Voices blog

The Citizenship Foundation has produced a report for CfBT which was released today.

This has been reported with a healthy prelude on the Guardian web site here:

although it doesn’t acknoweldge our authorship… so of course I would like to…

We have produced two reports - one that is comes in their ‘perspectives’ series: “School Leaders, Community Cohesion and the Big Society”, which highlights the issues thrown up by the report, and also a longer narrative about the stories from the primary and secondary schools that we interviewed.

Both can be found here:

Readers will be glad to see a critique of the many ways that schools approached this duty, from school-wide policy to classroom materials, and how such a duty impacted in areas with less or greater levels of diversity. Their approach also tackled many forms of diversity, be it ethnic or religious, to age or class, and shows what imagination was brought to the task.

The short summary of the report in the Guardian is a helpful start to seeing its content, though teachers may be particularly interested to read how their colleagues in other schools saw and used a commitment to community cohesion as a means of enhancing the quality of education that their students received. We had some evidence to suggest that Community Cohesion programmes have the capacity to improve the educational provision in school.

I’d like to congratulate Nicola Horsley, Don Rowe, Tony Thorpe and Tony Breslin on this substantive study and also Mark Chater in helping put together some of the final pieces in the reports.

I’m conscious that many teachers are now on holiday - so you’ve either got time to read the reports carefully, or not the slightest inclination as you’re finally getting a break. To that end - we might be lucky and discover you’re reading this in September…

“If youth charities can run schools can we expect these will have pupil voice and empowerment at the centre of the way they run?”

That was the content of a message posted to Twitter on Friday by Fiona Blacke. Presumably she was writing in response to the government’s scrapping of the £2million Academy sponsorship fee, currently required of voluntary and private sector organisations that want to sponsor schools. (More about the Academies programme.)

Asher Jacobsberg of involver picked up on this and asked if there was any interest in a consortium to “try it out”. He marked the message for the particular attention of a number of charities, including ourselves.

Clearly any project proposal for this would need to go through the proper internal channels, but it is an interesting topic for discussion:

• is there a case to be made for a flagship school centred on pupil voice and democratic principles;
• what would such a school look like;
• could one be run successfully by a consortium of enthusiastic voluntary organisations;
• if not, what possibilities are there for supporting other sponsors in achieving similar goals?

What do you think?