Improving education in rural areas is an emerging priority for European countries (OECD 2021; UNESCO 2001). The OECD report on rural regions confirms that: “Rural schools are facing, or will soon face, declining student numbers, bringing consequently smaller schools and class sizes. While small size can bring opportunities, such as a greater teacher focus for each student, many of these schools are isolated from the wider educational community and are operating under capacity. Smaller schools may also offer a more limited educational curriculum.” (OECD, 2021, p. 5).   

Nevertheless research (Corbett & Tinkham, 2014; Corbett & White, 2014) points out as small rural schools often have a strong connection with their local communities and seem better able to use the communities’ potential to enrich their students’ educational experiences. The close connection to the natural and socio-cultural environment positions Small and Rural Schools as “Schools of Proximity” (Chipa, Mangione et al, 2023) that can provide rich contextual learning experiences by strengthening the alliances with the school stakeholders. 

The proximity school model emphasises a close relationship between the school and its surrounding territory. In such a pedagogical vision, the territory becomes an educational partner and together they are able to generating an expanded educational ecosystem". the local context plays a vital role: Collaborations with local administration, parents’ associations, and cultural institutions allow for restructuring of schooling time and space and curriculum, fostering both curricular growth for students and cultural enrichment for the entire community.  

In 2020, following the phenomenological research approach within the Italian National Network of Small Schools (Mangione, Cannella 2021), INDIRE and European Schoolnet proposed explorative research involving 11 countries and 19 small schools aimed at understanding European practices related to specific transformative dimensions of the ‘grammar’ of the school towards a new social contract for education (UNESCO, 2022).   One of the investigated dimensions is the System Innovation: the capacity of the school to build strong and structured alliances with the families, the Municipalities, the Third Sector Associations and network of schools throughout the Country and abroad.

This study adopts an exploratory research methodology aimed at constructing a codebook that captures the strategic choices adopted by small schools on 4 dimensions: System Innovation; Leadership and management; Teaching Strategies; ICT as inclusive Tool. The contribution focuses on the System Innovation dimension. The research seeks to understand how these schools engage in collaborative networks, form alliances, the strength of ties among schools and communities and the nature of participation to national or international networks. A three-steps content analysis process has been used so to make valid and replicable inferences about the meaning of texts, images or other signifiers that are grouped into categories. As for System Innovation, the first step involved identifying three overarching themes based on the units of analysis that guided the qualitative investigation (schools’ monographies and semi-structured video interviews with teachers and school managers): Parental Role; School Collaboration; Community Collaboration. The units of analysis were predefined to ensure a structured and systematic examination of the data, facilitating the categorization of emerging pattern. Step 2 consisted in grouping portion of texts into categories based on a top-down approach, re-grouping into more general themes to identify the subcodes (Schilling, 2006). This step is the result of a two-phase negotiation process among researchers. In the first phase, each researcher has read the texts independently and identified emerging conceptual categories (“codes”). Any disagreements and differences in interpretations were resolved through a process of discussion/negotiation. During the second phase, the codes identified were organized and clustered into more comprehensive themes through a process of discussion/negotiation. Finally step 3 consisted into the creation of the codebook, a tool enabling a replicable coding of the material into content categories, on which the appropriate analyses can then be carried out. The existence of the codebook “is a necessary requirement for a content analysis based on human coding to be reliable.” (Lucidi et al., 2008, p. 97).

The codebook allowed the identification of practices and challenges for European small schools. The opportunities depend on local context and some recommendations are addressed to different stakeholders: policymakers, school leaders, teachers and local administration. Among the opportunities arouse emerged the importance of partnership, networking and collaborative practice for supporting school improvement in remote school areas.  In particular, the main findings are: - Small and rural schools no longer operate in isolation. They actively engage with their local communities, forming partnerships with parents, businesses, cultural institutions, and community organisations.  - Community involvement enriches learning experiences. Parents and Associations contribute expertise, local businesses offer internships, and cultural institutions provide resources for STEAM education and students democratic participation - Schools become centres for dialogue, collaboration, and shared resources. Community members participate in events, workshops, and discussions.  - Participating into networks contributes to teachers’ professional development, helping them to learn from their peers how to implement in their contexts innovative teaching practices and to integrate new technologies into the classrooms so to make learning more engaging and effective - Community support plays a vital and effective role to create rich learning environments able at catering diverse learning needs. The use of different spaces from the traditional classrooms, the possibility of integrating external experts into the teaching staff and engaging students in educational experiences outside the school based on experiential learning represents a support for inclusion. The research results have also played as useful recommendations for the implementation of a Special Interest Group (SIG) on "Small and Rural schools” within European Schoolnet.

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