P. (2010) 'Inquiry-based teaching: teachers' conceptions, impediments and support', Teaching Education, Vol. 21 (2), pp. 131 — 142. Priestley, M., Edwards, R. and Priestley, A. (2012) Teacher Agency in Curriculum Making: Agents for Change and Spaces for manoeuvre Curriculum Inquiry, Vol 42 (2), pp. 191-213. Sannino, A., (2008) Sustaining a non-dominant activity in school, Journal of Educational Change, Vol. 9, pp. 329-338. Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class London: Bloomsbury Academic. Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K. (2010) The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, London: Penguin.