Community schools are schools that open up to the world and where collaboration between different partners, linked to the lives of children and youngsters and their families, is a central point. In Flanders and Brussels, this development is called ‘broad school’ (brede school), a term adopted from the Netherlands. The development of community schools is stimulated by the (Flemish) government in different phases. A first literature study (Pirard et all, 2004) on the possibilities of the concept ‘community schools’ for Flanders was carried out in 2004. The authors concluded that community schools are a typical ‘bottom-up’ process, that cannot be enforced by regulations. But, the researchers claimed that the government can facilitate the development by eliminating judicial obstacles, making it easier to combine different financial sources etc. From 2006 until 2009 the Flemish minister of Education, granted subsidies for 17 pilot projects. These projects where supported by our centre that did the follow up of the development of these community schools, and made an evaluation of the impact of these projects. At the same time, we developed a framework for Flanders and Brussels. The framework on ‘brede school’ (in this text we translate it as community school) is mainly based on experiences in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (Joos, Ernalsteen, et all., 2006; Joos & Ernalsteen, 2010): “A community school aims at ameliorating the broad development of all children and youngsters by supporting and/or creating a broad learning and living environment in which children and youngsters can gain a wide range of learning and living experiences. In order to achieve this goal a broad network is established between organizations and authorities from the various sectors that jointly shape and support the learning/living of children and youngsters. “

At the end of the three year period of project funding, it was expected that the projects implemented their experiences in their regular course of work. In the meantime, in Brussels, in September 2012, 22 new community schools are set up and funded for one year. A new question arises: what is the impact of short term funding for projects. This is why we  set up in 2012 a research to examine the long-term impact of the 17 pilot projects. The extra financing (personnel and other expenditures) stopped after those three year. This school-year (2012-2013) is the third year after the pilot period.

In this research we wanted to examine how projects:

-       continued their work after the pilot period;

-       implemented their experiences/actions in a structural way;

-       dealt with the financial aspect;

-       developed the last three years: what are the objectives, what are the partners of the network, what are actions? 

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