Community Police- “the flying squad”


Stenton Primary School is a true community school, so it was no surprise yesterday when I popped in that they were working with PC Ross (an ex-pupil of mine) and PC Hughes.

The two officers are working with our schools in the Dunbar area and developing very positive relationships with all young people.

Here they are helping two pupils to put up a bird box. Thanks.

Education – a gift to give.

As educators we like to give the impression that we know all there is to know about sacrifice for our vocation. We quite naturally occupy the higher moral territory whenever the opportunity arises, and we sleep well in our beds knowing that the job we do is worthwhile.

So it’s very difficult when a fellow educator from another part of the world comes along and knocks that comfortable mindset, or to use a good Scottish expression “ca’s the legs frae ye” (sweep your legs from underneath you).

Yet that’s just what I experienced on Monday when I met Thein Naing. Thein is a remarkable man, from a remarkable place, full of remarkable people. He works in the Mae Sot area of Thailand just on the border with Burma. The area accommodates over 150,000 Burmese refugees and economic migrants.

The Mae Sot area has around 70 migrant schools which have started spontaneously to meet the needs of 30,000 children who have crossed the border with their parents from Burma. Of this number only 7,000 currently attend these schools, which receive no support from the Thai government and rely solely on resourcefulness and international support.

It’s to this cause that Thein has dedicated his professional and personal life – to help these children, many of whom are stateless, to receive an education and to improve their lives. He works with schools to develop their curriculum, teaching skills, health education, child protection and so many other elements of education which we take for granted.

I was close to tears when he told me that some parents choose to abandon their child at a school knowing that they will have a better life in the care of others – a story of parental love which is beyond anything in my experience.

As we spoke we began to explore possible things that we might do in East Lothian to support education in Mae Sot.

Here’s the pitch!

Next year we could ask each of our secondary schools if they would be willing/able take on one senior student (17 year old) to follow a full year’s study ending in formal qualifications. The schools would seek to find a family in their community who would be willing to host the student. The family would be responsible for feeding and supporting the student for the year – but we would look to raise funds to pay for recreational activities. For our part the authority would seek to find the money to pay for the travel costs for the six students and co-ordinate a support system for the students during their time in East Lothian.

I know that I would have been interested if one of my sons had come back from school and said he had wanted to host such a student, just as I would have been interested as a head teacher. The learning opportunities for our East Lothian students are obvious but we need to look beyond that benefit to the transformational effect it could have on our visitors, their own communities, and development of the democratic process in their country.

Could there possibly be a better gift to give?

Donations to help provide basic education for internally displaced people of Burma can be made at  www.nhecburma.org or theinaing@nhecburma.org

Microfinance: supporting social enterprise for student and community benefit

 

Option 29 described in the curriculum for excellence senior phase post was described simply as: Establish a microfinance investment fund for student application.

I’ve been asked by a number of people to explain what I meant by this and how it might work.

This option has a number of threads but the starting point is founded upon a perceived need to encourage students to actively create social enterprises which will benefit their communities, and in turn,themselves.

The idea is not new and is rooted in the Grameen Bank  concept, although with more of a focus upon community benefit and personal/group development, rather than tackling poverty. The scheme should certainly tackle some of the symptoms of poverty within communities.

Example:

The concept is based upon the establishment of a microfinance fund using donations from local business people and other sources – councils included.  This money would be placed in a trust to which students, or other members of a community, could submit an application for a micro loan which would allow them to establish and develop their social enterprise. The only stipulation – aside from the viability of the plan – would be that the proposal must have a direct benefit to their local community.

An example we have been developing relates to an Elders Buddy Scheme. Let’s say that a student (or students) at the school applies to the fund for an interest free loan to set up the buddy scheme, which will involve families or individuals paying a minimal fee for a young person to spend 5 hours week making an evening home visit to an elderly person. The social entrepreneur/s, would use the loan – to a maximum £1000 – to pay for advertising, information materials, recruitment, training, disclosure fees, and other costs.

The microfinance fund would seek to provide additional support through a business /community mentor and a further network of relevant contacts  and fellow social entrepreneurs.

Areas of possible community benefit include; early years and child care; elderly care; youth programmes; disability support; and environment.

Obviously there are numerous working details missing from this description but in order to keep this post brief and to the point I’ll focus upon the benefits to the indviduals and the community they inhabit, and the possible problems.

Here’s a list of possible benefits:

  1. Young people are introduced to the world of work and enterprise in a real and meaningful manner.
  2. Communituties would benefit from the services provided.
  3. Experience in developing and running a social enterprise would be highly regarded on applications for employment or further/higher education.
  4. Young people develop real experience in financial management.
  5. It gives meaning to other academic studies as they become contextualised in a world of work and social duty.
  6. If  recognised as part of a young person’s senior phase curriculum it would enhance and  deepen that experience.
  7. It would promote comunity engagement and awareness of young people with/about their community.
  8. It woukd raise the positive profile of young people in their communities.
  9. Encourages young people to take the next step into running businesses for themselves.
  10. Promotes and entrepreneurial spirit in a community/school.

And possible problems:

  1. Loans are not repaid
  2. Enterprises collapse as young people leave their communities for further study or employment
  3. Services to vulnerable groups are not sustained
  4. Existing services with full time employees are placed at risk due to competition.
  5. Schools do not recognise the value of the scheme and only allow high achieving students to particpate or do not facilitate time  for involvement.
  6. The scheme does not offer sufficient support in the initial stages
  7. The bureaucracy of the application process is too off putting and complex.
  8. Funding is too short term.
  9. Insufficient number of financial backers.
  10. Works only in areas of high net worth and not in communites which might really benefit.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Further reading:

What can social finance learn from microfinance

Social innovation

Peer to peer microfinance for young people

Youth enterprise

Microcredit for young entrepreneurs

It takes a community to raise a child

“Broken society”, “disconnected youth”, “dysfunctional communities” have been just some of the headlines following the recent riots across the UK, and torrents of words have followed, but vital in all of this and little mentioned is the relationship between a school and its local community.

As society looks for explanations and solutions for the recent troubles, those of us in Scotland cannot be complacent. Gang violence, knife crime, and youth offending in some Scottish communities are among the highest levels in Europe. Yet in these communities we have schools where these same young people conduct themselves in a very different manner. They are not perfect in any way, and statistics would suggest that far too many of our children are disengaged, excluded and failing to achieve. But it is a fact that our schools are essentially safe places where standards of behaviour are generally good.

So why do we see such a discrepancy between what happens in school and in what happens in our communities?

I would suggest that for too long schools have seen themselves as islands within their communities. Too often we have sought to create a school environment which sets itself outwith the local community. It creates its own ethos, values, and standards of behaviour, and as long as young people conform to these values in school, we feel that we’ve done our job. As educationists, we labour under the misapprehension that young people will be able to carry these values out into their homes and communities – and in that way we’ve done the best we can.

The reality is that many of our young people don’t see any connection between the school and their community, and perhaps that’s where we need to focus our attention.

Seeking definitions of what we mean by “community” does not really help – at the last count there were over 95 separate definitions. However, if we look for the common threads within these definitions, there begins to emerge a consensus around some key features.

A community usually has a number of characteristics, namely, membership or belonging, influence, integration and fulfilment of needs, and a shared emotional connection. I’m pleased to note that our schools fulfil these characteristics for many of our young people. But how many of our communities can claim any such fulfilment? Young people repeatedly claim to be excluded from their communities. They have no sense of membership – in fact, for some young people, they are explicitly excluded. The community certainly does not fulfil their needs, nor do they have any influence over community (at least in legitimate terms). But above all, a significant minority of our young people have no emotional attachment or sense of belonging to their community, or the other people who share that community.

So what do they do instead? They create these attachments to geographical territory (not their communities). They seek approval for acts which reinforce their connection to their peers – these acts are often referred to as “anti-social” in our terms – but are highly social in terms of the young people themselves. Finally, they see their needs met by membership of a group that provides them with a sense of belonging.

Before those of us in schools become too comfortable with such an accusatory view of our local communities, I would suggest that some of the blame lies with ourselves. Of course, one might expect that – schools are often put down as the source of so many of society’s ills. Yet I believe schools have retreated from their communities over the last 50 years. This is done partly to protect their own integrity, and partly because communities themselves have not seen a part for them to play in the education of young people.

It was Morgan Scott Peck, the eminent American psychiatrist, and author of A Road Less Travelled, who suggested that there were four stages of community building. The first of these was what he termed “pseudo-community”. This is where we pretend to be a community but in actual fact we hide our differences for the sake of being able to claim community status. I’d suggest that is where most of us reside in terms of relationships between schools and their local community – happy to use the terms of reference but, when examined in any real depth, failing to fulfil the any of the previous characteristics of a true community.

Peck saw the second – and necessary – stage of community building to be chaos. That is, he thought that the only way to break free from the comfortable phony community status was for some form of chaos to ensue which brought the community to confront the reality of the situation.

Perhaps that’s what we have just experienced in the UK. The chaos has brought us to our senses. It has made us reflect upon the reality of the situation.

Peck’s third phase is where most of us now are – a sense of emptiness and loss. But if we follow Peck’s line of travel, there is a chance that we could see “true” communities emerging from this process.

For me – ever the optimist – I see this as an exciting opportunity to challenge the pseudo-community links that we often have between schools and communities and, instead, create something which conforms much more to the aspiration of “It takes a community to raise a child”.

Community Ownership of Schools

 

I’ve been approached by quite a few people over the last couple of weeks about our ideas relating to Community Ownership of Schools.

I thought it might help to gather together in one place a number of related posts which provide an insight into the evolution of this idea and the underpinning rationale.

The first point to emphasise is that we are encouraged by our elected members to “think out of the box” in relation to policy development in East Lothian.  The following links track the development of an idea which is not yet fully formed nor planned to Nth degree.  In that respect I have been adopting the role of the leader as a sculptor:

“The alternative to the technically focused leader’s vision is to see vision as an outcome which is not ‘set’ from the beginning. Instead the sculptor has an idea; a notion; a picture in mind – e.g. to create a sculpture of a human form – but as the sculptor commences work the final outcome may be very different from what they had in mind at the beginning but is all the more successful for that variation.

What the sculptor is doing is to constantly check on the quality of the developing work. By checking it against a desire to produce the “best” work possible the sculptor shifts the vision rather than carrying on working towards something that will not be as high a quality as what will be created through a more flexible approach towards the final outcome.”

Please note that the first of these posts dates to August 2006, i.e. long before our current financial status.

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2006/08/19/do-i-add-value/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2006/08/23/exploring-alternatives-educational-provision/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2006/08/27/transforming-public-services/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2006/08/26/exploring-alternatives-administrative-obligations/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2006/08/27/exploring-alternatives-resource-provision/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2006/08/28/exploring-alternatives-school-improvement-part-1/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2006/08/30/exploring-alternatives-school-improvement-part-2/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2006/09/10/exploring-alternatives-the-private-school-model/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2008/05/15/could-we-do-it/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2008/05/17/school-based-management-2/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2008/05/18/school-based-management-3-an-emerging-rationale/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2008/05/19/school-based-management-owned-by-the-community/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2008/06/01/school-based-management-5-self-governing-schools-revisited/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2009/01/04/implementing-a-curriculum-for-excellence-situation-statement/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2009/04/13/learning-from-the-past-taking-a-line-of-sight-from-parish-schools/

https://www.edubuzz.org/donsblog/2009/07/20/closing-the-accountability-gap/

Engaging with our communities – the role of social media

 

We held a meeting last week where we explored the potential of weblogs to assist the community planning process – based on the edubuzz model -although not necessarily using the same platform.

Community Planning is a process which helps public agencies to work together with the community to plan and deliver better services which make a real difference to people’s lives.

The aims of Community Planning in Scotland are:

1. making sure people and communities are genuinely engaged in the decisions made on public services which affect them; allied to

2. a commitment from organisations to work together, not apart, in providing better public services.

There are two further key principles in addition to the two main aims outlined above:

3. Community Planning as the key over-arching partnership framework helping to co-ordinate other initiatives and partnerships and where necessary acting to rationalise and simplify a cluttered landscape;

4. the ability of Community Planning to improve the connection between national priorities and those at regional, local and neighbourhood levels.

As we discussed the potential of weblogs it became apparent that this might just be a vehicle which could be of some real use.  If we could encourage key figures and other members of a local community to keep a weblog where they would reflect upon local issues and stimulate a dialogue within a community, the likelihood of planners and public services to take account of these opinions would be greatly enhanced. The old ways of questionnaires, focus groups, community conferences, canvassing do not enable a substantive, two way, on-going dialogue to take place where ideas can be shaped and developed over a period of time.

I know how I am being influenced by being able to read the weblogs of teachers, parents and children – surely this has some possibility for community engagement?

So how might such a scheme work? Let’s take a community like Tranent.  If we established an area where the weblogs of of the community could be accessed and new members could participate we would begin to build up a very rich picture of the strengths, opportunities and needs within the community.  Officers and elected members could engage with this dialogue and perhaps even have their own weblogs to make the decision making process even more transparent and interactive. 

I know some people might feel very threatened by such a suggestion, as it appears to almost encourage anarchy by handing over the “airwaves” to the public – yet surely that is what community planning is about? – a transparent enagagement with the local community to the point where people eventually (it would take some time) begin to believe that they do have a voice and that it is listened to. Even more importantly those who do make the decisions can explain the thought process and reasoning behind decisions – even those decisions which are unpopular (see example).

Last observations:

  • A councillor recently described how no one had attended any of their surgeries in the last four weeks. 
  • Another councillor described how few people had attended their surgeries over a three year period. 
  • East Lothian Council have started to hold some council meetings in the evening to be more available to the public – very few (less than 10 have attended in any one evening) .

Perhaps it really is time to explore alternative vehicles for community interaction?

A School of Ambition

I visited Dunbar Grammar School this evening to attend the launch of the Dunbar Grammar School – School of Ambition programme.

I was hugely impressed by the programme and the plans for the coming three years.

The school has set up seven companies around the theme of the creative and performing arts:

Catering

Film and Animation

Dance

Theatre

Music

Broadcasting

Corporate Identity

As HT Paul Raffaelli stressed he is very keen for the school to be central focus for the community and for the community to actively engage with the school by sharing expertise and knowledge.

This really is a Curriculum for Excellence!

Agile Software Developments

 

One of the delights of keeping a Learning Log are the comments and suggestions you receive from other people.

And so it was when Kenneth McLaughlin left a comment on one of my recent posts.

Kenneth pointed us in the direction of Agile Software Developments:

The modern definition of agile software development evolved in the mid 1990s as part of a reaction against “heavyweight” methods, as typified by a heavily regulated, regimented, micro-managed use of the waterfall model of development. The processes originating from this use of the waterfall model were seen as bureaucratic, slow, demeaning, and inconsistent with the ways that software engineers actually perform effective work.

I was fascinated to read about the Agile model of development as I think it corresponds, in many ways, to how we are trying to take things forward education in East Lothian.

Without access to the Learning Log such a link could never have been made and an opportunity of reflecting upon our practice would not have emerged. It’s this kind of lateral engagement with other fields of study and enterprise that can help education to break free from some of the more traditional development models which have so singularly failed to bring about productive change.

Creative Arts and Education Group – creating a dynamic

 

We held our first meeting of the Creative Arts and Education Group.

As has become a pattern for first meetings it was more of a conversation about what people thought should be the purpose of the group.

The essential focus of the group is to enable us to give some shape and consistency to the wide variety of creative arts for young people in East Lothian. We talked about entitlements for children and how we might link school based activities with out of school activities.

Our next meeting will try to emulate the 3-18 strategic Learning and Teaching group by extending its membership to create a “tartan” with horizontal and vertical connections which will also include parents and pupils. The more I think about this there is definitely something in having much larger groups than has been the conventional approach. I think the key is to make the group part of the process i.e. to create a dynamic itself by engaging a large number of people – such meetings become workshops and creative opportunities, rather than staid mechanisms only there to fulfil bureaucratic functions.

Our next meeting, which will have over 25 people in attendance,  will consider our purpose and the approach we wish to take towards the development of the creative arts and education.  We intend to evolve our strategy as opposed to go for any “big bang”.