In the face of world-changing threats, including climate change, biodiversity loss and rising global inequality, young people in secondary schools continue to receive a formal curriculum dominated by instruction in discrete academic subjects culminating in high stakes examinations. In this way, students may learn about these issues but cannot seek to address them as agents in their own right. Against the rigid confines of this approach, there is a parallel tradition of schools trying to engage young people in community-based action projects (Öhman & Östman 2019). Empirical studies into the effects of student-led such programmes suggest that they can help to develop young people’s sense of agency, support mental health and develop a wide range of attributes including effective team working, communication skills and resilience (Trott 2021; Bramwell-Lalor et al 2020; Vare 2021). Despite these evident benefits, incorporating such projects into the regular timetable of schools remains extremely difficult. Where examples exist, such as the Extended Project Qualification available to ‘A’ Level (ISCED Level 3) students in England and Wales, they are not usually part of the compulsory education offered in mainstream schools.  

This paper builds on earlier work that investigated the impacts of student-led, community-based projects that were conducted under a European Union-funded programme (Vare 2021). It reports on a study conducted with teachers and students from five secondary schools, one each in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Spain and Turkey. Rather than focus on the impact of these projects on students, this research looks more deeply into how such projects were actually accommodated within the timetables of the participating schools and the extent to which schools were able to integrate the approach beyond the time-limited, externally-funded programme.  

The research objectives therefore were threefold:  

1. To identify ways in which student-led projects could be integrated into already full secondary school timetables  

2. To gain a critical understanding of how this ‘fitting in’ of projects served the purposes of the school and staff members involved  

3. To explore any drawbacks associated with the various strategies adopted by different schools. 

This research started with short online focus group discussions that took place four times over the two-year period of the EU-funded project that aimed to facilitate student-led, community-based projects. Regular online project meetings and associated documentation also provided supporting evidence throughout the duration of the project. Further data were gathered during informal interactions with the teachers and senior leaders during a student-focused workshop at the end of the project. Analysis of these data led to a final round of one-to-one, online, semi-structured interviews with teachers and senior leaders from five participating schools, each in a different European country. In this way we were able to gain rich data from our interviewees concerning their perceptions and experiences (Wellington 2015). This led us to construct a series of micro case studies based on thematic analysis of the interviews and an analysis of the key features of each school's approach. The micro case studies led us to develop a typology of approaches to – and perceived benefits of – student-led, community-based projects.

Depending on the characteristics of a particular school (e.g. private vs publicly funded) and administrative arrangements (e.g. degree of municipal control), we found that schools chose to emphasise different benefits of the student-led project approach according to their own situation. In this way, each school reveals the relative importance of its different critical communities, be they paying parents, education authorities and (in all cases) the learners themselves. Schools also reveal their values in the relative emphasis given to project work, positioning this variously as a route to higher academic achievement, vocational skills and/or engagement in wider community and environmental concerns. While paying attention to their critical communities, in each case an element of necessary subversion, a slight ‘bending of rules’, is required in order to facilitate these projects within the confines of rigid timetabling and legal structures. This in turn can be seen as teachers successfully modelling to their students a constellation of competences (e.g. creativity, decisiveness, action) that align well with sustainability-related learning outcomes (UNESCO 2017; Vare et al 2019). There is, however, a balance to be struck between making such subversive behaviour explicit and risking the disapprobation of their critical communities. Given the nature of formal education in neoliberal societies, teachers and school leaders continue to require a degree of courageous professionalism (Rate 2010; Knight 2020) in order to provide potentially transformative educational experiences for their students.

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