Chapter 3. Schools driving progress and well-being in local communities1

Horizontal connectedness

As demonstrated in the Innovative Learning Environments (ILE) project, innovative schools are characterised by a high level of horizontal connectedness to their environment. In many innovative learning environments, inquiry- or problem-based learning are defined by real-world problems and carried out with real-world partners: universities and vocational training centres, the local business world, libraries, museums, theatres and sports clubs.

Learning ecosystems are multidimensional

The diversity of social contexts in which learning takes place points to the value of formal, non-formal and informal learning. Formal learning involves institutionalised, curriculum-based learning and teaching, such as learning which occurs within the education system, or workplace learning. Informal learning can take place within work, family or community contexts. It is not structured, and is more unintentional from the learner’s perspective. This type of learning happens, for instance, when children play. Non-formal learning is situated between formal and informal learning. It is structured and intentional, but not regulated, nor is it accredited or formally supported.

Hence, learning takes place in a variety of social settings, summarised in the current framework as the school, the family, the community and the workplace. Within each type of context we can distinguish a number of specific elements, with examples presented in Figure 3.1. Each context contributes to the development of cognitive, social and emotional skills, although their relative importance will change depending on an individual’s stage in life. For instance, parents are clearly crucial during infancy and early childhood, but school and the community become increasingly important as a child enters formal education and interacts with diverse social networks. The workplace, in turn, is a key learning context, particularly during late adolescence and (early) adulthood.

Figure 3.1. Variety of learning contexts

Source: OECD (2015a), Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264226159-en.

Dimensions of school/community engagement

Schools’ engagement with their external communities has conventionally been categorised into three domains (Watson, 2007):

• First order engagement, reflecting schools’ standing as anchor institutions in their communities, with benefits arising from “just being there”.

• Second order engagement based on entrepreneurial “third stream” trading relationships with different client groups: providing educational services to students and employers, and transferring knowledge-based expertise to industry, policy makers and public services.

• Third order engagement involving schools in the life of the wider community through a variety of corporate social responsibility activities, ranging from outreach programmes with schools or community groups, to public lectures and cultural events, and opening campus facilities to public and outside users.

The diagram in Figure 3.2 illustrates schools’ engagement with their external communities along two axes – from provider-centred to community-focused, and from static and specific activities to dynamic and emergent solutions. This framework captures the three domains described here, while highlighting a fourth space, of open and collaborative partnerships through which schools and stakeholder communities work together to resolve shared needs and to create collective economic and social benefits. This mode of engagement goes well beyond institution-centred interactions, and has special resonance within the movement to develop local or regional responses to economic and social challenges (Stevenson, 2015).

Figure 3.2. Dimensions of school/community engagement

Source: Stevenson and Boxall (2015), Communities of Talent: Universities in Local Learning and Innovation Ecosystems, www.paconsulting.com/insights/how-can-local-learning-partnerships-overcome-our-national-skills-deficit/.

Extracurricular activities

In many school systems extracurricular activities provide opportunities to students to engage in the local community and to develop social and emotional skills, including civic engagement (OECD, 2015a). Extracurricular activities refer to those activities that complement core academic content, such as sports, clubs, student government associations, volunteer work and school chores. These activities provide students with real-life situations outside the classroom with the help of adult facilitators who can act as mentors.

Extracurricular activities can be found in schools in all OECD countries and partner economies. According to the student background questionnaire of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012, 73% of 15-year-olds across OECD countries attended schools that organised volunteering or service activities (Figure 3.3). Similarly, 90% of them reported attending schools that supported extracurricular sports activities and more than 60% were in schools that supported mathematics competitions, art and theatre clubs. The availability of these activities, however, varies greatly across countries. This may reflect cross-country differences in the amount of resources that can be allocated to support extracurricular activities, including teachers’ time. It may also reflect differences in demand for such activities from parents. In some countries, certain extracurricular activities are organised by external associations.

Figure 3.3. Availability of volunteering or service-learning activities at school. Percentage of 15-year-old students who were in schools that offer volunteering or service activities (PISA, 2012)

Source: OECD (2015a), Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills, based on PISA 2012 data.

 https://doi.org/10.1787/888933163837

Countries approach the organisation of extracurricular activities in schools in different ways (OECD, 2015a). In the majority of OECD countries, the organisation of extracurricular activities is not formally regulated. The implementation of these activities is often left to the discretion of local authorities or individual schools. The scope and nature of these activities therefore vary across, and within, countries. For example, local school administrations in Luxembourg define their own objectives for extracurricular activities without being bounded by national guidelines. While all schools in Luxembourg offer extracurricular activities, the range and content of extracurricular activities are only subject to the goals defined by the local school administrations. In France, an initiative launched in 2013 called “projet éducatif territorial” (PEDT) requires municipalities to organise extracurricular (sport, cultural and artistic) activities with financial support from the state government. This initiative aims to promote existing and new extracurricular activities and allow all students equal access to culture and sport. The PEDT is driven by the local authority while involving other stakeholders in the field of education, including national government institutions, associations, and cultural and sporting institutions.

In some countries, there are formal national guidelines for extracurricular activities that specify the hours and types of activities. For example, extracurricular activities are organised as an integral part of school education in Japan. The Japanese curriculum standards (the “Courses of Study”) for primary school students specifies minimum hours that schools should secure for four types of special activities: homeroom activities, student government, club activities and school events. For school events, the curriculum suggests organising specific activities such as school trips through which students can experience intensive group interactions and learn to be respectful of others. Besides these activities specified in the curriculum, most schools organise the cleaning of school facilities by students. This provides an opportunity for students to learn ways to collaborate with others and discipline themselves, while helping to maintain a clean learning environment. Korea also has similar guidelines on extracurricular activities, specifying time allocation for “creative experiential activities”, including self-regulated activities, club activities, voluntary activities and career education.

Whether there are formal regulations or not, schools and local education authorities have greater autonomy to plan extracurricular activities than curricular ones. Since schools are less constrained by the physical boundaries of classrooms (and, in some cases, schools), facilitators or mentors of extracurricular activities can flexibly mobilise real-life activities and scenarios to teach life skills that typically require strong social and emotional capability. Extracurricular activities often stimulate students to actively contribute to designing their own learning experience. They can also provide opportunities for schools to strengthen linkages with the community.

School-community partnerships can also provide additional opportunities for social and emotional learning by improving children’s access to extracurricular activities, and enhance their engagement in the community. Recently there has been a movement encouraging schools to actively reach out to stakeholders outside schools, including higher education, businesses and community groups, to enhance their educational programmes (OECD, 2015a).

Service-learning

Learning based on engaging with the local community is often conceptualised as service-learning. At its most basic level, academic service-learning is an experiential learning pedagogy in which education is delivered by engaging students in community service that is integrated with the learning objectives of core academic curricula (Furco, 2010). Academic service-learning is premised on providing students with contextualised learning experiences that are based on authentic, real-time situations in their communities. Using the community as a resource for learning, the primary goal of academic service-learning is to enhance students’ understanding of the broader value and utility of academic lessons within the traditional disciplines (e.g. science, mathematics, social studies, language arts and fine arts), all while engaging young people in social activities through which they derive and implement solutions to important community issues. Ideally, the community service the students perform helps them learn better how the academic concepts taught in the classroom can be applied to situations in their everyday lives. In this regard, academic service-learning seeks simultaneously to enhance students’ academic achievement and their civic development.

The literature on service-learning reveals that the community service activities in which students are engaged tackle a broad range of societal issues, including those concerning the environment, health, public safety, human needs, literacy and multiculturalism. In implementing service-learning activities, students can address a societal issue either through direct service (e.g. serving food at a homeless shelter) or indirect service (e.g. producing a research report that provides recommendations to the homeless shelter for improving its food distribution). Regardless of the type or focus of the service activity, academic service-learning is designed to help students apply their academic content knowledge to act on authentic and often complex societal issues.

Although service-learning resembles other forms of community-based learning approaches, such as internships, field studies or volunteering, it is distinguished from these programmes by placing equal emphasis on both community service and academic learning, as well as its intention to benefit both the provider and recipient of the service (see Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4. Service-learning situated within experiential learning

Source: Furco (2010), “The community as a resource for learning: An analysis of academic service-learning in primary and secondary education”, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264086487-en.

In contrast to other forms of project-based learning, academic service-learning learning projects are purposefully community-focused and community-based, are usually conducted in partnership with members of the community, and, most importantly, are designed with a community need in mind. In essence, like a textbook or laboratory, the community becomes a resource for learning whereby the environs outside school offer students authentic learning opportunities to use their academic knowledge and skills to construct and implement solutions to real-life social problems in the local community or broader society.

The emphasis on community service and its use of the community as a resource for academic study intentionally shifts the role that students play in the learning process: they become producers rather than recipients of knowledge, active rather than passive learners, and providers rather than recipients of assistance. Unlike most other experiential learning approaches, academic service-learning places students in situations where they focus less on using resources for their own gain and more on acting as a resource for the benefit of others. Service-learning creates an educational atmosphere whereby learners confront real-life issues through community-engaged experiences that call on them to develop meaningful, academically-relevant actions that have real consequences for the community and themselves. Perhaps more than any other experiential or community-engaged learning pedagogy, academic service-learning has a strong civic dimension at its core. Its emphasis on community service establishes an inherent civic dimension that promotes social responsibility and citizenship among participants.

Learning to engage

Education, whether measured in terms of educational attainment or skills acquired, seem to have a strong impact on the civic and community engagement shown later in life. Figure 3.5, based on data of the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, shows the strength of the relationship, but also that the strength differs from country to country.

Figure 3.5. Percentage of adults reporting that they volunteer at least once a month, by educational attainment and literacy proficiency level (2012). Survey of Adult Skills, 25-64 year-olds

Source: OECD (2014), Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators, https://doi.org/10.1787/eag-2014-en.

 https://doi.org/10.1787/888933116680

Better-educated individuals on average are more likely to exhibit higher levels of civic and social engagement than the less educated. Also, better-educated parents are more likely to stimulate their children’s civic engagement, and an educated society tends to be more cohesive and have less crime. However, the precise mechanisms and pathways through which education promotes civic and social engagement remain unclear (Borgonovi and Miyamoto, 2010). Current OECD research is focusing on the role that specific personality traits and social and emotional skills play in the development of civic engagement and on how such skills can be developed and nurtured.

It is also very interesting to see, as shown in Figure 3.6, that volunteering and adult learning are closely related: people who volunteer, especially those in older age groups, are also relatively more likely to participate in various forms of formal and non-formal education. This adds further weight to the suggestion that learning adds to social capital and engagement in the local community.

Figure 3.6. Volunteering and relative participation in formal and/or non-formal education, by age group (2012 and 2015)

Note: Values are missing for some countries and economies because there are too few observations to provide a reliable estimate.

1. The difference in participation in formal and/or non-formal education between unemployed 25-64 year-olds who volunteer and do not volunteer is not statistically significant at 5%.

2. Reference year is 2015; for all other countries and economies the reference year is 2012.

3. The difference in participation in formal and/or non-formal education between employed 25-64 year-olds who volunteer and do not volunteer is not statistically significant at 5%.

4. The difference in participation in formal and/or non-formal education between inactive 25-64 year-olds who volunteer and do not volunteer is not statistically significant at 5%.

Source: OECD (2017), Education at a Glance 2017: OECD Indicators, https://doi.org/10.1787/eag-2017-en.

 https://doi.org/10.1787/888933558610

Corporate partners

A very important channel through which schools partner with and contribute to the local economy and community is their engagement with local business and industry. Some corporate partnerships may be the conventional community links of businesses helping through taking a funding or sponsorship role, but they may be much more about the learning that takes place as well.

Cultural partners

Cultural partnerships can be very useful in extending the boundaries of the learning environment beyond formal school provision, and in offering access to arts materials and experiences directly. As in the case of Fiskars, artists and craftspeople become part of the educational workforce, too.

These, and many other examples of partnerships with museums, galleries and theatres, but also with radio and media companies, extend the materials and the means of learning as well as the range of professionals involved.

Networking

So far, we have discussed the relationships between schools and their surrounding communities in terms of “serving the community”, “outreach” and “partnerships”. From this perspective the distinction between the formal education environment of the school and the surrounding informal and non-formal opportunities for learning is still very powerful and limits the degree of integration of the school with its environment. In more innovative arrangements, the mixing of formal with informal and non-formal learning becomes more pronounced. Broadening the institutional base beyond schools through service-learning, diverse non-formal and informal learning opportunities on line and in communities, and establishing “hybrid” formal/non-formal programmes are all part of creating dynamic learning systems.

Such examples and others evolve into networked arrangements as emerging learning ecosystems around four different models (OECD, 2015b):

• school chains, which are groups of schools sharing a mission and acting as a micro system

• locally embedded hubs, responding through innovation to particular needs in a community or locality

• innovation zones, centrally facilitated innovation strategies in, for example, a city creating a network of schools, system leaders and broader education partners

• looser networks and coalitions, socialising new ways of working among professionals and school leaders.

Figure 3.7 and Figure 3.8 represent two different systems, including formal, non-formal and hybrid forms, and units of education (OECD, 2015b). Moving from top to bottom, there are more connections among formal units, which can be clusters and chains of schools. Moving from left to right, from the formal to the non-formal education providers, there are more connections among themselves or with hybrid partners or partners from the non-formal sector. The hybrids might combine work and learning, sports and learning, or community service and formal learning.

Figure 3.7. A weakly-connected system

Source: OECD (2015b), Schooling Redesigned: Towards Innovative Learning Systems, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264245914-en.

Figure 3.8. A networked system

Source: OECD (2015b), Schooling Redesigned: Towards Innovative Learning Systems, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264245914-en.

Figure 3.7 represents a hypothetical weakly networked meta learning system. There are few networks and cross-school communities, and very little evidence of hybrids. While there are some non-formal programmes and providers, as these are responding to demand for alternatives to schools there is little connection between them and the formal system.

The networked learning system (Figure 3.8) implies a significant increase in the number of groups, organisations and organisms devoted to learning as units, not only working by themselves as before but connecting up in a flourishing range of collaborative groupings. The networked system shows the learning space is fuller horizontally. There are also more non-formal providers and programmes, encouraged by the dynamism of learning and the opportunities opened up by technology and by demand. Some of these form networks totally outside the formal system but often the formal and the non-formal come together and fill the “hybrid” space in the middle. There are also more networks and communities of practice created in the formal system as it encourages clusters, networks and collaboration among districts, schools, classes and teachers as well.

Innovative learning ecosystems constantly change, with groupings forming and disbanding all the time; as they are organic, they are less predictable. In being less defined by acquired position and regulated status, they rely critically on relationships and connectivity whose importance grows. Especially important are knowledge and ideas as connectors. Increasingly, but not exclusively, they depend on communication technologies.

Networks can be singled out, not because they are by themselves always effective or innovative but because they offer the connections through which knowledge passes and ultimately collaborative action takes place. They are particularly valued for their capacity to bring diverse perspectives to the table, whether from inside or outside government, clarify problems, facilitate co-ordination and actually implement change. Effective networks can cut through complex hierarchies and generate new solutions to intractable and often challenging local problems whether in preventative health, welfare issues such as social housing and support for vulnerable youth, energy solutions, the environment, or in restructuring regional economies. Complex issues put a premium on the capacity of leaders and organisations to take account of a multitude of interdependencies and work across traditional boundaries. Well-functioning collaborative networks add high value and can enable the whole to become more than the sum of its parts.

Horizontal accountability

A networking ecosystem fundamentally changes the relationships between schools (and other learning organisations) and their main stakeholders and also alters the steering and accountability mechanisms around them.

In a context of increasing school autonomy and decentralisation, many education systems have reinforced instruments of school accountability. This is based on the assumption that holding schools accountable for attaining high standards will, in fact, motivate schools to improve their quality. Thus, the following purposes for school accountability can be distinguished:

• legitimation through compliance with laws and regulations

• accounting for the quality of services provided, in terms of quality of education (effectiveness), value for money (efficiency), equity or access

• improving the quality of services provided, in terms of quality of education (effectiveness), value for money (efficiency), equity or access.

Hooge, Burns and Wilkoszewski (2012) distinguish between two main types of accountability mechanisms: vertical and horizontal. Vertical accountability is top-down and hierarchical. It enforces compliance with laws and regulation and/or holds schools accountable for the quality of education they provide. Horizontal accountability presupposes non-hierarchical relationships. It is directed at how schools and teachers conduct their profession and/or how schools and teachers provide multiple stakeholders with insight into their educational processes, decision making, implementation and results. Each of the two types of accountability is further divided into two subsections, as shown in Figure 3.9.

According to Hooge, Burns and Wilkoszewski (2012) there is a gradual shift taking place in the governance of education from the vertical to the horizontal forms of accountability. Horizontal elements in education governance have had a relatively long tradition in a range of OECD countries. School boards or councils comprised of elected, voluntary members have sought to integrate the voices of parents into the governing process. However, many of these bodies do not include wider groups of stakeholders. In some countries, however, notably Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, there has recently been a trend to move towards more profound multiple school accountability designs. Defined as a process involving students, parents, communities and other stakeholders in formulating strategies, decision making and evaluation for education, multiple school accountability aims to provide:

1. legitimation of the strategy and decision making of the school (is the school doing the right things?)

2. legitimation of the quality of services provided (is the school doing things well?)

3. improvement of the quality of services provided.

A form of horizontal accountability, multiple accountability means that schools are accountable to students and their parents, to members of the community, and to the community as a whole for multiple aspects of schooling, based on various information sources. Multiple accountability aims to increase legitimacy and trust from the local community through the processes of learning and feedback that it entails. It requires that schools work closely with different stakeholders, supporters and constituents in their environment in order to:

• help them learn about their rights and duties, requirements, desires and expectations concerning education

• establish a relationship (by negotiating, collaborating and/or involving them)

• obtain support for school policies, strategy, decisions and practices

• be held accountable by them.

The practice of multiple accountability has yet to come to fruition in education, and the amount of available research on this topic is modest. Based on theory and experience from other sectors however, some lessons can be learned to make multiple school accountability work:

1. It is important to identify the right stakeholders. The process of stakeholder identification can be heavily influenced by “stakeholder salience”, that is, the ability of stakeholders to attract schools’ attention, depending on their power, legitimacy and urgency with regards to the school. In order to ensure that the identification of stakeholders is not limited to those most salient, schools must make efforts to involve less powerful or inactive stakeholders. Being less powerful or inactive does not mean that these stakeholders are not relevant to the school. On the contrary, these are often the very stakeholders for whom the school aims to add value; therefore, schools need them.

2. Build stakeholder capacity. This is particularly important while establishing accountability relationships with weaker stakeholders who might not have the requisite knowledge and language to play the role holding schools to account and, therefore, may inadvertently be excluded from accountability processes. Avoiding apathy and “consultation fatigue” is key because they weaken the effectiveness of the process, and ultimately the strength of this approach is determined by its weakest accountees. Schools can involve and activate their stakeholders by being inviting, by structuring participation and accountability processes, and by motivating and empowering them.

3. Self evaluation that provides real insight into schools’ quality and processes is needed to make multiple accountability work. Proper school self evaluation requires “assessment literacy” from school leaders as well as from teachers and other professional staff. The work of school leaders is crucial here: they must empower staff to be involved and open to parents and members of the local community and to be held accountable by them, and they must create the effective environments by building bridges between teachers and educational staff and external accountability demands. Autonomy and a (governance) environment that provides support foster this work of school leaders.