Education, Disadvantage and Place: Making the Local Matter 9781447311225

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EDUCATION, DISADVANTAGE AND PLACE Making the local matter

Kirstin Kerr Alan Dyson Carlo Raffo

EDUCATION, DISADVANTAGE AND PLACE Making the local matter Kirstin Kerr, Alan Dyson and Carlo Raffo

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Policy Press North American office: University of Bristol Policy Press 6th Floor c/o The University of Chicago Press Howard House 1427 East 60th Street Queen’s Avenue Chicago, IL 60637, USA Clifton t: +1 773 702 7700 Bristol BS8 1SD f: +1 773-702-9756 UK e:[email protected] Tel +44 (0)117 331 5020 www.press.uchicago.edu Fax +44 (0)117 331 5367 e-mail [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk © Policy Press 2014 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978 1 44731 120 1 paperback ISBN 978 1 44731 119 5 hardcover The right of Kirstin Kerr, Alan Dyson and Carlo Raffo to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Policy Press Front cover image: www.alamy.com Printed and bound in Great Britain by CMP, Poole Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

Contents List of tables and figures iv Notes on authors v Acknowledgements vi one two three four five six seven eight nine ten

Introduction 1 Why place matters in education 31 Local education systems as products of place: a case 47 study Learning from the past 65 Learning from the present 89 A rationale for a new generation of area-based 109 initiatives Developing understandings of place as a basis for 131 intervention Evaluation and monitoring 147 Governance and accountability 165 Children and places in hard times: some concluding 187 thoughts

References 201 Index 221

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Education, disadvantage and place

List of tables and figures Tables 1.1 1.2 3.1

Some purposes of education-focused area-based initiatives 27 Minimal and maximal conceptualisations of area-based 29 initiatives Indicators of deprivation in Stockborough by ward 49

Figures 5.1 8.1

Weston Academy theory of change Children’s community theory of change

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93 160

Notes on authors Alan Dyson is Professor of Education and co-director of the Centre for Equity in Education in the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK. His research interests are in the relationship between social and educational inclusion and, particularly, the relationship between education and other areas of public policy in urban contexts. Kirstin Kerr is a Lecturer in Education in the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK and researcher in the Centre for Equity in Education. Her research explores how community contexts shape educational experiences and outcomes. A particular focus is on how issues of educational inequity come to be perpetuated in places characterised by multiple forms of disadvantage, and how policy might intervene in this. Carlo Raffo is Professor of Urban Education in the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK, where he leads the EdD programme. His main research focus is in the area of education and poverty, and educational equity in urban contexts.

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Acknowledgements Over the past decade and more, we have had the privilege of working with professionals and community members in a wide range of area initiatives. We would like to thank them for their tolerance of our presence, and to acknowledge their contribution to our thinking. We would particularly like to thank the leaders of ‘children’s communities’ with which we are currently working, along with Chris Wellings and his colleagues from Save the Children, who have supported the development of these communities. Finally, we would like to thank Policy Press’s anonymous reviewers, Professor Hal Lawson from the University at Albany, State University of New York, and our colleagues at the University of Manchester Institute of Education, Professors Mel Ainscow and Ruth Lupton. Their comments on and support for the development of this book have been invaluable. Any remaining errors and shortcomings, of course, remain entirely our own.

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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction England1 is, in global terms, an affluent country. Yet, like many other affluent countries, it is characterised by marked inequalities of outcome. Put simply, different individuals enjoy, among other things, different levels of income, educational achievement and health. It may be the case that some of these inequalities are due to individual differences that it is difficult to do much about. However, it is certainly the case that they are also strongly related to individuals’ social characteristics – to social class, ethnicity, gender and disability, among others (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2010). Through what appear to be complex but powerful processes, these characteristics translate into advantages and disadvantages for individuals in relation to achieving good outcomes. Often, those individuals and groups in the most unpromising circumstances are simply characterised as ‘disadvantaged’, though it is worth remembering that there are likely to be distinctive patterns of advantages and disadvantages in all people’s lives. Historically, policymakers have felt that they can and should do something to tackle inequalities that arise in this way. Anti-poverty strategies, gender and ethnic equality policies, welfare policies, and universal access to high-quality public services are among the many ways in which policymakers have sought to eliminate the disadvantages experienced by different parts of the population. By and large, these policies have been universal in nature, or have been targeted at particular social groups wherever they may live. However, policymakers have also been aware that inequalities have a spatial dimension, that different places are unequal and that some places are characterised by multiple forms of disadvantage. As Tony Blair, the ‘New Labour’ prime minister from 1997 to 2007, observed: When we came into office, we inherited a country where hundreds of neighbourhoods were scarred by unemployment, educational failure and crime. They had become progressively more cut off from the prosperity and opportunities that most of us take for granted. Communities were breaking down. Public services were failing. People had started to lose hope. (Social Exclusion Unit, 2001, p 5)

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Education, disadvantage and place

Such places are often simply characterised as ‘disadvantaged’ (or, indeed, ‘deprived’ if the emphasis is on limitations in economic and other resources), though, as with individuals, the reality is that advantages and disadvantages form distinctive patterns in each place. Nonetheless, policymakers have long felt that something must be done about those places where disadvantages are most concentrated, demanding a policy response that is different from, and additional to, whatever else might be done nationally. To a large extent, these differential responses have been achieved through a strong system of local government, able to distribute funding and configure resources to meet the distinctive needs of particular administrative areas. However, there has also been a sense that something extra is still needed in the form of even more nuanced and more customised responses to disadvantages, as they are experienced locally, in particular places. This extra response has often taken the form of what have come to be known as ‘area-based initiatives’ (ABIs). ABIs have, over time, come in many shapes and sizes. Traditionally, they have tended to be government-led initiatives that have offered additional resources and flexibilities to professional and community leaders in disadvantaged places. In return for this, local leaders have been expected to tackle the presenting problems of the places where they work and to achieve improved outcomes, specified more or less precisely. Within these broad parameters, there have been all sorts of variations in design. Some ABIs have enjoyed considerable freedom to design a local response, while others have been required to implement measures determined by central government. Some have pursued a broad agenda and sought to tackle all the perceived problems of disadvantaged places simultaneously, while others have focused on specific issues – improving health outcomes, increasing employment opportunities or raising levels of educational attainment, perhaps. Some have defined their areas broadly, working across administrative boundaries and even encompassing whole city regions, while others have worked on a much smaller scale. Much more recently, and particularly so since 2010, we have found increasing instances where what we see as a new and distinctive style of ABIs have started to emerge. In contrast to ‘traditional’ government-led initiatives, these are being initiated and led by local stakeholders in response to locally defined concerns, using locally available resources. This draws attention to two important characteristics of ABIs as a general policy vehicle, which are central to the arguments in this book: first, it indicates that ABIs are far from homogeneous; and, second, it indicates that they are not a static model of intervention. There is, of course, particular interest in what we term ‘traditional’ (ie 2

Introduction

government-led) ABIs. Not only have they been the most ambitious, best-resourced and best-evaluated of all attempts to tackle the problems of disadvantaged places in a coordinated way, but it is also clearly important to understand the potential role of such initiatives in national policy. In this book, however, our concerns are somewhat wider. We are interested not only in what central government might do in regard to disadvantaged places, but also in how initiatives might be developed locally and evolve beyond their traditional forms. Therefore, when we use the term ‘area-based initiative’ – and cognate terms such as ‘area approach’ – we are doing so to refer to all kinds of attempts to marshal coordinated approaches to the problems and possibilities of disadvantaged places in general. However, we also distinguish broadly between ‘traditional’ (ie government-led) and ‘new style’ (ie locally led) ABIs, and later on, we will identify distinctive approaches to – or overlapping ‘generations’ of – ABIs within these. Reflecting for now on ABIs in general, over the years, whatever form they have taken, ABIs have had a mixed press from researchers, and have moved in and out of favour with policymakers. In England, there was a surge of interest in area approaches during the New Labour years between 1997 and 2010, when government-led ABIs of many kinds were introduced in an effort to ensure that no one would be ‘seriously disadvantaged by where they live’ (Social Exclusion Unit, 2001, p 5). Most of these were, however, relatively short-lived and have now disappeared. More significantly, the outcomes from them were, as we shall see, mixed at best. There appear to have been some limited positive outcomes from such initiatives, but there was little evidence that these led to a fundamental transformation of disadvantaged places, or that the outcomes of people living in those places began to match those of populations elsewhere. There was even less evidence that inequalities across the country as a whole were substantially reduced. Indeed, spatial distributions of disadvantage have remained stubbornly entrenched, yielding only marginally to policy interventions (Dorling et al, 2007; Dorling and Pritchard, 2010; Fahmy et al, 2011; Lupton et al, 2013a). Not surprisingly, this has led some critics of ABIs to draw the blanket conclusion that they are, all-in-all, a failed experiment, with no real role to play in serious attempts to tackle disadvantage and inequality (Durose and Rees, 2012). Yet, this conclusion runs counter to two compelling arguments. The first is that there is a powerful rationale for adopting an area approach to problems that appear to arise in particular places. As Smith (1999, p 49) articulates it:

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Education, disadvantage and place

the key reason [for area approaches] is that some areas suffer disproportionately high levels of economic and social deprivation, including very high levels of worklessness, poverty, poor health, high crime and fear of crime, and need special attention. Although some issues can only be addressed through national level mainstream policies it is the case that some problems occur because of local area related factors and it is therefore appropriate to address them at the local level. On the basis of this rationale, ABIs ought to work, and if they do not, the problem may be with the way they have hitherto been conceptualised and operationalised, rather than with any more fundamental limitation. That ABIs are, in our view, still evolving and far from static in their formulation suggests that more effective conceptualisations and operational arrangements can be achieved. The second argument is that even though outcomes do not appear to have been transformed, ABIs of one kind and another do seem to make some difference locally. As researchers who are concerned to support local efforts to tackle disadvantage, we spend much of our time engaging with local ABIs of different sorts and gathering evidence about their impacts. While we see much that is far from perfect, we also see high levels of collaboration between professionals and services, and well-thought-out strategies for tackling disadvantage. Above all, we meet children, families and other residents who give powerful accounts of how their experiences and opportunities have been changed by the work going on around them. Of course, ‘ought’ and ‘seem’ offer poor arguments in the face of robust evaluative evidence – and it is in order to resolve the contradiction between these two views of ABIs that this book has been written. We start from a hunch that many of the inadequacies of past ABIs are actually inadequacies of conceptualisation. Policymakers, we suspect, have sought to improve outcomes in the most disadvantaged places without fully understanding either the complex nature of disadvantage or, more particularly, the complex nature of the processes operating within and through places that create and sustain disadvantage. We suspect, therefore, that although their approaches may have varied, most ABIs in the past have been designed in ways that would make widespread transformational outcomes unlikely – and that policymakers and critics alike have expected too much from them. However, our experience also leads us to suspect that there are other ways of ‘doing’ ABIs that would mark a fundamental shift from 4

Introduction

previous traditional approaches. The shift we have in mind is both conceptual, in terms of how places, and the processes that create and sustain disadvantage in places, are understood, and practical, in terms of how ABIs develop their strategies and governance and accountability arrangements. Indeed, as noted earlier, new ways of ‘doing’ ABIs, where initiatives are initiated, led and developed over time by local stakeholders, are already beginning to emerge on the ground. This suggests that more effective ways of conceptualising and operationalising area-based approaches are not only possible, but actively being sought. What these new-style ABIs might achieve is yet to be seen, but we believe that it is essential that they are seen as contributors to wider strategies for tackling disadvantage in future. As the country passes through hard economic – and, some would say, political – times, a new style of ABI may well have an important role to play in helping those working at a local level to make a real difference to what happens in their areas. This book, therefore, tries to explore some of the more fundamental conceptual issues around ABIs. We consider how ‘place’ can be understood in relation to ‘disadvantage’, examine the conceptual flaws in previous ABIs and seek to develop a rationale for a new approach to area-based intervention. In doing so, we use our position as university-based education researchers to draw on the research literature on previous ABIs, and on the wider scholarly literature around disadvantage and place. We believe this will offer a corrective to two common tendencies, for ABIs to be developed, firstly, on the basis of inadequate conceptualisations of disadvantage and place and, secondly, without learning from previous experiences. In addition, we spend much of our time working closely alongside policymakers and practitioners as they struggle with the complex problems of tackling disadvantage ‘on the ground’. In this role, for instance, we have worked to support the development of a series of extended school initiatives, and to evaluate these in ways that capture their complex, long-term goals. This enables us to bring to bear an understanding of the practical challenges posed by ‘wicked problems’ of place-based disadvantage. In drawing together these conceptual and empirical insights, our view is that practical strategies for tackling disadvantage are limited without adequate conceptualisations, but, equally, that powerful conceptualisations are limited if they are not then operationalised in the field. We therefore use our experiences as ‘real world’ researchers to consider some of the practical implications of rethinking ABIs. Our aim in doing so is not to produce yet another ‘how to do it’ guide to developing and managing an ABI. This is not least because we believe 5

Education, disadvantage and place

that if ABIs are to make a valuable contribution in future, they must be locally owned and developed in response to local issues. However, we do see ABIs as a practical and practicable approach to tackling disadvantage. We think that, formulated appropriately, they can make a difference, and we hope that policymakers and practitioners will use our thinking to inform their own work.

Education-focused area-based initiatives We have learned much from examining a wide range of ABIs, and hope that our work will have implications beyond our own field. However, our particular interest as educationalists is on those ABIs that have had a distinct focus on education in general, and the education of children and young people in particular. Not surprisingly, the factors that lead to disadvantages in relation to other outcomes also tend to be implicated in educational inequalities. Disability, gender, ethnicity, the effectiveness of family support, access to high-quality schools and teachers, and health and well-being, among others, also help determine who does well and who does badly. However, the economic background of learners, in particular, has significant implications for their educational outcomes, with those from poorer backgrounds tending to do significantly worse than their more favoured peers (see, eg, Cassen and Kingdon, 2007; Schools Analysis and Research Division Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2009; Perry and Francis, 2010). As we shall see elsewhere in this book, it is not so much that relative poverty ‘causes’ poor educational outcomes in some linear way, as that it is associated with a range of disadvantaging factors in the home, school and neighbourhood and seems likely to exacerbate the effects of other disadvantaging factors where they are present. The mechanisms linking economic background to disadvantaging factors and so to outcomes are complex, therefore, but the linkages are strong. It follows that places where economically poor families are concentrated – and the schools that serve such places – are likely to contain a relatively high proportion of learners who face educational disadvantages and who achieve at low levels. Not surprisingly, therefore, successive governments have developed initiatives targeted at such places that seek to tackle this problem. There is a relatively lengthy history of such initiatives in England, stretching back at least as far as the Educational Priority Areas prefigured by the Plowden Report (Central Advisory Council for Education [England], 1967) in the 1960s, and even to earlier initiatives such as Henry Morris’s efforts to support the rural communities of Cambridgeshire through 6

Introduction

the establishment of village colleges (Morris, 1925). More recently, New Labour governments introduced a rapid succession of ABIs in education, from Education Action Zones (DfEE, 1999a), to Excellence in Cities (NFER, 2007) and City Challenge (DfES, 2007). Many of these initiatives were focused primarily on improving the school system, and were unequivocally area-based. However, there were others – Sure Start being one, and Extended Schools and Services another – where the education focus was part of a wider agenda, or where the focus on area was variable. Likewise, there were others again – New Deal for Communities being a case in point – where the primary focus was on regeneration but where education was seen as a contributory strand (Batty, 2013). The English context – not least because of the intensive use of ABIs during the New Labour years – is therefore of particular interest when exploring what can be learnt from previous area approaches, and how they might develop in future. But it is also important to note that, in some form or another, ABIs form part of the policy landscape in many countries. There are, for instance, Zones d’Éducation Prioritaire in France, the Harlem Children’s Zone and Promise Neighborhoods in the US, Territórios de Intervenção Prioritária in Portugal, the One Square Kilometre of Education in Berlin, and Educational Priority Zones in Cyprus (for a review of some of these, see Edwards and Downes, 2013). These examples occur in countries with demographics, histories and education systems that are very different from those in England, and the implication would seem to be that ABIs address a concern that is common to many education systems, and may well reflect the inequalities found in many relatively affluent societies and the strategies available to policymakers to tackle these. Nonetheless, the use of education-focused ABIs does present policymakers with something of a chicken-and-egg dilemma: if poverty and its associated disadvantages are seen as a primary cause of poor educational outcomes, then addressing these underlying issues is paramount. However, education is also widely seen as a route out of disadvantage, with improved educational outcomes being seen as central to enabling better life chances. As one secretary of state for education declared: That is why I see my department as the department for life chances. And that is why I see it as my job to boost social mobility.… Our task is to make sure that for everyone involved in learning excellence and equity become and remain reality. (Kelly, 2005) 7

Education, disadvantage and place

Policymakers, therefore, have to decide how to balance these concerns – to improve educational outcomes as a means of tackling disadvantage, or to tackle disadvantage as a means of improving educational outcomes. In England, as in many other countries over recent decades, there has been a strong emphasis on the former strategy, in the expectation that raising standards of performance across the school system as a whole must necessarily benefit the most disadvantaged students. In this context, education-focused ABIs become either redundant or narrowly focused on driving up attainment in the most poorly performing places, as, for example, in the case of City Challenge. However, there has also been a sense that neither raising standards nationally nor focusing on standards in disadvantaged areas will be enough to reduce educational inequalities unless the underlying social and economic causes of disadvantage are also addressed. As an influential report by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) (the education inspectorate in England) argued: Schools, and other educational institutions, can do more to improve their own effectiveness, to plan to ensure that pupils have the curriculum to which they are entitled and can build on the learning they have gained. But most schools in these disadvantaged areas do not have the capacity for sustainable renewal. The rising tide of national educational change is not lifting these boats. Beyond the school gate are underlying social issues such as poverty, unemployment, poor housing, inadequate health care and the frequent break-up of families. Education by itself can only do so much to enable individuals to reach beyond the limiting contours of their personal and social circumstances. (Ofsted, 1993, p 45) The implication of saying that education ‘can only do so much’, of course, is that efforts at educational improvement need to be accompanied by efforts to tackle ‘underlying social issues’, and it is but a short step from this to saying that education-focused ABIs need to extend their scope in order to address these broader issues. It is perhaps no coincidence that just a few years after this report was published, the New Labour government launched its own School Plus report (DfEE, 1999b), arguing that schools in highly disadvantaged areas should link efforts to improve attainment with strategies for working with families and communities, and that these should, in turn, be linked to a much wider range of strategies aiming at ‘neighbourhood renewal’. 8

Introduction

In addition to the knotty conceptual issues raised by all ABIs, therefore, education-focused initiatives raise other questions about the relationships between education, disadvantage and place. They lead us to ask whether educational disadvantage can, indeed, be tackled through educational interventions alone, or whether such interventions must be accompanied by efforts to tackle ‘deprivation’ – understood in an English context as limitations in the economic and other resources to which people have access – and its associated forms of social disadvantage. They lead us to ask whether national strategies can be enough, to use Ofsted’s term, to ‘lift all boats’, or whether these need to be accompanied – or even replaced – by some sort of area initiatives. Furthermore, if education-focused ABIs of some sort are needed, to what extent should they focus on educational performance or have a wider remit in respect of the areas and populations they serve? Above all, if, as we argue, education-focused ABIs should, indeed, have a wider remit, how exactly should they be designed, and what kind of rationale should inform their operation? Taking stock of all the issues raised earlier, it is clear that ABIs are a complex – and perhaps, at times, controversial – approach to tackling disadvantage. Nonetheless, our view is that ABIs still have value and, conceptualised and operationalised appropriately, are worth pursuing. We will argue throughout the book that there is a powerful rationale for an area-based approach: that ABIs’ limitations to date owe much to the ways in which they have been conceptualised and that this can be addressed; and that in order to respond to disadvantages as they are experienced in particular places, it is entirely appropriate for ABIs to differ in the detail of their aims, purposes and operation, and, indeed, for education-focused ABIs to differ from one another. We have not arrived at this stance naively, and are fully cognisant of the challenges to which ABIs have been subject. Our purpose in the second half of this introductory chapter, therefore, is to undertake a certain amount of ‘ground clearing’ before moving on to present our arguments in detail in later chapters. In doing so, we want, first, to tackle some of the key challenges that have been levelled against ABIs, which some critics have used to suggest that they are a fundamentally flawed approach. Second, as a core theme that underpins many of our arguments is about how ABIs are conceptualised, we will set out some of the conceptual foundations on which our own understanding of ABIs, and of their potential, is based.

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Thinking about area-based initiatives: some challenges ABIs have been subject to critical challenges from researchers and others throughout their history. We hope to address the most important of these throughout this book. However, there are a few challenges that demand to be addressed at this early stage because they call into question some of the fundamental assumptions underpinning an area-based approach and, with this, the value of any further exploration of ABIs as a means of tackling disadvantage. They relate to: whether, given the wide variety of ABIs indicated earlier, they can be meaningfully defined; how far they are dependent on the problematic notion of ‘neighbourhood effects’; whether tackling disadvantage by targeting areas makes sense; whether ABIs are capable of generating valuable outcomes; and whether it is viable to pursue area initiatives in the current economic and political climate. In what follows, we offer a brief response to each of these challenges in turn. Defining area-based initiatives As the discussion in the first part of this chapter has suggested, defining what an ABI is, is not entirely straightforward. As we have suggested, ABIs come in many shapes and sizes, differing in their foci, their definitions of ‘area’, their origin in local initiative or national policy, their governance arrangements, and many other characteristics. These variations are such that it is tempting either to identify just one type of ABI as authentic, or simply to abandon the term altogether as being too all-encompassing to use. We adopt neither of these positions. As we have argued earlier, for us, ABI remains a viable general term that is useful in signalling a broad family of initiatives that have in common an attempt to bring strategies, resources and actions to bear in some (in this case, highly disadvantaged) places that are different from those used elsewhere. This targeting of some places rather than others is what makes ABIs different from the variations in policy and practice that occur everywhere as the result of a system of local government and the local delivery of public services – though, of course, such variation can be incorporated into an ABI. Moreover, we see the differences between ABIs as being more than random variations. They arise out of different conceptualisations, and these conceptualisations change over time, perhaps in response to what is learned from previous initiatives, but more often in response to changing priorities, possibilities and understandings.

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Introduction

We have already alluded to this in drawing a very broad distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘new style’ ABIs – the former being government-led and the latter locally led – and have suggested that far from being static, ABIs are an evolving policy approach. To get beyond these somewhat broad, if nonetheless helpful, characterisations, throughout the book, we also see it as valuable to think in terms of different ‘generations’ of ABIs, which, in England at least, succeed but also overlap one another. We identify three generations: • The first generation – Educational Priority Areas would be an education-focused example – were ‘traditional’ ABIs, which were mandated by national policy but otherwise stood alone as an attempt to tackle the local manifestations of disadvantage through purely local action. • The second generation – Sure Start and Extended Schools being examples – began as ‘traditional’ mandated standalone ABIs, but eventually become embedded in wider policy efforts to tackle disadvantage. • The third generation – represented by the emerging ‘new style’ ABIs, which we have studied first-hand and that are reported on later in this book – are essentially locally developed and locally owned initiatives, making the best use of the resources provided by national policy but free to shape these to local needs and able to survive, to some extent, the short-termism and shifting priorities that are the unavoidable characteristics of policymaking at the national level. While we would not wish to argue that this is anything more than a helpful heuristic in understanding ABIs, it does serve two very important purposes from our point of view. First, it makes it clear that by no means all area initiatives are like the ‘first generation’. This is important because we suspect that the failings of ABIs of this kind are often generalised to all kinds of area initiatives, whereas our view is that it is essential to differentiate between problems with area approaches in general, and problems with particular kinds of ABI. Second, and related to this, the notion of generations makes it clear that the conceptualisation of ABIs changes over time. A central argument of this book is that new forms of education-focused ABIs are beginning to emerge on the ground, despite the absence of the overarching central government initiatives that characterised previous decades. There is every reason to believe that these new types of ABI are different from what has gone before, and that they may be able to overcome some of the limitations of their predecessors. 11

Education, disadvantage and place

Area-based initiatives and neighbourhood effects Our position in this book is that ABIs matter because place matters in relation to disadvantage and, specifically, in relation to poor educational outcomes. In Chapter Two, we explore this issue in greater depth. However, there is a lively debate in the research community about so-called ‘neighbourhood effects’ – that is, the possibility that having high concentrations of multiple poor outcomes in particular places has an additional disadvantaging effect over and above the aggregate disadvantage in the area (see contributors to Van Ham et al, 2012b). The idea of neighbourhood effects has an intuitive validity, and certainly appears to have underlain much neighbourhood policy in recent years. The assumption, perhaps, has been that if people are ‘disadvantaged by where they live’, intervening in a limited number of places might have a significant impact on social equality without the need to tackle disadvantaging factors at a societal level. If, moreover, neighbourhood effects are real, ABIs can be conceptualised as attempts to overcome them, and there is, then, a clear rationale for having these initiatives in some places but not others. The problem is that while such effects seem to be apparent in many qualitative studies of disadvantaged areas, they have proved much more difficult to identify in quantitative studies. This raises the possibility that the focus on disadvantaged places – and, hence, on ABIs as interventions in such places – is based on an ecological fallacy, and that what look like disadvantaging characteristics of place can, in fact, be reduced to the existing disadvantages of the people who live in that place. In that case, it is possible that ABIs are a misdirected venture, and that, after all, place does not matter in efforts to tackle the impacts of disadvantage on education (Lupton, 2003). On balance, the evidence seems to suggest that neighbourhood effects are real, at least in some places (Burdick-Will et al, 2011). However, the view we take in this book is that this is largely irrelevant to whether place matters in relation to educational disadvantage and whether area initiatives are a promising way to tackle disadvantage. With Spicker (2001), we believe that places cannot simply be reduced to an aggregation of individual circumstances; places are different, and the relationship between people and places is complex and dynamic. Places differ in their geography, history, infrastructure, demographics and service configurations, and in their relationships to other places. Places are experienced by and shape the lives of the people who live in them – and, at the same time, how people live their lives shapes the places where they live. This means that standard responses and 12

Introduction

standard policies are not always appropriate for different places. For this reason, we argue that area initiatives have much to offer in tackling disadvantage – though this is with the caveat that what they have to offer is much reduced if the complex relationships between people, places and disadvantage are not properly understood. Area-based initiatives and area targeting There are similar debates around the strategy of targeting energy and resources on the most disadvantaged places, and therefore about the role of ABIs as vehicles for such targeting. Again, it makes intuitive sense to say that places that are doing worst should be targeted in this way. However, set against this, many people experiencing multiple and acute disadvantages will live outside ABIs’ target areas, while others who are not acutely disadvantaged may nonetheless live within an ABI’s boundaries. This raises questions about whether targeting individuals, rather than places, would be a more defensible approach (see Smith, 1999; Griggs et al, 2008). Added to this, even if area targeting is seen to be justified, there is then an issue about the grounds on which it is legitimate to target some areas rather than others. For instance, Crace (2006) reported that: government money is usually directed to those areas that fall within the top 10% of deprivation. This means areas just outside this band get nothing and, due to the crudeness of the current system of measurement, many deprived neighbourhoods situated close to comparatively affluent areas get overlooked. We might add that for the kinds of ABIs we are advocating in this book, the opposite might sometimes be the case. Where ABIs are developed locally rather than in response to central government initiatives, some degree of pre-existing local capacity is necessary. The danger is that the places where this does not exist are precisely those that have the greatest need of such an initiative, and that, in fact, the ‘new style’ ABIs we describe here simply capitalise on those instances where local stakeholders already have the capacity to develop innovative local strategies. Indeed, to go a step further, there is a question of whether only disadvantaged places need ABIs. If place matters because places are different, this applies everywhere and suggests that all places could benefit from locally tailored provision and practice.

13

Education, disadvantage and place

Our position in response to these issues is threefold. First, as Tunstall and Lupton (2003) point out, targeting is a matter of designing the most appropriate mechanism for each initiative and for the purposes of that initiative. Specifically, policymakers do not have to choose between ABIs and person-focused, non-area strategies, but between different mixtures of person- and place-based elements. These can be thought about in terms of a continuum ranging from universally progressive policies, through universal policies that allow for spatial intensification, to ABIs that create policies for particular places. Our view is that ABIs should be regarded as just one policy vehicle within a much wider spectrum of activity to tackle disadvantage. Living within the boundaries of an ABI need not be the only way in which people gain access to supportive interventions. Second, while all places matter, not all places need ABIs – or at least not the kind of intensive interventions with which we are concerned here. When most people are doing well, services are not under pressure and the local economic and social infrastructure is broadly supportive, universal policies together with interventions at an individual level may be all that is needed. However, where there are concentrations of disadvantage, a tipping point may arise where more intensive area initiatives become both feasible and necessary. We saw this phenomenon in our study of schools’ Pupil Premium spending (Carpenter et al, 2013). Pupil Premium funding is attached primarily to pupils in receipt of free school meals. We found that schools where few pupils attracted the Pupil Premium tended to use funding to support these pupils individually. By contrast, in schools with high levels of Pupil Premium funding, this was typically used to support multifaceted responses to the challenges schools saw as characterising their local area. Third, as the English policy landscape shifts, so, too, does the basis for deciding what approaches are appropriate in particular places. Over the history of ABIs, we have seen major shifts in the strength of national policies for tackling disadvantage, the willingness of central government to direct what happens locally and the availability of funding to support local initiatives. These shifts, in turn, have implications for the numbers of ABIs that might be needed, their location and their form and purpose. In this sense, the appropriateness of a particular ABI in a particular place depends not only on the characteristics and dynamics of that place, but also on the national policy context at the time. This does not mean, however, that we believe that ABIs should be developed to make good the shortcomings of national policy. Although there are many ways of achieving an alignment between national policy and 14

Introduction

local initiatives in tackling disadvantage, that alignment is essential. To take a particular example, this book is written at a time when the interventionist New Labour government of the past has given way to a Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government much less inclined to mandate and direct local initiatives. If the danger of the former approach was that local understandings were marginalised by central direction, the danger of the latter is that places that lack the capacity to develop their own initiatives will be neglected, and that the most disadvantaged places will do even worse. In both cases, the alignment between national policy and local initiative has been less than perfect. Area-based initiatives and outcomes If place matters, and area-targeting can be justified, there remains a question of whether ABIs are actually worth pursuing. As we have already suggested, and as we shall see in more detail in Chapter Four, the evidence for the effectiveness of ABIs is somewhat mixed. At best, some ABIs are presented as having small but nonetheless positive impacts (Rhodes et al, 2005; Batty et al, 2010; National Evaluation of Sure Start Team, 2012), while others have reported their impacts to be fairly negligible and sometimes even slightly negative (Rees et al, 2007). In either case, ABIs do not appear to have had a transformative impact on outcomes in their target areas, and this raises questions about whether they deserve to have a future. Two issues are pertinent to this. The first is about what ABIs can realistically be expected to achieve, and the second is about whether they are effective in achieving what might realistically be expected of them. In operating locally, ABIs are able, at least in principle, to intervene in local factors that are tied to particular places. However, they present an inadequate response to disadvantages that arise from factors that are not tied to local places – for instance, global economic trends resulting in the loss of local manufacturing jobs. Thus, while ABIs may be locally ameliorative, they are not in a position to intervene in the underlying forces that ultimately concentrate poor outcomes in particular places. This has led to the criticism that ABIs are a form of displacement activity that distracts from the need to address wider structural inequalities (Power et al, 2005), and which can be used to blame those living in ABIs for failing to improve their outcomes when given support to do so (Gulson, 2005). As we frame it, the debate to be had constructively is not whether ABIs can overturn structural inequalities – they neither can nor should 15

Education, disadvantage and place

be expected to. Rather, it is whether there is something that ABIs, by virtue of their local area focus, can contribute to efforts to tackle disadvantage that other policy initiatives cannot. In this respect, even if they only have small impacts, it does not mean that these impacts are not worth having. Understood to be just one approach to be embedded within a wide-reaching, strategic and coordinated attack on disadvantage, we believe that a new generation of ABIs has the potential to make a valuable contribution and is worth pursuing. There is still a question, however, as to whether ABIs are effective in achieving the impacts that they might realistically be expected to achieve. On the basis of the existing evidence, it is far from clear how far the appearance of modest impacts arises because ABIs are difficult to evaluate well, or because they have been poorly designed and implemented, or because the principle of area-based intervention is in some way flawed, or for any one of a number of other reasons. In this respect, there are limits to the judgements that can be made about ABIs’ effectiveness on the basis of current evidence, and developing evaluation strategies that can engage with the range of issues outlined here will be crucial to supporting the development of new-style ABIs. This is an issue to which we return in Chapter Eight. Area-based initiatives and the current policy context As our arguments are informed by our empirical work, they are necessarily grounded in an English context. We are very much concerned with what can be done here and now rather than with what might be done elsewhere and at other times. Nonetheless, we believe the current English context is one from which much can be learned. In part, this is because of the change we have already alluded to from the interventionist approach of the New Labour governments to the somewhat more laissez faire approach of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition. Although, to some extent, this shift marks the demise of traditional ABIs, it has also, we believe, started to create an environment in which a new generation of ABIs might emerge. In many places, New Labour has left a legacy of strong foundations for area-based working, and with policy set on a general trajectory of enabling greater local freedoms, there may well now be opportunities to build on these to create innovative area-based approaches from the bottom up. Indeed, the basic rationale for ABIs actively lives on in policy, if in different guises, not least in the Localism Act (HM Government, 2011) and related policy documentation. For instance, the Department for Communities and Local Government makes 16

Introduction

explicit reference to the need for local-level action in disadvantaged areas, stating: actions … will vary from place to place and need to happen at the right spatial level. In disadvantaged neighbourhoods within a larger local authority area, the focus might be very much on the community and neighbourhood-led interventions to connect the neighbourhood to growth and opportunities nearby, so local partners may decide the priorities might be community development, skills, transport and influence of that particular community over plans for the wider area. (DCLG, 2011d, p 6) Furthermore, to support such moves in practice, new policy vehicles, such as Community Budgets (DCLG, 2011b), are being developed to devolve power to a local level, and have been promoted as a way for local authorities to develop innovative responses to public spending cuts (Cockell, 2013). Quite how education fits into this emerging context of localism and the opportunities it offers for a new style of ABI to emerge, is, to say the least, uncertain. There are competing forces at work within the education system that could both support and undermine these possibilities. On the one hand, freeing schools from local governance arrangements is a (if not the) central pillar of the Coalition government’s drive to improve standards of educational attainment. For instance, the Academies Act (HM Government, 2010a) made it possible for all schools to become academies – state schools, freed from local authority (LA) control, able to act as their own admissions authorities and sometimes managed by sponsoring bodies. As of 1 August 2013, there were 3,086 academies open in England (DfE, 2013a), compared with just 203 at the end of the 2009/10 academic year (DfE, 2013b). The current situation is arguably one in which schools as individual institutions are both more powerful and more strongly and directly accountable to central government than ever before, while, at the same time, becoming increasingly detached from the LAs and communities they serve (Barker, 2012; Hatcher, 2012). However, there are also counter-forces at work. Ultimately, schools remain locally sited institutions. In disadvantaged areas, in particular, they often face considerable challenges to raising standards that are beyond the influence of their internal improvement practices, as they are grounded in their local area contexts (Ainscow et al, 2007, 2008). For instance, Muijs (2010) suggests that even at their most effective, 17

Education, disadvantage and place

schools’ internal practices account for no more than 30% of the variance in pupil outcomes, thereby pointing to a pressing need for greater intervention in pupils’ local environments. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that many schools are actively outward-looking, therefore. Our recent research has demonstrated how some have been building on the partnerships established through their involvement in previous ABIs, and in initiatives such as Extended Services (Carpenter et al, 2013). It has also pointed to instances where structural reforms, such as the opportunity for schools to federate, have enabled schools to create their own area governance arrangements – and, at their most extensive, to pursue complex local strategies to tackle disadvantage (Dyson et al, 2011b, 2012). It seems to us that, in some places at least, it is not out of the question to suggest that schools and their partners might lead the development of a generation of new-style, education-focused ABIs. A second reason for paying attention to the fate of ABIs in the current English policy context is that such a context is widely seen as creating what Lupton et al (2013b) characterise as a ‘cold climate’ and what we, in the final chapter, call ‘hard times’ for tackling disadvantage. This is only partly due to the post-2008 economic crisis and the response of the Coalition government. Looked at from a slightly longer perspective, it is clear that economic, social and educational policy in England has been shaped for some time by what is usually characterised as a ‘neoliberal’ as opposed to a ‘civic’ or ‘social-democratic’ agenda (Gunter et al, 2010). In other words, the emphasis has been on promoting economic competitiveness and relying on market forces (even within public services) rather than on enhancing mutual support and keeping inequalities in check. It is arguable that it is this agenda that has produced a proliferation of ABIs. As inequality grows, disadvantaged people and places multiply, and governments are forced into a series of ameliorative responses. Among these, ABIs enable something to be done about the worst-presenting problems in the most disadvantaged places without requiring governments to abandon their fundamental commitments to competition and marketisation. Fuller and Geddes, for instance, characterising the agenda of New Labour governments as ‘roll-out neoliberalism’, argue that: New Labour … emphasises the responsibility of citizens and communities to address their own deprivation through bodies such as NDCs [New Deal for Communities], in a discourse which reduces poverty to the endogenous nature of place and to the unevenness of public service delivery, rather than the impact of broader economic processes 18

Introduction

and inequalities on place. This ‘resort to community’ does not however represent the kind of thoroughgoing empowerment of citizens which might be the case if it were driven by non-neoliberal ideas.… The contradiction of roll-out neoliberalism lies, therefore, in its subordination of the ‘social’ to the market: given that the widening of social and economic disparities is not merely a by-product of the neoliberal project but the intention and consequence of the restoration of the power of the economic elite, it is unrealistic to expect anything else. (Fuller and Geddes, 2008, p 276) Viewed in this way, the current policy context is something of a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, it encourages the multiplication of initiatives to tackle disadvantage at area level, and thus creates a kind of laboratory in which such initiatives can be studied. On the other, those initiatives are always subordinate to the neoliberal agenda, and always too weak to challenge the fundamental economic, social and political processes that such an agenda sustains. There are, of course, alternatives, and it is arguable that these represent more promising approaches on which any authentic commitment to tackling disadvantage might be based. Continental Western Europe and, particularly, the Nordic countries, for instance, have pursued more social-democratic agendas than the UK and the US, and these have kept inequalities in check, maintained the capacity of state institutions and reduced the need for ‘add on’ interventions (see, eg, Moss et al, 1999; Wacquant, 2008; Power et al, 2010). These alternatives are not the primary focus of this book for two reasons. The first is our concern with the here and now. It is precisely in Lupton et al’s ‘cold climate’ that viable approaches to tackling disadvantage need to be found. Moreover, it is far from clear that the climate elsewhere is not almost equally cold. Although England may be particularly in thrall to neoliberal approaches, they are by no means absent in other countries, even in what were once the social-democratic bastions of Scandinavia (Abrahamson, 2010; Alexandersson, 2011; Dahl, 2012; Klerfelt and Haglund, 2013). There is, therefore, much to be learned internationally from the English experience. The second reason is that although ABIs have latterly been associated with neoliberal policy approaches, they have not always been so and there is no necessary reason why they should always be so. As we shall see in Chapter Four, ABIs in England date back many decades and originate in the broadly social-democratic approaches of (particularly 19

Education, disadvantage and place

Labour) governments in the 1960s. More to the point, our argument throughout this book is that ABIs do not need to be seen as standalone initiatives attempting to hold back the tide of inequality in a hostile environment. They can be and (we shall argue), to some extent, already have been located within wider policy configurations that aim to tackle disadvantage at a national and socio-structural level. Therefore, we see the current English context as offering an internationally important test bed for thinking differently, and quite concretely, about the future of ABIs. The proliferation of ABIs in this country, the shift from interventionist to more laissez faire policies and the ‘cold’ policy climate all offer opportunities to learn both about the limitations of ABIs and the potentially new forms they might take.

Thinking about area-based initiatives: some key concepts In addressing some of the key challenges levelled against ABIs, we have shown that the approach does have value as part of policy efforts to tackle disadvantage. We have also suggested that if this is to be realised in future, some of the limitations associated with ABIs in the past, which have been to do with failings in conceptualisation, will have to be addressed. In this section, therefore, we begin this process by setting out some of the key concepts and ways of thinking that inform our understanding of ABIs, and that accordingly underpin the arguments that run throughout this book. Understanding disadvantaged places ‘Disadvantaged places’ – for our purposes, those places in which disadvantages tend to concentrate – can be understood in ways that can be more or less elaborate. Presented in terms of a broad continuum, these range from understandings that remain at an overarching administrative level, to those that engage with experiences of living in particular places. From an administrative perspective, places tend to be treated as bounded and fixed areas, such as administrative wards, boroughs or city districts. These effectively serve as ‘containers’ in which poor outcomes are located and into which additional resources can be dropped. In this conceptualisation, places ‘are regarded as a backdrop against which human behaviour is played out’ (Hubbard et al, 2004, p 4). However, a closer inspection of these apparently inert containers reveals that they are, in fact, made up of complex sets of characteristics, some to do with the material infrastructure, but many also to do with 20

Introduction

the people who live there and with the cultures and behaviours of those people. Galster (2001, p 2112), for instance, defines neighbourhoods as ‘bundles of spatially-based attributes’ and sees them as including: • environmental characteristics, for example, topographical features and pollution; • proximity characteristics, for example, location and transport infrastructure; • building characteristics, for example, type, design and state of repair; • infrastructure characteristics, for example, roads and streetscapes; • the demographic characteristics of the population; • the class status characteristics of the population; • political characteristics, for example, political networks and residents’ involvement in local decision-making processes; • social-interactive characteristics, for example, friend and family networks; • sentimental characteristics, for example, a sense of identification with the area; and • the existence and quality of local services. Viewed in this way, places have both material and social characteristics. Moreover, as Lupton (2003) points out, these apparently different aspects of place are, in fact, deeply intertwined: the infrastructure of a place, its housing stock and opportunities for employment will help to shape the nature of its population; there will be a multiplicity of social relationships within the population; different populations may attract different services and also shape the nature of service provision; and how people understand the places where they live may, to greater or lesser extent, lead them to ‘adapt their preferences and subjective wellbeing or choices according to what they think is possible for them’ (Walker, 2006, p 167). Furthermore, underlying both the material and social characteristics of places are deeper social processes – the operation of national and global economies, of class systems and other hierarchies, or of national and group cultures, for instance. It is for this reason that many scholars argue that places should be seen not as containers or backdrops, but as both socially produced and consumed, simultaneously shaping people’s lives and, in turn, being shaped by the people who live there (Hubbard et al, 2004). In terms of understanding how place might form a locus for intervention, we have no difficulty with the proposition that it is sometimes useful to begin by identifying relatively fixed and observable characteristics. Knowing which places have the poorest outcomes, the most stressed 21

Education, disadvantage and place

services or the most economically deprived populations may help direct attention to the places where intervention is most necessary. It may also help identify which of those characteristics are what, in this book, we call the ‘factors’ associated with disadvantage. However, if we want to understand how those factors work to produce, maintain and reproduce disadvantage, we have to adopt a much more dynamic view of place, focusing not just on fixed characteristics, but on what we call here the ‘processes’ that shape the place. Put simply, it is not enough to know that a place is characterised by economic deprivation, and that such deprivation appears to be a factor in poor outcomes for children and young people. We also need to know how economic deprivation produces poor outcomes, how it interacts with other factors and how it comes to appear in this place at this time. This is not merely a theoretical distinction. It has real implications for the design of ABIs and for their likely effectiveness. We would argue that there is a basic distinction to be made between ABIs that are designed to be overlaid onto a static ‘backdrop’ of place, and those that are designed to exist actively in place, by engaging with the dynamic processes which constitute that place. To a significant extent, the inadequate conceptualisations of ABIs to which we have alluded are attributable to inadequate conceptualisations of place. As Ainscow et al (2008) note, when areas are treated as a backdrop, action to address the impacts of disadvantage on education most commonly focuses at the level of ‘presenting problems’, typically defined in terms of indicators for which measured outcomes are particularly poor. They note that under the aegis of a single ABI, this can lead to multiple, decontextualised, single-issue interventions being imported into a bounded administrative area, with each intervention being intended to separately address a particular ‘problem’. This, they argue, can encourage an: understanding of the local situation … reduced to little more than a superficial analysis of how local performance measures up against national targets.… To make a rapid impact on the relevant indicators, all that is needed is to focus attention on, and direct (marginally more) resources towards those aspects of performance which are particularly poor. What is missing in this situation … is any more searching analysis of local conditions or any more strategic approach. (Ainscow et al, 2008, p 19)

22

Introduction

This observation invites an exploration of an alternative basis for developing ABIs, founded on much more elaborate understandings of place. These would need to seek to understand and intervene in underlying processes, shifting attention from poor outcomes per se to the causes, and, indeed, the causes of the causes, of those outcomes. In so doing, the emphasis would also need to shift from finding ways of implementing decontextualised solutions (such as ‘evidence-based’ programmes or centrally mandated approaches) in particular places, towards understanding how those places ‘work’ and developing locally customised ways of intervening to change them. As White and Green (2007, p 4) argue: It is important that policy-makers keep in mind that not all neighbourhoods or people are the same – where they are located, their history, their socio-demographic and economic characteristics are crucial in understanding how they operate. This calls for local flexibility in design and implementation of policy in a manner that is sensitive to local circumstances. It is worth adding that this more dynamic understanding of place also adds to the cautionary note we sounded earlier against the assumption that all places need ABIs, or, we might add, that all types of ABI are appropriate for all places that need them. ABIs are interventions in a set of dynamics rather than in a static configuration of characteristics. In the disadvantaged areas where we work, for instance, leaders of ABIs sometimes worry that ‘successful’ people tend to move out of the area, and that the ABI may serve to increase this outflow, making the area as a whole less self-sustaining. Elsewhere, there are worries that the impact of an ABI may be to encourage processes of gentrification that will end up displacing economically poorer people rather than helping to improve their lives. Understanding local dynamics, therefore, means understanding how interventions in those dynamics are likely to impact upon them, and being aware that interventions such as ABIs can, unless they are developed and monitored thoughtfully, do harm as well as good. In later chapters, we will explore what ABIs founded on more complex kinds of understandings might look like in practice. In the meantime, however, the introduction of a dynamic, process-oriented understanding of place raises questions about how the boundaries of places are to be understood if they are not to be equated with

23

Education, disadvantage and place

lines drawn on maps, nor even with concentrations of particular characteristics. It is to this that we now turn. The importance of scale We are introducing the notion of spatial scale as a means of making explicit the question of how disadvantaged places sit within wider contexts, and the different contexts that exist within disadvantaged places. As Hubbard et al (2004, p 6) explain, places do not exist in isolation, but are: situated within and shaped by forces from well beyond their own notional boundaries.… Places and the social relations within and between them are the results of particular arrangements of power whether it is individual and institutional, or imaginative and material. Such a formulation recognises the open and porous boundaries of place as well as the myriad of interlinkages and interdependencies among places. This suggests that while named and nominally bounded, disadvantaged places cannot be understood without reference to their relationships to other places and spatial scales. In an effort to capture this complexity, Crowson and Boyd (Crowson, 2001a; Crowson and Boyd, 2001) draw a parallel with natural ecosystems, suggesting that disadvantaged places are part of a wider ecology of cultural, social, economic and political life taking place at every level, from the micro-level of the individual to the global macro-level. They argue, therefore, that interventions within disadvantaged places have to be formulated as ‘ecological’ interventions, engaging with the systemic nature of place. Taylor (2009) helpfully moves such discussions towards a utilisable framework for exploring local ecologies in relation to education. He does this by proposing a series of interrelated ‘scales of influence’, ranging from the micro, to the meso and the macro geographical levels: the learner (child, adult, employee); the site of learning (school or college, workplace, household); the community of learners (neighbourhood); the local authority (region); the central government (nation); and the international context. These scales present a range of contexts within which education-focused ABIs may act more or less directly. They invite an exploration of: what factors within a place’s local ecology need to be acted upon to improve outcomes; at what scale; and which of these would be most amenable to direct intervention 24

Introduction

at the spatial level of an ABI. This, in turn, offers a framework for thinking about what ABIs can realistically be expected to achieve by identifying the factors and processes they might influence (directly and indirectly), and other factors and processes over which they have little influence but which may impact upon their actions and outcomes (for better or worse). A concrete illustration of this argument is provided by Anyon (2005), in her analysis of how poor educational outcomes come to be concentrated in urban inner-city neighbourhoods in the US. She comments: Urban schools are at the center of the maelstrom of constant crises that beset low-income neighbourhoods. Education is an institution whose basic problems are caused by, and whose basic problems reveal, the other crises in cities: poverty, joblessness and low-wages, and racial and class segregation. Therefore, a focus on urban education can expose the combined effects of public policies, and highlight not only poor schools but the entire nexus of constraints on urban families. A well-informed mobilization centering on education would challenge macroeconomic federal and regional policies and practices as part of an overall plan to improve local education opportunity. (Anyon, 2005, p 177) Importantly, Anyon’s argument does not detract from the need for educational reforms per se, but, in addition, it points to the need for engagement with other aspects of the ‘ecology’ – including minimum wage levels, job availability, tax rates, federal transportation and affordable housing. Anyon also notes that action at any one spatial scale will be limited in what it can achieve (or even, as we noted earlier, counterproductive) unless complementary actions are taken across multiple spatial scales. For instance, she reflects that local community movements: can improve schools in low-income areas to the point that housing values rise, businesses increasingly invest in the neighbourhood, and low-income residents are pushed out by higher rents.… [This] is a reminder that without other public policy changes (in this case, housing policies to maintain low-income housing or policies providing better-paying jobs), successful school reform in low-income

25

Education, disadvantage and place

urban neighbourhoods can have unfortunate, unintended consequences for residents. (Anyon, 2005, p 184) This suggests that outcomes can be changed through local-level interventions, but that these, alone, are not enough to overcome the disadvantages experienced by people living in poor areas. Taking action: purpose and power Bringing an ecological perspective to the exploration of ABIs offers a way of acknowledging both the limitations and possibilities of initiatives. However, it does not resolve all issues about what we might call ‘purpose and power’ – in other words, about what ABIs might aim to achieve and who might need to be involved in developing and leading them. In terms of purpose, the simple assertion that ABIs aim to tackle disadvantage on an area basis is a useful starting point, but is no more than this. What ABIs might be expected to achieve depends upon a range of more fundamental beliefs and assumptions about the kinds of lives people might reasonably hope to lead, the kinds of places where they might expect to live and, ultimately, the kind of society in which they might expect to participate. In Chapter Two, for instance, we differentiate between an emphasis on matters of ‘redistribution’ – the equalisation of resources, opportunities and outcomes – and of ‘recognition’ – the valuing of individual and group differences. In Chapter Six, we suggest that ABIs might be seen as ‘risk-reducing, resilience-building’ interventions. Each of these articulations of fundamental purpose rests on different understandings of the nature of disadvantage and its relationship to place and education, and then has implications for how ABIs will be designed. Lupton (cited in Dyson and Kerr, 2011, p 13), for instance, identifies five main propositions about how the relationship between education, disadvantage and place is understood, the key issues ABIs would need to engage with to intervene in this, and how this might be reflected in their design. These are outlined in Table 1.1. Each of these propositions embodies a complex understanding of how places ‘work’ and how ABIs might intervene within them. However, each one also embodies a different understanding of which outcomes matter most, what action is possible and desirable, and who is in a position to take such action. In our view, none of these propositions is self-evidently to be preferred, and the differences between them ultimately have to be resolved through a deliberative process that has to take place at the local level. 26

Introduction

Table 1.1: Some purposes of education-focused area-based initiatives Proposition

Key issues

Key elements in initiative design

1

‘Schools are contextualised organisations’

Disadvantaged areas create additional challenges and organisational demands and exert downward pressures on school quality

Additional funding and organisational designs for schools in disadvantaged areas

2

‘Area dynamics shape learners’ identities and engagement with school’

Area dynamics help shape the formation of youth identity, aspirations and interests. If education ignores this, it is likely to pass some disadvantaged young people by

Curriculum and pedagogies tailored to local areas

3

‘Different areas need different kinds of educational outcomes’

Education should serve local areas in terms of providing the skills that local employers need and helping build local citizenship

Residents, organisations and agencies in an area ‘visioning’ desired futures and working collaboratively towards them

4

‘Educational outcomes in an area are a shared responsibility’

Local authorities and schools working in the same area have collective responsibility for outcomes in the area

Schools and local authorities working together to share resources and practices that lead to best outcomes overall

5

‘Schools cannot compensate for society’

Poor children are held back from education on many fronts (including poor housing, family poverty, conflict, mobility, etc). Attainment gaps cannot be closed unless these issues are tackled

Residents and agencies working in the same area need to work together with schools to tackle wider disadvantages and take on a community education remit

This, in turn, begs the question of who has the right to be involved in such a process, and whose voice should dominate. ABIs tend to have multiple stakeholder groups in terms of local political leaders, different groups of professionals and local residents belonging to different sub-communities, among others. There is no reason to assume that these different groups will agree with each other, nor indeed among themselves, and every reason to believe that they will have different capacities to get their voices heard. Our position is that all can contribute something by way of legitimacy, understanding and ability to act, and that the aim should be to ensure that each contribution is valued and built upon. In this respect, a useful distinction is made by Warren et al (2009, p 2213) between the exercise of ‘unilateral power’, which ‘emphasizes “power over” others’ and ‘the capacity to get others to do one’s bidding’, and ‘relational power’, which ‘emphasizes the 27

Education, disadvantage and place

“power to” get things done collectively’. It is this latter way of exercising power that Crowson and Boyd (2001) suggest is essential in order to intervene in a local ecology, arguing that different stakeholders should align their interests by forming alliances, networks or advocacy groups in order to facilitate the exercise of collective-minded action to address community problems. It goes without saying, however, that such alignments are difficult to achieve and even more difficult to sustain. Moreover, even where they are achieved, they will inevitably be vulnerable should the national policy environment prove unsympathetic, or should more fundamental social processes provoke division. Therefore, we see differing views, and even conflict, as an integral part of working in areas, and regard ‘relational power’ as something that is always a work in progress. We shall return to these issues in Chapter Nine, when we consider governance issues in ABIs.

Some concluding comments: minimal and maximal models for area-based initiatives Throughout this chapter, we have sought to outline some of the underlying issues that are integral to any exploration of ABIs and the roles they might play in future in addressing the links between education, disadvantage and place. We want to conclude by summarising these issues in terms of a simple heuristic, the value of which lies in providing a basic map of the territory to inform our discussions throughout the book. This ‘map’ focuses attention on four core dimensions underpinning ABIs: 1. Place – how is this understood? 2. Scale – what scale(s) is(are) engaged with? 3. Power – how is power exercised and with whom does power lie? 4. Action – what actions are taken for what purposes and with what outcomes in mind? We suggest that each of these dimensions can be conceptualised in ways that are more or less expansive (referring to these positions as minimal and maximal), and we set these out in Table 1.2 as a series of continua. (The ‘minimal’ and ‘maximal’ columns in the table represent the ends of each continuum.) In doing so, it is also important to reiterate, as we noted earlier, that different understandings may be appropriate to achieving different purposes, and within an ABI, multiple purposes, based on multiple propositions, can be pursued. That said, we would 28

Introduction

see a new generation of locally created ABIs as taking a maximal approach overall. Table 1.2: Minimal and maximal conceptualisations of area-based initiatives Features of a ‘minimal’ conceptualisation

Features of a ‘maximal’ conceptualisation

Place

Static backdrop, container for outcomes, surface for distributing services

Dynamically produced and consumed, part of a multi-scale ecological system

Scale

Intervention focused at a single scale, treated in isolation – not part of a wider ecology

Intervention focused at a particular scale, but conceptualised as nested within a multi-scale ecology. ABIs seen as one form of action within a wider coherent strategy

Power

Unilateral exercise of power – particular stakeholder groups ‘doing’ to others

Relational exercise of power – importance of democratic processes involving multiple stakeholders and leading to collective-minded action

Action

Surface-level response – decontextualised, single-issue initiatives matched to presenting problems. Effectiveness judged primarily on end-point outcome data measured over short timescales

Actions informed by ecological understanding, engaging with the causes of the causes of poor outcomes within a local ecology. Effectiveness judged over time in relation to short-, medium- and longterm goals

In future chapters, we will seek both to position our arguments in relation to these understandings and to elaborate upon them.

The structure of the book In this chapter, we have said something about the ways in which ABIs have been used to tackle the apparent problems of disadvantaged areas and, in particular, to intervene in the relationship between education, disadvantage and place. We have suggested that it is a mistake to see ABIs as all being of one type, and have instead begun to think about how there have been fundamentally different forms of ABI, emerging to some extent in the form of different ‘generations’. We have suggested that the differences between ABIs are at least in part conceptual, and have begun to outline some of the key debates and conceptual issues that surround them. Above all, we have argued that ABIs are not a failed policy approach from the past, but have a role to play in future. That role, however, may demand very different conceptualisations and

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Education, disadvantage and place

operational arrangements from those that have underpinned ABIs in the past. In Chapter Two, we revisit the issue of place and explore precisely how it is that place is implicated in poor educational outcomes. In Chapter Three, we take this analysis and apply it to a case study of an actual disadvantaged area – here, given the pseudonym of ‘Stockborough’. We show how the economics and demographics of Stockborough, combined with the histories and structures of its local education system, work to produce and reproduce particular forms of disadvantage and how, therefore, an ABI might look to intervene in these processes. In Chapter Four, we turn to the history of ABIs in England to see what can be learned from them. We find that their successes have been distinctly limited and explore why this might be. In Chapter Five, however, we turn to case studies of some newer ABIs, and suggest that these open up possibilities for different kinds of area initiatives. We then move on to explore these possibilities in detail, beginning in Chapter Six with an attempt to construct a robust rationale for a new style of ABI. In Chapter Seven, building on the understandings of place developed earlier, we show how ABIs might conduct their own analyses of the places they seek to serve in order to develop a deeper understanding of how educational and other forms of disadvantage are produced in those places, and how, therefore, effective interventions might be constructed. In Chapter Eight, we consider how ABIs operating on the basis of these more complex understandings might best be evaluated and monitored, suggesting that the current rather unidimensional preoccupation with short-term outcomes is inadequate. We then consider, in Chapter Nine, how these ABIs might be governed, how they might be held to account and what the implications are for the relationships between professionals and the people on whose behalf they seek to work. Finally, in Chapter Ten, we bring the threads of the book together, outlining how ABIs might form part of a ‘strategy for hard times’ in the fight against disadvantage. Note The four parts of the United Kingdom - England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales - have many economic, social and educational similarities. Social and economic data in particular are often reported at UK level. However, each part of the country has its own, separately governed, education system; these pursue similar but nonetheless distinct policies. This book focuses primarily on the system in England, but also refers to scholarly work and to social and economic data from across the United Kingdom and internationally. 1

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CHAPTER TWO

Why place matters in education As we argued in Chapter One, when it comes to achieving good outcomes across a range of domains, different places present different challenges and opportunities. An ecological conceptualisation of place can be used to help understand these. It can be used to help identify the factors and processes at work, at different spatial scales, which help to create and perpetuate poor outcomes in particular places. Following this, it can also invite some broad consideration of how area-based initiatives (ABIs) might intervene in relation to poor outcomes in particular places. We now want to apply these general arguments specifically to exploring the relationship between education, disadvantage and place in greater depth. In doing so, we will drill down from national analyses of educational outcomes data to consider a range of research evidence about how the factors and processes at work within local areas may relate to educational experiences and outcomes.

Spatial inequalities in education To understand spatial inequalities in education, it is necessary to unpick the different dimensions of the relationship between education, disadvantage and place. First, as we saw in Chapter One, there is an unequivocal link between socio-economic disadvantage and poor education outcomes. Young people living in poverty, however defined, are more likely to achieve poor educational outcomes than their more advantaged counterparts (Cassen and Kingdon, 2007; OECD, 2008). A government survey of evidence from education, carried out by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), concluded that ‘[economic] deprivation can have a large and pervasive impact on educational attainment’ (Schools Analysis and Research Division Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2009, p 6). In particular, it noted that gaps in cognitive development are evident from an early age, that schooling does little to reduce these gaps and that there are clear links from low attainment to reduced employment opportunities, poorer health outcomes and increased criminality. Second, such evidence also shows that poor education outcomes and socio-economic disadvantage are spatially concentrated, and tend to be found together. For example, the DCSF reported that only 31

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35% of pupils in the most disadvantaged areas in England reached nationally expected levels of attainment at the Foundation Stage in 2007, compared to 51% of pupils in more advantaged areas (Schools Analysis and Research Division Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2009). Similar patterns have also been found at a school level. For instance, at one point, the Social Exclusion Unit (1998) found that five times as many secondary schools were identified by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) (the national education inspectorate) as having serious weaknesses in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in England than in more advantaged areas. When, as part of the survey mentioned earlier, the DCSF mapped the spatial concentrations of schools in England achieving below the national expectation of 30% of pupils gaining five A*–C GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education), including maths and English, this correlated almost exactly with Wheeler et al’s (2005) spatial map of concentrations of urban poverty in England. At this national level, there are clear patterns of spatial inequality, with the poorest outcomes systematically occurring in some of the most disadvantaged places. However, if we look below these general patterns, a rather more complex picture of the relationship between disadvantage, education and place is revealed. More detailed analyses have shown that children experiencing similar levels of economic disadvantage can, in fact, achieve quite different outcomes. For instance, while the DCSF survey cited earlier paints a depressing picture of the low levels of educational attainment of children from poorer backgrounds as a group, it also shows that some such children apparently do very well, with over one fifth achieving benchmark levels of attainment at the end of statutory schooling (Schools Analysis and Research Division Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2009, p 25). If the link between socio-economic disadvantage and poor educational outcomes were a simple, causal one, then all children from poor families should have equally poor outcomes. But this is not the case. Instead, it seems that there are a complex set of mediating factors in children’s environments that, through complex processes, link the two, and that place is integral to this. These environmental factors might include a lack of material resources, parental attitudes and behaviours, children’s own attitudes and behaviours, access to good schools, and the characteristics of the neighbourhoods where children live (Chowdry et al, 2009, p 2). The importance of neighbourhood contexts in influencing educational outcomes has been further indicated by fine-grained neighbourhood-level, geo-demographic analyses. These have 32

Why place matters in education

highlighted that some equally poor urban neighbourhoods have differentially better or worse educational outcomes. For instance, Webber and Butler (2007) found that in neighbourhoods characterised by inner city social housing, pupils consistently achieved better GCSE results than would have been predicted on the basis of the level of poverty in their home neighbourhoods. They found a similar pattern in neighbourhoods with high levels of Asian owner-occupiers, where GCSE results at neighbourhood level were again much higher than would have been anticipated on the basis of socio-economic factors alone. By contrast, their analysis also revealed that some of the neighbourhood types with the lowest GCSE results were large, overspill (historically social) housing estates on the outskirts of England’s larger provincial cities, which were actually less acutely disadvantaged in socio-economic terms. Neighbourhood-level studies focusing on school improvement have also pointed to the importance of neighbourhood dynamics in influencing educational outcomes. For instance, in a study of Chicago schools, Bryk et al (2010) found that school organisational development was much harder to initiate and sustain in certain types of poor neighbourhood than in others. They found improving schools in neighbourhoods that varied by socio-economic and racial-ethnic composition. However, they also found that stagnating schools (ie those that did not improve) were concentrated in very poor, almost exclusively African-American neighbourhoods, suggesting that there was something about these neighbourhoods that made school reform much more difficult to advance. Such studies are important in indicating that place matters in relation to educational outcomes. However, they are less suited to illuminating the processes that lead poor educational outcomes to become concentrated in disadvantaged places. We therefore want to explore this in greater depth by focusing attention on how the ecologies of disadvantaged places shape children’s identities and the relationship between schooling and these identities, and how the school system is both overlaid onto place and part of the dynamics of place, which again shapes the educational opportunities and experiences children can access.

The ecology of disadvantaged places, children’s identities and schooling The ecologies of disadvantaged places first need to be understood in the context of factors and processes operating at wider spatial scales. 33

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Macro theorisations that have examined the shifting fortunes of socioeconomically disadvantaged places in affluent countries over the last 20–30 years have tended to focus on issues of globalisation and the difficulties many Western economies are experiencing in competing on the basis of low-cost, high-volume manufacture (Lash and Urry, 1994; Brown, 1999). These ideas have been neatly summarised by Wacquant (2008) in his notion of ‘urban outcasts’ – namely, those living in the most highly disadvantaged neighbourhoods in industrial towns and in parts of industrial cities who experience advanced forms of marginalisation as a result of global economic factors and the processes they create. These come to be manifest locally in various combinations of: youth unemployment and low-grade, part-time, fixed-term work, which leads to increased social instability and insecurity; the disconnection of marginalised neighbourhoods from the economic growth sectors in towns and cities; and the increasing isolation and stigmatisation of marginalised neighbourhoods, which both lead to the breakdown of local social networks and leave residents feeling insecure and dislocated from where they live. Such studies are valuable in demonstrating how global trends can impact on neighbourhoods, and on the lives of communities, families and children. However, they provide few insights into how people living in highly disadvantaged neighbourhoods respond to the local dynamics that global forces have helped to create. The recent growth in research focusing on smaller spatial scales is more illuminating in this respect. As Kintrea (2010) observes, underpinning this shift in focus on neighbourhoods, there is arguably an assumption that there are neighbourhood effects in operation in the sense of collective socialisation processes operating at neighbourhood level, which lead people living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods to have different beliefs and expectations compared to those in more mixed or affluent neighbourhoods. As we saw in Chapter One, it seems likely that these effects add further disadvantages to already disadvantaged populations. Whether this is the case or not, however, there is less doubt that there are qualitative differences between places. One compelling account is presented by Sanchez-Jankowski’s (2008) ethnographic study of endemically poor neighbourhoods in Los Angeles and New York. He details how, in these contexts, the value systems by which people live their lives, and in which their cultural dispositions are grounded, are both formed and sustained by their immediate neighbourhood environment. As part of these processes, the neighbourhood creates both a shared reference point for social interactions and a physical 34

Why place matters in education

arena in which residents can ‘develop, strengthen and exhibit their value orientations, launch efforts to maximise their interests and host people from other establishments within the neighbourhood’ (SanchezJankowski, 2008, p 33). Within these neighbourhood arenas, Sanchez-Jankowski identifies two value orientations that help residents to act in ways that enable them to create meaningful lives for themselves. The first, which he terms ‘responsibility as security’, is where people try to save money and limit their expectations to realistically achievable goals. Their aim is not to achieve socio-economic mobility, but to protect themselves and their wider families from risks in their local environments, such as unemployment. The second, which he terms ‘responsibility as excitement’, is founded on a belief that as there is little people can do to live comfortably in their neighbourhood, they should ‘find as much excitement as possible in such conditions’ (Sanchez-Jankowski, 2008, p 23). Social and friendship networks, and spending money whenever it is available, are central to this. Sanchez-Jankowski suggests that neighbourhoods where both these orientations operate are fragmented, in that people act and see themselves differently. He also suggests that neighbourhoods can be internally contested when there are multiple ethnic groups who seek to position themselves in relation to one another. Nonetheless, he argues that disadvantaged neighbourhoods are highly cohesive entities, as all residents have strongly place-based identities, grounded in their shared neighbourhood environment. Such place-based processes shape – though do not wholly determine (see Raffo, 2000; Raffo and Reeves, 2000) – children’s and young people’s identities and the sorts of lives they want to lead. This, in turn, is likely to shape their beliefs and expectations about schooling, and lead to different choices and levels of engagement with the school system – or, in short, their dispositions to schooling (Micklewright, 1989; Hatcher, 1998). For instance, Lupton (2006) posits that the characteristics of places affect the individual learners who live in those places by increasing the likelihood of problematic aspirations, low selfesteem and limited parental support for education. These characteristics also affect the schools that serve those places in the form of internal stresses, recruitment difficulties and poor-quality provision – and the schools, in turn, compound the effects on individual learners through poor experiences and limited opportunities.

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Place-based identities and engagement with schooling Young people enter schooling from unequal social starting points. Typically, these are associated with different value orientations and cultural dispositions. We have argued that these are affected (but not wholly determined) by place-based factors – social relations, structures, cultures, material conditions. A long-standing concern relating to patterns of inequality in education is that these orientations and dispositions are differentially valued in the school system, where those associated with high social status – or, as Bourdieu terms it, ‘cultural capital’ – are most highly prized: The educational system … maintains the pre-existing order, that is, the gap between pupils endowed with unequal amounts of cultural capital. More precisely, by a series of selection operations, the system separates the holders of inherited cultural capital from those who lack it. Differences in aptitude being inseparable from social differences according to inherited capital, the system thus tends to maintain pre-existing social differences. (Bourdieu, 1998, p 20) Children’s dispositions to schooling, and the place-based values and cultural dispositions and identities underpinning these, acquire greater or lesser ‘capital’ value depending on how near or far they stand to the knowledge and values that dominate mainstream schooling in such areas as curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). In many, if not all, disadvantaged neighbourhoods, it seems likely that the knowledge, values and dispositions brought to school by significant proportions of pupils are not well utilised with respect to teaching and learning methods or curricular content. As Riddell states: Some young people … will have a background of rich learning in community, but transfer may be weak if the school’s expectations and environment cannot ‘recognise’ the learning and its conventions, particularly if the dominant ones are of a different type from those in school. (Riddell, 2007, p 1033, emphases in original) Indeed, the research evidence suggests that schools serving disadvantaged places often have difficulty in understanding the nature of pupils’ place-based identities. They may, as Hatcher (1998) notes, 36

Why place matters in education

accredit the choices and behaviours of children from disadvantaged neighbourhoods to cultural deprivations experienced in their local environments, rather than to a complex set of often rationally chosen actions grounded in place. Consequently, many children living in disadvantaged communities may come to feel what Frazer (1996) calls ‘misrecognised’ by schools and teachers, with this resulting in an array of ‘status injuries’. Mac an Ghaill (1988), for instance, explores how the cultural disjuncture between neighbourhood and school life can contribute to feelings of alienation for children, families and neighbourhoods. He details how children who feel devalued within the school system may develop strategies of resistance in response, which may, in turn, partly account for the limited educational outcomes achieved by many children in disadvantaged places. Teese and Polesel (2003) further argue that children who experience a disjuncture between school and neighbourhood life can miss out in two significant ways. First, the curriculum (which for most schoolchildren in England, means a centrally prescribed national curriculum or some close variant thereof) too often makes little connection with learning in their local environments, so there is little intrinsic value for them in engaging with the educational experiences on offer. Second, as a result of this lack of connection, children are not always able to identify and engage with ‘the conceptual or codified knowledge associated with the curriculum’ (Young, 2008, p 15), which is central to gaining access to further education, training and employment. In the context of this somewhat negative picture, it is important to recall the points we made at the start of the chapter. Not all children living in disadvantaged places do badly, and in some disadvantaged places, educational outcomes are better than might be expected given neighbourhood characteristics. Furthermore, not everyone has the same experience of living in a particular place, or of engaging with the school system in that place. While, as Lupton (2006) suggests, it seems highly likely that there are a general set of processes at work in disadvantaged places that increase the likelihood of problematic interactions between learners and the education system, there are also locally specific processes to be considered. These are not just to do with how people live and develop their identities with reference to their local environments. They are also about the structure of the school system locally, the types of school that can be accessed, schools’ locations and the characteristics they have acquired over time, how parents exercise school choice, and how schools respond to their pupils’ backgrounds. As a final step in our exploration of the relationship 37

Education, disadvantage and place

between disadvantage, education and place, we therefore also want to consider the nature of the school system and how it operates in place.

The school system and place Schools occupy a somewhat complex position in the ecology of place, in that they are simultaneously local and national institutions. As part of a centralised and marketised national education system, schools are, in some respects, treated as decontextualised institutions. Regardless of where they are located, all schools are: tasked by government with communicating certain knowledge and values through a statutory national curriculum; accountable to government for achieving nationally determined standards; and, at times, required by government to adopt certain internal practices. In these respects, many of the factors driving education policy are of a global nature, such as concerns about England’s future economic competitiveness. There is also an assumption at this level that schools should be able to overcome the barriers to learning that may arise from factors operating at meso (eg neighbourhood) and micro (eg child and family) spatial scales. Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education from 2010 to 2014, has, for instance, argued that schools should serve as engines of social mobility and be able to overcome the disadvantages of birth (Gove, 2011). Moreover, for the past two decades and more, there has been a determined effort on the part of national policymakers to weaken the link between particular schools and particular places. Principally, this has taken the form of enabling parents to express a choice as to which school their children should attend so that, in principle at least, school populations need not be recruited simply from the local area. While the operation of choice is complex, the reality is that there is no oneto-one correspondence between the location of a school and the places where its pupils live (Chamberlain et al, 2006). Particularly in urban areas, where a number of schools are within easy travelling distance, and especially in the case of secondary schools, which typically recruit from relatively wide geographical areas, it makes little sense to think of schools as straightforwardly ‘one community’ institutions. This, of course, has implications for the role that schools might play in ABIs and, as we shall see, demands careful thought about how ‘area’ is defined and how it relates to the school population. Nonetheless, the complexities of patterns of recruitment to schools do not alter the fact that schools remain geographically located and that the majority of them draw their populations from an area that may be wider than the 38

Why place matters in education

housing estates in the immediate locale, but is defined by the distance that children can easily travel on a daily basis. The fact that schools operate locally in this sense means that they are simultaneously shaped by the dynamics of place and, in turn, shape these. Two aspects of this relationship are particularly significant from our point of view: first, the impacts of policy on place; and, second, how places shape schools. National policy has had differential impacts on the school system as it is organised in different places. This has created an unevenly distributed ‘mixed economy’ of different types of schools, which, in turn, leads to differential access to particular types of educational opportunities in different places, and different relationships between schools and the places where they are located. For instance, in Greater Manchester, government data for December 2013 showed just one academy school in Bury and four in Rochdale, but 11 in Oldham and 35 in the city of Manchester itself (see: http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/ leadership/typesofschools/academies/b00208569/open-academies). Added to such recent variations, places differentially experience the cumulative effects of multiple policies over time. While some have been able to retain a relatively coherent pattern of school provision, others hold a complex network of single-sex and co-educational grammar schools, faith schools of different kinds, merged schools, trusts and federations, schools that have been closed and reopened, and ‘failing’ schools about to close. The case study of ‘Stockborough’ in Chapter Three offers an example of just such a place. In other places, the impacts of national policies over time may be more subtle. While the structure of the school system may have changed in line with national policy, previous policies may nonetheless continue to shape people’s behaviours differently in different places. For instance, in one of the disadvantaged towns we have studied (Ainscow et al, 2007), we found that although school catchment areas had ceased to operate some years ago, at secondary level, approximately 80% of parents’ school choices still fell in line with these – even though three of the town’s four secondary schools were located within walking distance of one another and were, in that sense, equally accessible. One of the schools was, moreover, still commonly referred to locally as ‘the grammar’ and still enjoyed the reputation associated with this, some 30 years after the town’s schools had become comprehensive. As this indicates, the processes through which schools acquire different populations can be particularly complex. For example, processes of residential sorting and the selection bias inherent in these are significant, as the nature of an area’s housing stock and its economic base helps to determine who comes to live there (Harding, 2003). 39

Education, disadvantage and place

In turn, as social and physical factors interact, this can lead places to attract particular services, facilities and reputations – including different types of schools, and schools that acquire different pupil populations. Where a school is sited in relation to particular residential areas and transport infrastructures is also likely to be influential, as are residents’ social networks and territorial attachments (Kintrea et al, 2008). How places are positioned in relation to one another matters. A school in a neighbourhood that is geographically and/or socially isolated from other places may well attract pupils from within this tightly bounded area, whereas a school located at the crossover points of multiple boundaries (whether physical, social or administrative) may attract pupils from across a much broader area. Schools’ reputations – whether it be that they are academically ‘good’, offer a safe environment, have good holiday clubs or whatever else – may attract different pupil populations depending upon what pupils and families most value. Schools, in turn, also have the potential to change the composition of local populations. For instance, Glen and Nellis (2010, p 2), in a study of seven major English cities, found that: ‘high performing schools stimulat[e] a price premium in local residential property markets of between 1% and 3% for each additional 10% point improvement in the pass rate in GCSE examinations’. Research has specifically drawn attention to selection bias in school populations, as parental choice operates locally, and different schools attract different pupils. There is, for instance, clear evidence that middle-class families are skilled in exercising their choices about schools, both because of the knowledge of the education system they bring to the market process and because of their ability to purchase a house close to their favoured school (Power et al, 2003; Bell, 2007). This is particularly pronounced in urban contexts where a greater number of schools are accessible (Riddell, 2005). This complex and interacting mix of national policy within dynamic places has, as the Academies Commission notes, created a situation where: The mission of state education is to provide access to educational excellence for all. In practice, the apparent lack of equal access has been a long-standing problem. The UK education system is among the most socially segregated of OECD [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development] countries. This is manifested in socially advantaged pupils being concentrated in the best schools with more teachers, and disadvantaged children 40

Why place matters in education

are over-represented in poorer quality schools. (Academies Commission, 2013, pp 61–2, citations omitted) This places some schools – particularly those serving disadvantaged pupil populations in disadvantaged places – in a position where they ‘are constantly managing tensions and problems directly related to the particular circumstances and context of the school’ (Harris and Chapman, 2002, p 2). These schools are, as Levin (2006, p 402) notes, most likely to ‘face pressures on resources, higher staff turnover, high pupil turnover, lower levels of overt parent support and a history of lack of success’. They are also most likely to struggle to meet national standards, make sustained gains in attainment and attract punitive government sanctions. How schools that come to be in this situation then respond to it – and, indeed, how schools respond so as to avoid finding themselves in this position – has implications for the operation of the local school system, and for children’s access to and experiences of schooling. Sanchez-Jankowski (2008) suggests that schools may choose to orientate themselves in one of two broad ways – as either ‘enterprise-’ or ‘neighbourhood-’oriented. A school with an ‘enterprise orientation’ is one that actively seeks to create a school culture that will enable it to achieve more highly in relation to state agendas and secure a better market position. By contrast, a school that orients itself as a neighbourhood institution is one that seeks to recognise, value and reaffirm neighbourhood cultures. As Sanchez-Jankowski (2008, p 34) explains: [Schools] take on an ‘enterprise’ character when they are governed primarily by values, norms and interests exogenous to the neighborhood and fulfil primarily the needs of the state and wider society or primarily their own … interests.… Because the state’s agendas represent exogenous interests, they rarely support the local social structure and are generally resisted by local residents. When residents succeed in making … schools predominantly reflect and reinforce the neighbourhood’s values, norms, and interests rather than the state’s these establishments take on the dispositions of neighborhood institutions. In a competitive, marketised system where poor institutional performance attracts punitive sanctions, there are considerable incentives for schools to act to manipulate local circumstances to 41

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their best advantage. For example, witness statements submitted to the Academies Commission suggest that some academies have sought to subvert the requirement for non-selective admissions processes by asking prospective parents to complete complex forms. The Academies Commission comments that such processes have effectively enabled ‘schools to select pupils from more privileged families where parents have the requisite cultural capital to complete [these] in ways that will increase their child’s chances’ and were ‘resulting in schools with skewed intakes that do not reflect their neighbourhoods’ (Academies Commission, 2013, pp 65, 66). As importantly, the Commission emphasises that not all academies employ such processes, and that many are committed to engaging with their local communities. Indeed, it notes that acting on a more neighbourhood-oriented basis can also change local dynamics and the nature of pupil populations in schools in particular places. For instance, it reported that, over time, schools established during the initial phase of the academies programme had seen a decrease in the proportion of disadvantaged pupils on roll, and there was some evidence of corresponding changes in the intakes of other local schools. It went on to argue: Such patterns should not necessarily be attributed to academies’ manipulation of admissions, as some commentators appear to do. A newly resourced and thriving academy may attract local families who would previously have tried to send their children elsewhere. In this sense, such academies genuinely become more reflective of their local community – and encouraging a better social mix is beneficial for everyone. (Academies Commission, 2013, p 64) Quite simply, the school system, in itself, is highly complex, and as the school system operates in place, the situation becomes more complex still. A mixture of local dynamics and national policies lead schools to acquire particular characteristics, while, at the same time, schools have some potential to influence the characteristics of both place and other schools. Added to this, how people in particular places engage with the school system, and how their experiences of place shape that engagement, are important – as are how schools respond to place-based identities, values and dispositions. ABIs, in aiming to improve educational outcomes on an area basis, are therefore seeking to intervene in extremely complex local ecologies, in which many of the factors and processes in which they 42

Why place matters in education

might wish to intervene may be outside of their scope of influence. By way of conclusion, we wish, therefore, to reflect on the issues raised throughout this chapter by considering how education-focused ABIs might orient themselves in seeking to intervene in disadvantaged places.

Education-focused area-based initiatives: possible orientations The complex relationships between education, disadvantage and place that we have traced in this chapter seem to us to have three implications for evaluating the ABIs of the past and for exploring the potential of ABIs of the future. First, they strengthen the case for interventions that are able to take into account what we have called the ‘dynamics’ of particular places. Attempting to improve outcomes without understanding how those outcomes come to be produced in particular places seems negligent in the extreme. Likewise, it seems wilful to attempt to raise the performance of schools and other educational institutions without understanding why particular institutions in particular places come to do badly. The more we learn about the role of place in educational disadvantage, the clearer it becomes as to why policies operating across the national system as a whole fail to lead to improvements in outcomes in all schools. Second, our understanding of these complex relationships suggests that ABIs themselves need to take this complexity into account. Even locally based initiatives are going to be limited in their effectiveness if they focus on the surface manifestations of educational disadvantage and fail to address the processes that underlie poor outcomes and poor institutional performance. The implication is that ABIs need to look beyond traditional educational concerns. As Anyon (2005, pp 2–3) argues, this complexity necessitates a rethinking of ‘what counts as education policy. Rules and regulations regarding teaching, curriculum and assessment certainly count; but perhaps policies that maintain high levels of urban poverty and segregation should be part of the educational policy panoply as well.’ This undoubtedly means that ABIs need to be embedded within a wider range of educational, social and economic policies aimed at tackling the sources of disadvantage that lie beyond the area. However, it equally means that ABIs themselves need to address those sources insofar as they lie within the area. Narrowly conceived ABIs, concentrating, say, on internal school improvement strategies in the schools in an area, are, it would seem, unlikely to have more than a limited impact on the problems of highly disadvantaged places. 43

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Third, the discussion in this chapter suggests that orientation – whether towards an ‘enterprise’ or ‘neighbourhood’ agenda – is also integral to shaping the approach an ABI might take as it seeks to understand and intervene in place. We suggest that a helpful framework for thinking about this is to consider the purposes that educationfocused ABIs may serve in relation to agendas of ‘redistribution’ or ‘recognition’ (Raffo, 2010). Taking these in turn, a redistributive agenda is about trying to ensure that children in disadvantaged neighbourhoods have access to the same range and quality of opportunities as those in more advantaged areas. They tend to focus on the challenges disadvantaged places might be seen as presenting (eg lack of parenting skills, lack of appropriate role models and networks of support, lack of access to employment) and on the related challenges schools face (eg difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff, disengagement from learning, poor behaviour). Their actions may, therefore, include things like the provision of parenting programmes to improve parents’ support for children’s schooling, and collaborative partnerships between schools to support improvements in teaching and learning. Surfacing the underlying ideological stance and the power relationships in any ABI acting on a redistribution agenda will be particularly important. This is because there is an inherent danger that if power is located exclusively with professionals, they could act (whether intentionally or not) in ways that ‘misrecognise’ and cause ‘status injuries’ to children, families and communities. There is, for instance, a marked difference between parenting programmes in which professionals seek to correct parents’ deficits and those that support parents in relating to their children in ways that positively reflect their identities, values and dispositions. A recognition agenda is primarily concerned with ways of overcoming the stigmatisation of disadvantaged places and the people who live in them, the exclusion of those people from civic life, and the mismatch between their place-based identities, values and dispositions and those promoted by schooling. Developing partnerships in which power is shared between professionals and children, families and communities, is integral to enacting this. For instance, a recognition agenda suggests that schools may need to enhance their democratic governance arrangements, and to develop a better understanding of children’s identities in order to support them to make informed choices about their educational lives. In practice, this might, for example, include actions to support schools in developing place-based curricula that enable the different ‘funds of knowledge’ grounded in the local area to be respected and utilised in schools (see Gonzales et al, 2005; Facer, 2010). 44

Why place matters in education

The danger inherent in a recognition agenda is that it reinforces the barriers to engagement with education and access to wider opportunities that are grounded in local environments. Therefore, a recognition agenda also has to be about providing support to children, families and communities to address factors that either limit their expectations or stop them from realising these. At a micro-scale, this could, for example, be about developing curricular and pedagogical relationships in schools that recognise and give voice, choice and independence to young people (Goodson, 2008; Hattam et al, 2009). Helping teachers to move beyond a ‘pedagogy of indifference’ (Lingard, 2007) in order to create appropriate bridges from young people’s lives to school-based teaching and learning experiences, and to wider life experiences grounded in other contexts, is also important – if a potential challenge to their professional identities (Gruenewald and Smith, 2008). In sum, it appears to us that in future, whatever purposes ABIs pursue, and whatever actions they take, they must be closely aligned with an understanding of their target area’s local ecology and with the factors in that ecology that an ABI can influence. This means that the next generation of ABIs will need to be bespoke to the places in which they operate. In Chapter Three, we provide an empirical illustration in support of these views by presenting a case study of the local processes that have created and sustained poor educational outcomes in the town of ‘Stockborough’.

45

CHAPTER THREE

Local education systems as products of place: a case study In this chapter, we want to provide an empirical illustration of our arguments that place matters in shaping educational outcomes, and that future area-based initiatives (ABIs) must therefore be bespoke to the places in which they operate. To do this, we present the case of Stockborough (a pseudonym), a mill town in the north of England, where between 2006 and 2011, we were closely involved in efforts to address the relationship between education and disadvantage. One of us (Dyson) was a member of a university team that supported a network of Stockborough secondary schools to enhance equity in their own institutional contexts (for an account of the Stockborough Equity Research Network, see Ainscow et al, 2012). Another of us (Kerr) led two successive research studies in the town. The first explored how children and families accessed and experienced education locally, and the second focused on the impact of nationally initiated, joined-up policy approaches to tackling disadvantage, and education’s role within these. These studies involved interviews and focus groups with children, parents and community members, faith leaders, councillors, voluntary sector workers, and professionals in local authority (LA) services and schools. The data we report come from these studies.

The town context Stockborough has a population of about 85,000, and is the largest population centre in its local authority. It is relatively isolated, connected by road to other smaller towns and villages, and located on the edge of moorland. The town has distinctive residential areas, which are also relatively isolated from one another; there are good transport links to the town centre, but not so between residential areas themselves. There are, however, three cities within a 35-mile radius of Stockborough and the town has good rail and motorway connections to these. Like many northern towns, Stockborough grew during the midto late 19th century as a centre for the textile industry. The town’s housing stock reflects this heritage, including areas with narrow streets 47

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of two-up-two-down terraced housing and areas with larger Victorian villas. There are also social housing estates and high-rise buildings built between the 1930s and 1960s as town centre slum areas were cleared. By the latter part of the 20th century, the town’s textile industry was in sharp decline and its last working mill closed in the early 1980s. Employment opportunities in the town are now very limited and are overwhelmingly concentrated in small businesses. Descriptive data In England, area statistics relating to disadvantage are gathered together in the so-called ‘Indices of Deprivation’ (DCLG, 2011c). These statistics relate, among other things, to income, employment, health and education, without the implication of cultural deficits that the term ‘deprivation’ sometimes carries. As might be expected given Stockborough’s relative isolation and poor economic infrastructure, the 2010 Indices of Deprivation reveal high concentrations of unemployment and income deprivation. Of the 129 Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs; small administrative areas of about 1,500 people) in the LA, 20 LSOAs fell within the worst 10% nationally for employment deprivation, 13 of which were in Stockborough or on its outskirts. Income deprivation was even more starkly concentrated in the town. In the LA, 15 LSOAs fell within the worst 10% nationally. Fourteen were in Stockborough, nine in the west of the town and five in the north. Data at ward level, although less fine-grained than LSOA data, is also particularly illuminative of spatial patterns of deprivation in Stockborough. This is because Stockborough’s consistently two most deprived wards capture two distinct styles of housing, which have attracted particular communities. The first, which we refer to as ‘Stockborough West’ (population about 14,000), corresponds closely to an area of poor-quality and largely private rental terraced housing, separated from neighbouring areas by the road layout. The second, which we call ‘Stockborough North’ (population about 10,500), encompasses two social housing estates. On a best-fit model, the LA has assigned Stockborough West 11 LSOAs. Six of these were in the 10% most deprived nationally, and three were in the most deprived 10–20%. Stockborough North has been assigned 10 LSOAs, three falling in the 10% most deprived nationally, and four in the most deprived 10–20%. Both wards also had growing grey economies, often in the form of unlicensed small enterprises such as taxi services. Table 3.1 provides some further 48

Local education systems as products of place

illustrative data, compiled by the LA during our fieldwork using 2001 census data, 2004 Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) data and LA monitoring data. For comparative purposes, this also shows figures for Stockborough’s consistently least deprived ward. Table 3.1: Indicators of deprivation in Stockborough by ward Indicator of deprivation

Percentage Stockborough West

Stockborough North

Stockborough South

People aged 16–74 with no qualifications

46

43

23

Dependent children living in households with no access to a car/van

31

41

9

Dependent children living in households with no adults in employment

36

32

7

Children under 16 living in deprived households

51

42

10

Resident pupils receiving Free School Meals

39

28

5

Note: Percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number.

Ethnic-residential dynamics Stockborough, like many former textile towns, also has stark ethnic divisions in its population. At the time of our most concentrated fieldwork, its population was about 80% white British, 10% Asian heritage and 10% ‘other’. This reflected two distinct waves of immigration in the last 60 years. The first, in the 1950s, saw families drawn largely from around a single town in Kashmir, Pakistan, who were proactively recruited to provide unskilled labour for the textile industry. The second wave followed the expansion of the European Union in 2004, and has resulted in a growing number of Eastern European migrants and notable numbers of refugee and asylum-seeker families, often of Roma heritage. This has been reflected in patterns of residential settlement. Stockborough North’s social housing estates have overwhelmingly white British populations, the original residents moving there following slum clearances, and others following in pursuit of better housing. Census data from 2001 showed Stockborough North to have a 97% 49

Education, disadvantage and place

white British population. Many of the original South Asian immigrants settled in the terraced housing in Stockborough West that these white British families were leaving. Census figures from 2001 reported 53% of Stockborough West’s residents as of Asian heritage, with 49% specifying Pakistani heritage. During fieldwork in 2008, LA officers estimated that the actual figures were nearer 70% Asian heritage, with a growing Eastern European population. Our interviews revealed a range of factors that compounded and sustained these ethnic-residential divisions, inter- and intra-ward. For example, in Stockborough North, two right-wing British National Party councillors had been elected. Contrastingly, Stockborough West’s councillors were all first- and second-generation members of the original Kashmiri immigrant community. Although the town had not experienced the rioting seen in some northern mill towns in 2001, there were reports of police raids on premises in Stockborough West where bomb-making equipment was believed to be stored. Intra-ward tensions were also particularly evident in Stockborough West, where tensions between younger and older generations, and families with more and less traditional beliefs, were reported. There were, for instance, mixed feelings about the traditional views promoted by the ward’s councillors, who maintained close links to their community’s town of origin in Kashmir. They were described to us both as ‘village elders’ and ‘village idiots’. In more traditional families, arranged marriages, with brides moving to or from Kashmir, were not uncommon. Residents who identified themselves with particular forms of Islam also tended to cluster together, effectively creating different residential ‘zones’ in the ward. We also heard of tensions between some members of Stockborough West’s Asian heritage population and Eastern European arrivals, particularly of Roma heritage, who were said to be very reluctant to report anti-social incidents to the police. Staff from a ward coordination initiative explained that many of these new arrivals spoke little English, were unable to access declining local employment opportunities and were often ineligible for benefits. This, in turn, was forcing them to live in overcrowded conditions and placing them at risk of destitution. On reflection, Stockborough West and Stockborough North appear similar in terms of measured deprivation, but focusing purely at the level of outcome data is to miss the complex inter- and intra-ward dynamics underlying these, which mark the wards as distinctly different. In the following sections, we relate this to education by exploring the nature of Stockborough’s local education system, how this interacts

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with the town’s ethnic-residential dynamics and how this shapes pupils’ educational experiences.

Stockborough’s local education system During the late 2000s, Stockborough had falling school rolls and an unsustainable number of surplus school places at primary and secondary level. At primary level, this meant that pupils typically attended their first choice of school, and 80% attended the school closest to their home. The situation was considerably more complex at secondary level, shaped by the continuing legacies of previous education policies. Stockborough’s LA was created in the 1970s by merging two boroughs, each with selective education systems. From this foundation, the LA’s secondary education system had developed to include 16 secondary schools. Of these, two were selective grammar schools, two were denominational schools (one Church of England and one Roman Catholic) and one was a special school serving children with complex learning needs. Of the 11 remaining schools, six (mainly former grammar schools) had sought to enhance their status locally by opting out of LA control as grant-maintained schools in the late 1980s, and then returning only to very limited LA control as foundation schools following policy changes in 1997. Once selective, faith and foundation schools were accounted for, five LA-maintained schools were left, and these overwhelmingly served the poorest parts of the authority. This mixed economy of schools had created an intense hierarchy at secondary level, with the grammar schools, faith schools and highperforming foundation schools at the apex, and the lowest-performing, non-selective maintained schools at its base. This was seen most intensely in Stockborough itself, where the two grammar schools, two denominational schools and three poorly performing non-selective schools were located. There were also three independent schools in and around the town. Added to this, was the ever-present threat of school closure in response to falling school rolls, so that schools had to compete not only for the most able pupils, but to maintain numbers in general. For instance, we heard reports that when the grammar schools had spare places at the start of the academic year, they would actively, in the words of one head teacher, ‘poach’ the most able pupils from other schools, creating an unstable situation for both schools and pupils. Overall, as the most able (and typically more advantaged) pupils were drawn up Stockborough’s school hierarchy, this created a situation where spaces were created in those schools lower down. Consequently, not only did the bottom-of-the-hierarchy schools have 51

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disproportionately low numbers of higher-attaining pupils on entry, but in order to fill surplus spaces, they were obliged to admit pupils arriving during the academic year (typically, new arrivals with poor English language skills) and those excluded from other schools, who often presented significant social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. This compounded the fact that, to begin with, these schools typically served the town’s poorest areas where children were most likely to experience acute disadvantage. Stockborough’s school populations Here, our particular interest is in Stockborough’s bottom-of-thehierarchy secondary schools, which served the town’s poorest areas, and in Stockborough West’s two primary schools. We start with the secondary schools, referred to here by the pseudonyms Central, Moorside and Highlands. Central was located on the edge of Stockborough West. It had a stable pupil population, with typically about 90% of pupils being of Asian heritage and about 85% having English as a second language. Most of the pupils lived within walking distance of the school, though Central was rarely the first choice for the small proportion of white British families living locally. Moorside was located in Stockborough North. It had a stable and almost exclusively white British pupil population drawn largely from the ward’s social housing estates. The very small number of Asian-heritage families living locally typically chose to send their children to Central. Highlands was located on a particularly isolated housing estate on the town’s eastern edge. Although this was especially difficult to access by public transport from other residential areas, Highlands drew pupils from across Stockborough. Its pupil population was highly mobile and majority white British, with a growing proportion of Eastern European pupils. There was also a very tangible sense that the schools actively ‘belonged’ to different ethnic-residential groups. This had become an explicitly political issue in the mid-2000s when the LA proposed to close Central and Highlands, and to build a new school midway between them. There was a strong rationale for this: both schools were too small to remain viable (having about 600 and 400 pupils, respectively); the LA needed to reduce surplus places; the school buildings were inadequate; and LA services, not least English as an additional language (EAL) support, were being spread too thinly across too many schools to be effective. However, Asian-heritage and white British families mounted very public opposition to the plans. In response, Central and Highlands both threatened to effectively opt out 52

Local education systems as products of place

of LA control by applying for foundation status. Looking for their own ‘opt-out’, a coalition of councillors and Imams from Stockborough West also started to investigate the possibility of using private financial resources to establish an Islamic girls’ school, arguing that even if it was academically unsuccessful, “it would at least teach values and culture” (Councillor, Stockborough West). Ultimately, the LA capitulated in the face of such opposition and funding was secured to rebuild the schools on or near to their existing sites. This perpetuated many of the difficulties the LA had hoped to address. Both schools remained obliged to accept pupils arriving during the school year and LA services remained too thinly spread to support them effectively. A further issue that seems likely to have compounded these divisive dynamics was that many of Stockborough’s most disadvantaged communities had very limited access to higher-performing schools. Denominational schools were inappropriate for many, and particularly so for much of Stockborough’s Asian-heritage population. Local knowledge about grammar schools was limited and families often had very limited capacity to support their children to undertake the 11+ examination. We were presented with some specific examples of this when we met with members of a women’s group attached to a mosque in Stockborough West. Through an interpreter, one mother explained how she had become so worried about where her son might be forced to go if he could not attend Central that she had finally visited her GP to seek advice. Her GP explained about the grammar school system, and when her son failed the grammar school entrance examination (known as the 11+), suggested he might attend one of the town’s fee-paying schools. The head teachers at Stockborough West’s two primary schools, referred to here by the pseudonyms Queens Road and Parkview, also reported that parents needed information and guidance on the English school system. As the head teacher at Queens Road commented, while open evenings were well attended, “[parents] don’t know what questions to ask and it’s often through an interpreter, who is often the child”. They also reported that aspirational parents tended to rely on expensive private tutors to support their children in undertaking the 11+, and that this option was affordable to very few local families. An additional gender dynamic was noted, as both head teachers commented that some families would make considerable sacrifices to help their sons secure a grammar or private school place, but saw Central as perfectly adequate for their daughters, who, in some cases, would be expected to leave the education system at age 16 to marry.

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Overall, when we spoke to parents in Stockborough’s most disadvantaged areas about why they favoured their local secondary schools, and what they perceived as a good school, attainment was low on their list of priorities. For many, a more important concern was that their children would be safe, by which they meant being with other children from the same background, while a ‘good’ school was more typically seen, in the words of one parent, as one that “reaches out to the community”. In Stockborough North especially, there was considerable local loyalty to the school. Quite simply, local families had, without question, always sent their children there; as one parent expressed it “it may be a crap school, but it’s ours”. Similar dynamics appear to have operated at primary level, as illustrated by Stockborough West’s two primary schools – Queens Road and Parkview. In common, both had about 500 pupils, levels of free school meals and special educational needs that were well above the national average, and significant proportions of children starting school with no English language and whose parents often had very limited English. However, Parkview had a stable, almost exclusively Asian-heritage population, drawn largely from the original Kashmiri migrant community, where the majority of families spoke Punjabi at home. By contrast, Queens Road served a more diverse and transitory population. The head teacher estimated that 40 different languages were spoken at home, and children of South Asian heritage (although generally not from the Kashmiri-derived community), from Eastern Europe (most notably Czech, Slovakian, Lithuanian and Polish) and from West African countries made up the largest proportions in the pupil population. When the school had to be temporarily relocated near Parkview because of building works, the head teacher also recounted how parents were reluctant to bring their children to school in what they saw as another ‘zone’. Just as there were tacit processes of residential sorting within the ward, there were parallel school sorting processes at work.

Schools’ responses to their pupil populations As we have seen, a wide variety of processes – relating, not least, to the hierarchical nature of the school system, schools’ locations and communities’ perceptions of school ‘ownership’ – created distinctive populations in the schools serving Stockborough’s most disadvantaged areas. We now want to explore how this has also helped to create distinctive in-school experiences as schools have sought to respond to the challenges and opportunities associated with their pupil 54

Local education systems as products of place

populations, and to the need to meet national targets for attendance and attainment. In doing so, we focus again on Queens Road and Parkview, and on the three bottom-of-the-hierarchy secondary schools, Central, Moorside and Highlands. It is important to note that in the late 1990s, all of these schools were in the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) special measures category (ie seen to require significant improvement), with the exception of Highlands, which was rated satisfactory. By the late 2000s, Parkview was judged outstanding, while Queens Road continued to move in and out of special measures. At secondary level, Central had been judged good, and Moorside and Highlands were in special measures. In the following, we explore what accounts for these different trajectories. Primary schools in Stockborough West When we first visited Queens Road, the school had had five head teachers in six years. The then head teacher had been in post for a year, and the school had recently been graded satisfactory by Ofsted. Ofsted credited improvements to strong leadership, professional development in relation to core subjects and a focus on improving children’s communication skills. It also noted that previous strategies to raise standards by narrowing the curriculum had been to the school’s detriment and that steps were being taken to address this. When asked about the challenges and opportunities that came from the pupils’ local environment, the head teacher talked about the strategies being put in place to meet the needs of a linguistically diverse mobile population. These included supporting parents to complete forms and teaching children to interpret forms for their parents, and employing both a Polish-speaking teaching assistant and a family worker who spoke Punjabi and Arabic. The school also employed an external agency to provide family literacy classes three days a week, and on Friday afternoons, ran a ‘language café’ where parents were invited into school to speak their home languages with pupils. In these ways, the school was trying to ensure that it met families’ basic needs, involved parents in their children’s education and valued its linguistic diversity rather than seeing it simply as a barrier to learning. We lost contact with the school when the head teacher left two years later. The school returned to special measures shortly afterwards. Ofsted reported that it had failed to maintain previous improvements, and that the positive relationships fostered with parents and children were masking serious academic failings. This cycle of moving in and 55

Education, disadvantage and place

out of special measures, and of head teachers coming and going, has repeated itself several times since. The school’s most recent Ofsted report at the time of writing also suggests that its positive community relations had started to break down, and some pupils reported feeling inter-ethnic tensions. By contrast, Parkview had been able to break this cycle. Having had six head teachers in four years, the school’s head teacher throughout our fieldwork, Mr Ali (a pseudonym), had been in post since the early 2000s. He has created a distinctive vision for Parkview by using his own Asian-heritage background to engage with, and, at times, explicitly challenge, values and dispositions in the school’s largely homogeneous community. In particular, he has explicitly set out to promote a positive British-Asian identity, and one of the questions guiding the school’s mission statement is: ‘Do the opportunities the school provides enable children to understand their role in society as British Asians?’ Engaging with pupils’ cultural backgrounds also appeared integral to Parkview’s strategies to raise attendance and attainment. During an interview, Mr Ali explained that when talking to parents about educational aspirations and the importance of striving to achieve, he often used a Punjabi term for the respect that comes from being good at a job. The school had introduced a policy of rewards for hard work, and pupils who worked hard for a sustained period were awarded a free two-week family membership of the school’s breakfast club, which also served as a means of bringing parents into the school. There was also a dedicated room for parents’ use, and mothers were especially encouraged to take part in English-language classes and wider activities. Parkview had also developed strict policies on attendance. In particular, Mr Ali explained how he had tracked pupils’ decline in attainment after extended stays in Pakistan, and had introduced a strict policy limiting such stays to 10 days during term time. As part of this arrangement, pupils were also required to present the school with a journal of their visit to Pakistan on their return, with this becoming a resource for the school library. Notably, the local councillor who was on the board of governors was ‘sacked’ for non-attendance at school governor meetings during one such extended stay. Extra-curricular activities had also been used to challenge community norms and values. For instance, Parkview had established an Asian dance troop and Mr Ali presented this as particularly important in creating positive opportunities for girls in a community that often limited their expectations. He recounted how, in his own words, he had had “to battle” with some fathers to get them to allow their daughters to participate. It is also interesting to note that the school 56

Local education systems as products of place

has, more recently, reportedly used some of its Pupil Premium funding to provide tuition for the 11+ examination. While there are undoubtedly some aspects of practice that Parkview and Queens Road could share to the benefit of both, local dynamics mean that they also have distinctive populations, and what is appropriate for one may not be for the other. For instance, in Queens Road, with its diverse population, setting out to forge a single cultural identity as Mr Ali has done in Parkview would be inappropriate. There are also questions to be asked about Mr Ali’s approach when considered in the context of local area dynamics. These include whether the school’s approach (tacitly) reinforces divisions within the local area, and what would happen should Mr Ali leave the school. Stockborough’s bottom-of-the-hierarchy secondary schools Central, the only one of the three secondary schools to improve, employed very different strategies to Parkview, though it served an almost exclusively Asian-heritage population. In just three years, Central’s GCSE results rose from 15% of pupils achieving five A*–C grades, including maths and English (comparable to Moorside), to nearer 50%, just slightly below the national average. Again, this was attributable to the actions of a new head teacher who introduced a policy of internal streaming that mimicked the town’s selective school system. At the end of Year 9, pupils were placed into academic and vocational strands. Those placed in the academic strand were seen as having the potential to achieve five A*–C grades at GCSE and received intensive academic support, including additional study schools outside term time. Those placed in the vocational strand studied for BTEC (Business and Technology Education Council qualifications) and GNVQ (General National Vocational Qualifications), with a GNVQ then being worth the equivalent of four GCSEs in school league tables. This policy was becoming increasingly well-established during our engagement with the school, and both positive and negative impacts were being noted. On the one hand, attainments at the school were higher than ever before, with many more pupils gaining qualifications and entry to further education (FE). On the other, there was growing evidence that this was being achieved at a cost. For example, there was a high drop-out rate among Central’s former pupils at post-16, when it became necessary for them to transfer to a school with a sixth form, or to the FE college. The explanation we were commonly presented with was that once the school’s intensive support was withdrawn, its former pupils were unable to cope with the demands of independent 57

Education, disadvantage and place

study, and that the grades they achieved at GCSE were not actually indicative of their abilities. In addition, some of the pupils we spoke to who had been placed in the vocational strand clearly felt that the system was unfair. Their comments to us included: “[the teachers] don’t think much of us lot”; “[the academic] strand get more attention”; “[pupils in the academic strand] get more opportunities”; and “everyone should have an equal shot at the exams but you can’t”. Moorside, serving social housing in the north of Stockborough, had also appointed a new head teacher shortly before we became involved with the school. However, despite a range of internal reforms focusing on teaching, learning and improving behaviour, attendance and attainment remained low and Moorside continued to fluctuate between Ofsted’s ‘special measures’ and ‘satisfactory’ categories. It had also become the focus of sustained negative media coverage, which portrayed Moorside pupils as unteachable and out of control. Many of the pupils we spoke to complained about this, saying that they felt they were being pre-judged and that their achievements went unnoticed. Some even reported that they would be verbally abused if they went into the town centre in their school uniforms. Notably, Moorside also had a distinctive issue with internal truancy; pupils liked to spend time on-site, saying that they felt safe there, but once in school, did not always attend lessons. Ofsted also identified staff resistance to school improvement strategies, and high levels of staff turnover, as barriers to improvement. The new head teacher attributed this to older staff being more concerned that pupils had good pastoral support, while younger staff were more concerned with attainment, and tensions between staff had been exacerbated by union involvement. This, in turn, had made it difficult to implement coherent and sustained approaches to improvement and to meeting its pupils’ needs more effectively. Highlands, the secondary school in the town’s isolated eastern residential area, faced yet another set of challenges. Notably, about 35% of its pupils came from the north of the town, and were effectively fleeing Moorside. However, these pupils typically had long and difficult journeys to school, and the school had related concerns about attendance, which could be as low as 80%. The head teacher, who had been in post for three years when our involvement with the school started, recounted that when he arrived, the school had had a “secondary modern mentality of caring for its students but not improving life chances or attainment” – a mentality that was still causing tensions in Moorside. During his time in post, the head teacher had introduced a range of strategies to address this, for instance, 58

Local education systems as products of place

using targeted interventions, introducing termly, individual academic mentoring sessions for all pupils, and introducing applied subjects, which although not as extreme as dividing the school into academic and vocational strands, nonetheless introduced a more practically oriented element to the curriculum. However, because Highlands had surplus places, did not receive the negative press that dogged Moorlands and was not seen as ethnically exclusive, it had also started to attract significant numbers of pupils arriving after the start of Year 7. For instance, in our first year of fieldwork, 34% of pupils arrived after the start of Year 7, with this figure being nearer 50% in Year 11. In particular, this reflected the growing numbers of Eastern European migrants to the town, which the head teacher described as having “caught the school off the hop”. As the school struggled to respond to the unpredictable and immediate demands that this had created, there was some evidence of a divide arising between Highland’s established non-mobile and newly arrived mobile pupils. For instance, the non-mobile pupils we spoke to reported feeling well supported by the school: they had all been able to take their first choice of GCSE subjects; they were mainly clear what their expected GCSE grades were; they felt members of staff were approachable; and they felt that they were known in the school and belonged there. By contrast, mobile pupils typically reported that they had been unable to take their first choice of GCSE subjects, having to fit in where they could. They also talked about the difficulty of knowing what to expect from staff and other pupils, and of not feeling part of the school. Throughout our fieldwork, the constantly changing nature of the school’s population was always at risk of destabilising the school.

Wider efforts to tackle disadvantage in Stockborough Each of the schools detailed above was trying to respond to a particular set of ‘symptoms’ that had their origins in Stockborough’s wider ethnic-residential dynamics, and in the intensely hierarchical nature of the town’s education system. On their own, however, they appeared powerless to intervene in the underlying processes of residential and school sorting that concentrated particular pupils in particular schools. Although it had been unsuccessful in its attempts to manage surplus school places, the LA had nonetheless started to create multi-agency structures that it believed would help to facilitate collaborative responses to poor outcomes on a town-wide level. To this end, at the time of fieldwork, hopes had been pinned on the development of a local area agreement (LAA) – a three-year agreement setting out the priorities 59

Education, disadvantage and place

agreed between all the main public sector agencies working in Stockborough and central government. However, we found that rather than serving as the basis for any searching analysis of Stockborough’s local dynamics and how agencies might jointly intervene in these, in practice, the LAA appeared to be reinforcing individual service priorities and targets. This was seen specifically in relation to education, where although it had some flexibility to select locally relevant targets in the LAA, it also had to include the 18 mandatory targets for educational performance set by central government. These were described by Stockborough’s then Director of Children’s Services as “good old school league table targets”, which focused attention on individual schools’ attainment and attendance figures. To make these locally relevant, the LAA had been used to set local ‘narrowing the gap’ targets between the town’s electoral wards. This, in turn, reinforced the schools’ preoccupations with their own institutional performance; as the Director of Children’s Services reflected “good school heads are introverted because of the introverted measurement of standards”. She further identified the increased scrutiny of Stockborough’s poorest performing schools by Ofsted, national government and the LA as a disincentive for wider collaborative activity. We also found a tendency for those working outside education to see schools as responsible for tackling issues that fell outside other services’ remits. For example, an LA regeneration officer we spoke to raised the concern that no one was really responsible for young people at risk of becoming NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training), and that his service, with its remit to promote employment, had to “pick up the pieces” for young people who did progress to further education. His ‘solution’ was that schools should take work preparation more seriously and be set targets for the numbers of their former pupils entering employment. What he seemed not to acknowledge, however, was that Stockborough’s poorly performing secondary schools were already facing considerable challenges in meeting their core targets. Moreover, entry to employment in Stockborough was limited by the town’s poor economic infrastructure – something that the schools alone had very limited capacity to affect. It also appeared that while Stockborough’s schools were frequently criticised for not supporting other services, at least some of them were already forced into meeting needs that other LA services could not meet. For instance, Queens Road and Highlands had had to find ways to respond to the immediate needs of new international arrivals; what LA support there was tended to lag behind and, in any case, could 60

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not meet the growing demands placed upon it. During our fieldwork, funding for LA-provided adult EAL tuition was cut, meaning that the only provision left was whatever schools were able to provide independently. Whatever promise the LAA had held to begin with, it rapidly became clear that it had little to offer schools, but equally did not demand anything of them that they were not already doing.

Addressing education inequalities in Stockborough In the complex ecological analysis we have presented here, we see the processes outlined in Chapter Two at work in a particular place. We can see how global and national economic processes work to produce a population that is both economically deprived and ethnically diverse, and how local housing policies (among other things) turn this diversity into a set of more or less hard boundaries between different parts of the local population. We can see how this is reflected in the populations of local schools, and how this is then compounded by the legacy of past education policies (notably, selection) and the operation of current policies (notably, the maintenance of a market in school places driven by parental ‘choice’). We can see the emergence of learner identities, shaped by a complex mix of their experiences of schooling, their experiences of living in particular communities and more deep-seated cultural factors. We can then see how schools respond in different ways to the situations they face, driven in part by the commitments and values of their leaders, but also by the sometimes perverse effects of the policy context within which they must work. It is difficult to argue either that the situation in Stockborough is equitable or that policies and strategies currently in place are likely to make significant inroads into the problem of education disadvantage. Efforts to drive up the performance of schools and bring supportive services together are undoubtedly necessary, but in their current form, they ignore the complexity of the situation they face and may even exacerbate the difficulties in that situation. It is much less difficult to envisage the kind of actions that might make a real difference to educational disadvantage in Stockborough. In order to intervene in the causes of poor educational outcomes in the town, it would be necessary, among other things, to: • Break the hierarchy of schools. The schools would need to be treated as a system, not individually, and there would need to be some degree of shared responsibility for all the young people in the town.

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•

•

•

•

Without this, some schools will always be trapped at the bottom of the town hierarchy, facing extreme challenges. Increase the resources available, and use existing resources more effectively, so that all learners’ basic needs can be met. The system’s capacity would need to be developed so that it matched the basic needs learners present. For example, to respond to an influx of EAL learners, the local education system would need to have the flexibility to increase its capacity for EAL support within a short timescale. This means that as well as increasing the system’s capacity, there would need to be ways to move resources around the system more flexibly. It would also be important to consider where provision should be sited to maximise its accessibility and engagement with its target populations and extricate it, to some extent, from the town’s territorial divisions. Build communities’ capabilities. While there is no obvious mechanism to break ethnic-residential patterns in the town, it is conceivable that Stockborough’s distinctive communities could be supported to become more outward-looking and more able to act to achieve improved outcomes. Indeed, members of the mosque women’s group we spoke to told us that if we really wanted to change things “round here”, rather than focusing on schools, we would need to influence the views of their mothers-in-law, as they were powerful in determining what was seen as acceptable behaviour within the family. Schools and other agencies could develop their roles in respect to a community-building agenda, and help to connect the communities they serve to wider opportunities within and beyond the town. Improve community outcomes and infrastructure by changing the learning opportunities available. Although the local economy is in a downturn and structurally weak, education could be explicitly linked to its rebuilding. An important component in this could be to support young people to develop the skills needed to be successful in the small business settings that dominate the town’s employment opportunities. Establish area coordination mechanisms that are fit for purpose. Mechanisms would have to be created that could enable services and wider stakeholders to come together to develop joint understandings of the inequities in the town and its constituent areas. They would need to understand the dynamics that are creating particular outcomes, and to identify the factors that they can act on – jointly and individually – to make an impact on these. From this basis, they would need to be able to develop, implement and monitor shared strategies. As part of this, the town’s resources and access to learning opportunities 62

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would also have to be coordinated to ensure that they are distributed equitably, and that limited resources are not ‘captured’ by particular schools or communities. As we argued in Chapter Two, these measures are about the distribution of educational resources and opportunities in Stockborough, but they are also about the recognition of who people are, of the value of what they are and of their right to take control of their lives. Moreover, redistribution and recognition go hand in hand in this situation. It is difficult to imagine that the stigmatisation of Moorside and its pupils could be tackled without increasing the resources and opportunities available to them, just as it is difficult to imagine the powerful recognition work at Parkview being successful if its pupils went on to experience isolation, poor schooling and limited opportunities as they grew older. Some of the measures just set out would undoubtedly be much facilitated by changes in national policy. For instance, national governments can do much to ensure that local authorities and their services are fairly resourced, to maintain employment levels in disadvantaged areas, and to ensure that schools and services work together. However, regardless of whether such facilitation is available, there was a clear need in Stockborough for a locally tailored strategic response. Most of the measures set out earlier are about local action taken in the light of a detailed understanding of local dynamics. Put simply, Stockborough needs an ABI. However, this bald statement begs questions about the nature and purpose of any such initiative. We have already alluded to the need for, at the very least, central government facilitation for change in Stockborough. It is also clear that some of the factors in the Stockborough situation appear considerably more difficult to influence than others – the nature of the town’s housing stock, for instance, would be extremely difficult to change, and even if it were possible, would be no guarantee of changing patterns of residential segregation. Only long-term intervention across the whole of the town (at least) would make a difference here. On the other hand, there are also distinctive factors at work in different parts of the town, suggesting that some kind of more local, even neighbourhood, approach might be needed. Saying that ‘Stockborough needs an ABI’, therefore, does not necessarily imply a single-level intervention, so much as a series of nested interventions at different spatial levels – neighbourhood, ward and town – and supported by national policy.

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It is, however, clear that an initiative capable of working at a number of local levels could realistically look to influence a range of factors – for instance, building community capacity, linking education and employment opportunities, and finding ways to use the limited resources within the school system more effectively. It is also striking that while the situation is highly fragmented, the analysis we have presented gives some indication of the range of knowledge community members and professionals already hold about the factors and processes leading to poor outcomes locally, and of the range of resources already committed within the town – from the mosque’s women’s group, to local authority services. Notably, even though the town’s secondary schools were in active competition, Central, Moorside and Highlands were all members of the Stockborough Equity Research Network, which we supported, showing that while limited in its remit, partnership between the schools was possible. Our sense – and one that was shared by many of those we worked with in the town – was that it must surely be possible to harness this knowledge, commitment and resource in some way in order to improve outcomes in the town, in education and more widely. The key question, of course, is how, in a context that was far from favourable in other respects, this might be brought about. Our suggestion is that by learning from the strengths and weaknesses of previous ABIs, and by utilising the policy spaces that have begun to emerge around the growing emphasis on localism and the structural reforms within education that might allow local schools to reorganise themselves, it might just be possible to do things differently in places like Stockborough. We develop this argument throughout the following chapters.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Learning from the past The previous chapters have begun to explore how we might better understand the relationships between education, disadvantage and place, with a view to intervening in them through area initiatives. However, as we suggested in Chapter One, there is a long history of area-based initiatives (ABIs) – and, indeed, there have been overlapping generations of different kinds of ABIs – though it is not entirely clear that these have all been based on the kind of complex understanding that we are advocating. In this chapter, therefore, we wish to review that history, paying particular attention to what, in Chapter One, we very broadly termed ‘traditional’ first- and second-generation ABIs. We focus on England, where the history of area initiatives of all kinds is particularly rich, and where, during the New Labour years between 1997 and 2010, they played a major role in policy efforts to tackle educational disadvantage. We begin by exploring a range of ABIs before focusing more particularly on those with a significant educational component. Our aim is not to give a comprehensive account of the history, but to extract from it the key lessons that can be learned in order to inform the development of ABIs in the future.

The evolution of area-based initiatives in England In England, ABIs have typically been conceptualised as a way for central government to target resources and energies into those parts of town and cities where disadvantage is most acutely concentrated. Such ABIs are generally seen as of relatively recent origin, beginning with the Urban Programme of the 1960s. As Dargan (2007, p 346) explains: Based on the assumption that poverty and deprivation existed in isolated pockets within the inner cities, the Wilson government introduced the Urban Programme; a discrete package of funding, separate from mainstream programmes, to be targeted at specific urban areas in an effort to eradicate deprivation.

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Importantly, as a discrete, separate, specifically targeted programme, the Urban Programme was designed to ‘stand alone’ – a design trait that Batty et al (2010) note still endured in the 2000s. As they reflect: For more than 40 years, UK governments have attempted to moderate disadvantage within deprived pockets of English cities and larger towns, through the designation of ABIs such as the Urban Programme, Urban Development Corporations, City Challenge and the Single Regeneration Budget. Typically ABIs provided additional, often relatively limited, resources to defined areas for determined periods of time in order to achieve their economic, social and/or physical regeneration. (Batty et al, 2010, p 10) Nationally mandated stand-alone ABIs of this kind were widely employed by New Labour governments between 1997 and 2010. There was, for instance, a proliferation of ‘action zones’ focused on specific issues – including health, employment and, of course, education, which we shall deal with in more detail shortly. More ambitiously still, New Labour developed New Deal for Communities (NDC), described as ‘one of the most intensive and innovative ABIs ever introduced in England, indeed quite possibly anywhere’ (Batty et al, 2010, p 11). Essentially, NDC established and funded local partnerships in 39 highly deprived areas over a decade, charging each partnership with developing its own strategy for achieving some nationally mandated outcomes: reduced crime, enhanced community involvement, improved housing and physical environment, improved health, better educational achievement, and reduced worklessness (Foden et al, 2010). Extensive though its remit undoubtedly was, at the level of basic design, NDC still shared the main characteristics of stand-alone ABIs from the 1960s onwards: a focus on disadvantaged areas, additional time-limited funding and the expectation that local strategies should be developed to achieve outcomes specified by central government. However, New Labour’s use of ABIs was anything but static. As Lupton et al (2013a) have argued, they went through a series of changes in terms of form, purpose and underlying assumptions. What is significant from our point of view is that not all of New Labour’s efforts to tackle the problems of highly disadvantaged areas remained as stand-alone initiatives. The Sure Start initiative, for instance, began life in this form, providing a range of professional support to young children and their families in highly disadvantaged areas (DfEE, 1999c). In its initial formulation, local programmes were expected 66

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to develop provision to meet the needs of their areas as they saw fit. Central government provided funding and guidance, but, in other respects, the local programmes remained only loosely connected to other national policies. However, as it developed, Sure Start became aligned with overarching national strategies on child care and, more specifically, the national Every child matters agenda (DfES, 2003), which sought to promote the well-being of children wherever they lived. Accordingly, Sure Start was rolled out nationally, with the consequence that it became more prescriptive about the services that should be offered and became the responsibility of local authorities rather than area partnerships (Lewis, 2011). A similar story can be told about NDC, which was likewise incorporated into the more wide-ranging National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (Social Exclusion Unit, 1998). The then prime minister, Tony Blair, underlined the ways in which this national strategy was different from previous stand-alone ABIs: [It is] different for four reasons. First, the true scale of the problem is being addressed – not the tens but the hundreds of severely deprived neighbourhoods. Second, the focus is not just on housing and the physical fabric of neighbourhoods, but the fundamental problems of worklessness, crime and poor public services – poor schools, too few GPs and policing. Third, the Strategy harnesses the hundreds of billions of pounds spent by the key Government departments, rather than relying on one-off regeneration spending. Fourth, the Strategy puts in place new ideas including Neighbourhood Management and Local Strategic Partnerships for empowering residents and getting public, private and voluntary organisations to work in partnership. (Social Exclusion Unit, 2001, p 5) In both of these cases, we can see a shift from a ‘first generation’ of more or less isolated, mandated initiatives, trying to tackle disadvantage solely within their own areas, to initiatives with an equivalent area dimension but operating in the context of national strategies. In this way, area initiatives became embedded within wider national policy efforts, perhaps losing some autonomy along the way, but, in return, gaining access – potentially at least – to the material and other resources that central government could command. Some critics have seen this change as an acknowledgement by New Labour governments that ABIs were a failed experiment (Durose and Rees, 2012). Lewis (2011, p 79), 67

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for instance, makes the case that the reformulation of Sure Start ‘meant the end of [it] as an area-based programme’. Likewise, Mathews (2012) argues that the advent of the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal effectively marked a shift away from the core concept of ABIs. However, an alternative explanation is that these changes marked the emergence of what we called in Chapter One a second generation of ABIs, in which the emphasis was on area initiatives operating as part of wider national policy efforts rather than as stand-alone initiatives. The case here is that both the Every child matters agenda and the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal retained a strong area dimension. While the balance between local and national concerns changed, there was still an assumption that decisions – about the precise nature of the services that would be provided and the actions that would be taken – needed to be made at the local level, precisely because different places present different challenges and opportunities. There was certainly a more clearly specified national approach, but in both cases, this fell well short of a fully specified national programme that was to be delivered in identical form in every area. One way to understand this shifting balance is to see the New Labour governments as struggling with some of the key issues around disadvantage and place that we identified in Chapter One and finding – albeit not always in an entirely coherent way – some new resolutions. One such issue is that of ‘scale’ (as we designated it earlier). Mathews (2012, p 147) outlines the policy implications of this issue neatly: Over the decades that urban policy has focused on concentrated deprivation there has been an ongoing policy analysis debate as to whether policy should be delivered through concerted activity within neighbourhoods, areabased initiatives (ABIs), or through broader policy action.… This debate has reflected different definitions of the policy problem.… Simplistically, the ABI approach saw the policy problem as inherent to the neighbourhood, and thus policy aimed to ‘turn it around’ within a period of time. Strategic approaches accepted the role of wider social inequalities in producing concentrated deprivation and aimed to alleviate some problems at a city-wide level and enhance service provision in deprived neighbourhoods. Given this analysis, it is arguable that what New Labour governments were attempting was to avoid having to opt for one pole or another of this dilemma, and instead – in a classic ‘Third Way’ (Giddens, 1998) 68

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resolution – seeking to combine the advantages of both. It was this new resolution that informed initiatives such as Sure Start and the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal and made them different from their predecessors. Likewise, there is a related choice between focusing on people and focusing on places (Griggs et al, 2008). The debates around these issues are vital, but the simple equation of ABIs – even stand-alone ABIs – with place-based policy is misleading. Sure Start, in particular, is an example of a place-based initiative with a heavy emphasis on people, which meant that it was possible to roll it out beyond the places where it originated to target disadvantaged families wherever they might live. Likewise, the Children’s Fund, which was established at about the same time to support work with older children and young people, was very much person-focused, being concerned with vulnerable young people wherever they lived. In practice, however, many of the activities it supported were targeted at areas where vulnerable young people were concentrated or where particular issues arose for them, so that the Children’s Fund looked very much like an ABI in some places (Edwards et al, 2006). New Labour, therefore, reformulated the choice between place-focused ABIs and person-focused strategies as one between different mixtures of person- and place-based elements – with the option of changing the mix in a particular policy as situations change, evidence indicates or as thinking develops. A key element in all of this was the concept of ‘progressive universalism’ (Prescott, 2002), defined as ‘support for all, with more support for those who need it most’ (HM Treasury and DfES, 2005, p 1). Again, in a typical Third Way resolution, New Labour concluded that it was unnecessary to choose between targeted and universal policies if the latter could be designed in such a way that they could be intensified for those people – and, by extension, those places – in greatest need. Using Sure Start as an example, this meant that a policy could make provision for all people wherever they might live, and yet, at the same time, make particularly intensive provision for the most disadvantaged people living in the most disadvantaged places. Whether such resolutions were sustainable without the favourable economic circumstances that New Labour governments enjoyed is a moot point, and it is no coincidence that Sure Start has been rapidly scaled back in the wake of the economic crisis. What is clear, however, is that while, to some extent, the ABIs that emerged during the New Labour years were based on the assumptions of their predecessors, it seems likely that a ‘second generation’ began to appear during this

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period. As we suggested in Chapter One, therefore, it is not possible to think of ABIs as all sharing similar designs and assumptions.

Education-focused area-based initiatives In addition to the educational dimension of some of the ABIs referred to earlier, England also has a rich tradition of area initiatives where education is the major focus. These are usually traced back to the Education Priority Areas (EPAs) of the 1960s and 1970s – contemporary with the Urban Programme discussed earlier. The case for EPAs was outlined in the Plowden Report on primary education (Central Advisory Council for Education [England], 1967): In a neighbourhood where the jobs people do and the status they hold owe little to their education it is natural for children as they grow older to regard school as a brief prelude to work rather than an avenue to future opportunities. Some of these neighbourhoods have for generations been starved of new schools, new houses and new investment of every kind.… Not surprisingly, many teachers are unwilling to work in a neighbourhood where the schools are old, where housing of the sort they want is unobtainable, and where education does not attain the standards they expect for their own children. From some neighbourhoods, urban and rural, there has been a continuing outflow of the more successful young people. The loss of their enterprise and skill makes things worse for those left behind. Thus the vicious circle may turn from generation to generation and the schools play a central part in the process, both causing and suffering cumulative deprivation. (Central Advisory Council for Education [England], 1967, para 132) Plowden’s response to this situation was to argue for ‘positive discrimination’ in terms of the resourcing of schools in disadvantaged areas so that they could ‘supply a compensating environment’ to make good the supposed inadequacies of homes and neighbourhoods (Central Advisory Council for Education [England], 1967, para 151). Accordingly, the report proposed the designation of areas where schools would be resourced more intensively and where there would be a wide range of other compensatory measures (eg an emphasis on nursery education, parental involvement and community schooling).

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In practice, the EPA programme was always somewhat diverse – and even diffuse (see Smith, 1987). The areas EPAs would target, and the activities they would undertake, were largely left to local authorities to decide, and, consequently, a range of loosely related actions came to be badged with the EPA label. However, chief among these was that central government provided additional funding to improve school buildings in designated areas and pay teachers a small increment to their salaries in designated schools. There was also some expansion of nursery education, and an ‘action research’ programme focused on the development of new practices in and around schools was initiated in five areas. Such activities, however, all but petered out in the early 1970s, and by the mid-1970s, EPAs formally ceased to exist. New Labour governments then revived the use of education-focused ABIs in the form of stand-alone initiatives. The first of these were Education Action Zones (EAZs) (DfEE, 1999a). The government’s rationale for EAZs was that by drawing on a wider range of expertise and resources than usual, they would stimulate creative new approaches to tackling educational problems in places where educational standards were particularly low. Seventy-three EAZs were established, which, in practice, typically consisted of around 20 schools (usually two or three secondary schools plus their feeder primaries) located in a disadvantaged area within an LA, which were locally led by small partnerships between the LAs, local businesses and voluntary sector and community representatives. They were managed on a day-to-day basis by an appointed director, and each EAZ was formally governed at a sub-LA level by an Education Action Forum (EAF). EAFs had a statutory responsibility to formulate, implement and monitor a detailed local action plan. They received government funding of up to £750,000 per annum for three to five years to support this, which they were expected to supplement with £250,000 per annum in sponsorship or equivalent in-kind contributions from the private and/ or voluntary sector. EAZs were then supplemented and largely succeeded by the Excellence in Cities (EiC) initiative. Launched in September 1999, initially just with secondary schools, EiC expanded rapidly, and by April 2006, over 1,300 secondary schools and 3,600 primary schools in 57 LAs had been involved in the programme. Compared to EAZs, central government defined EiC’s purposes and actions much more clearly in terms of raising school standards and promoting inclusion in inner cities and other urban areas. EiC recommended strategies for developing leadership, managing student behaviour and enhancing teaching and learning, and sought to tackle underachievement in 71

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schools through specific strands of action targeted at underachieving or disadvantaged groups. For instance, within EiC: Learning Mentors worked with underachieving students in schools; Learning Support Units were established to provide support for students at risk of exclusion from school for disciplinary reasons; a Gifted and Talented pupils programme was developed; and City Learning Centres were established to enhance adult learning opportunities (particularly through information technology) for local people. Over time, EiC also began to act as an umbrella programme within which other initiatives could be located. For instance, the Behaviour Improvement Programme (BIP) sought to develop common approaches to the management of student behaviour in EiC areas, chiefly through the creation of integrated teams of professionals known as Behaviour and Education Support Teams (DCSF, 2009). As part of the government’s Street Crime Initiative, the Department for Education and Skills funded 34 local education authorities to support measures to improve pupil behaviour and attendance in two to four selected secondary schools and their feeder primary schools in EiC areas. The final stand-alone education-focused ABI of the New Labour period was the London Challenge, subsequently extended to include Greater Manchester and the Black Country as ‘City Challenge’ (DfES, 2007). City Challenge recognised the distinctive difficulties facing schools in the targeted metropolitan areas, for instance, in terms of: low levels of achievement; high levels of disadvantage; the challenges and opportunities presented by a multi-ethnic population; and the balkanisation of governance arrangements when divided between a large number of LAs. Like EiC, City Challenge deployed a range of strategies to address these issues, including: targeted interventions in low-performing schools; strategies for teacher recruitment, retention and training; and encouragement for schools to form support networks. Taken together, these stand-alone education-focused ABIs can be read as presenting an increasing narrowing of the government’s understanding of how best to intervene in poor educational outcomes in disadvantaged places. While EAZs were designed with some faith in local creativity and local partnerships, EiC and City Challenge set much greater store by actions that clearly targeted the individual symptoms of disadvantage as they were seen to be manifested in schools – in terms of behaviour, attainment, teacher recruitment and so on. However, not all attempts to bring an area dimension to bear on efforts to tackle the impacts of disadvantage on education have been so narrowly conceived – and not all attempts have been explicitly labelled as ABIs. Most notably, there is a long tradition in England of 72

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community schooling, which New Labour governments once again tapped into, developing the Schools Plus, Full Service Extended Schools (FSES) and Extended Services initiatives. These were premised on the idea that schools themselves could serve as catalysts for revitalising disadvantaged communities as they might be best placed to ‘offer services to families who might otherwise be hard to reach, and … build relationships with adults who might not trust other public services’ (Dyson and Raffo, 2007, p 299). To understand this strand of policy more fully, it is necessary to give its origins some attention. Throughout most of its history, the governance of the English school system has been highly decentralised. LAs have played a key role in shaping local provision, with considerable flexibility to shape that provision to the perceived needs of different areas, and to link their work in education with their other responsibilities for housing, social care, transport and economic development, among other things. From time to time, this led to some significant ‘area-based initiatives’ that were distinct from stand-alone ABIs but nonetheless tried to tackle educational and related social issues in particular areas. One outstanding example was the village colleges initiated by Henry Morris as chief education officer of Cambridgeshire in the 1920s, which are still in existence in some recognisably similar form. Morris had a radical vision of the potential role of the school as the hub of the local community, in the sense that it would not only provide standard educational services for school-age children in the normal school day, but would also offer adult education, provide a place where community groups could meet and offer library facilities. As his famous Memorandum put it, the village college: would take all the various vital but isolated activities in village life – the School, the Village Hall and Reading Room, the Evening Classes, the Agricultural Education Courses, the Women’s Institute, the British Legion, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, the recreation ground, the branch of the County Rural Library, the Athletic and Recreation Clubs – and, bringing them together into relation, create a new institution for the English countryside. It would create out of discrete elements an organic whole; the vitality of the constituent elements would be preserved, and not destroyed, but the unity they would form would be a new thing. For, as in the case of all organic unities, the whole is greater than the mere sum of the parts. It would be a true social synthesis

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– it would take existing and live elements and bring them into a new and unique relationship. (Morris, 1925, p xv) Morris’s views were, moreover, based on an analysis of what he saw as a crisis facing rural communities in Cambridgeshire as people began to move to better-paid employment and greater opportunities in towns and cities. A village college, therefore, was not simply a way of hosting local services more efficiently, but also about regenerating local communities. As Morris explained: As the community centre of the neighbourhood the village college would provide for the whole man, and abolish the duality of education and ordinary life. It would not only be the training ground for the art of living, but the place in which life is lived, the environment of a genuine corporate life. (Morris, 1925, p xv) Clearly, village colleges are markedly different from the approaches taken by EAZs, EiC and City Challenge. Morris’s central concern was with fostering sustainable and fulfilling community environments, rather than taking remedial action to offset disadvantage and failure. Moreover, village colleges were very much a local rather than central government initiative, and depended on the reconfiguration of mainstream services rather than on targeting extra resources at disadvantaged places. Nonetheless, they were – and are – undeniably ‘area-based initiatives’ in the broad sense we are using in this book, and came, in fact, to be the first of a series of national developments in which schools were seen to play a key role in sustaining and developing the communities they served (Ball, 1998; Wilkin et al, 2003; Cummings et al, 2011b). These included an attempt to develop community schools as part of the EPA initiative so that schools in EPA areas would have an extended role in supporting children and families (Central Advisory Council for Education [England], 1967). Significantly, when the idea of extended schooling was later revived by New Labour governments, it was embedded within the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal in the form of the Schools Plus report (DfEE, 1999b). The National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal was developed through the work of a number of ‘policy action teams’ (PATs), each one looking at one key issue in deprived areas. The analysis presented by the Schools Plus PAT saw poor educational ‘underachievement’ as the product of social factors experienced by children and young people – lack of access to opportunities, inadequate 74

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support from families, low income and poor living conditions limiting students’ capacity to take advantage of whatever opportunities were on offer. In turn, it saw underachievement feeding back into communities and wider society in the form of low expectations and high levels of crime and unemployment. The solution it presented was for schools to develop a more extended role, offering additional support to their students, supporting families in working with their children, developing the skills of adults and building social capital: Every community needs a focal point – somewhere where people of all ages can meet. These can use sports and leisure facilities and take part in lifelong learning, also act as a base for community groups. For many communities – particularly where other services have been withdrawn or reduced – schools can act as this focus. Schools, in partnership with others including colleges and local businesses, are often well placed to offer second chance learners opportunities to undertake courses locally. This can help to improve key skills and lead to wider employment prospects. As well as improving adults’ employability and general skills, such activity can have a positive effect on young people. Parents act as positive role models for learning, homework is seen as a shared activity and parents’ expectations for their children and young people’s own expectations can be raised. The aim must be to develop schools with the commitment to engage with their communities. (DfEE, 1999b, para 12) Notably, the Schools Plus report made no distinction between a strategy to improve the achievements of children and young people, and the wider regeneration aims of the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal. On the contrary, it argued: School Plus activities can play an important part in raising the attainment of pupils and adults, and at its best can help regenerate areas. Schools can be one of the focuses for community regeneration and act as a gateway to education for children and adults alike. (DfEE, 1999b, para 13) The Schools Plus idea eventually became embodied in a series of nationally mandated ‘extended schools’ initiatives, which ran throughout the New Labour years. The most ambitious of these was the FSES initiative, which ran from 2003 to 2006, funding 148 schools 75

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(at between £93,000 and £162,000 per annum, decreasing annually) in disadvantaged areas that were already part of the EiC initiative. The schools were expected to provide a comprehensive range of services on a single site, including access to health services, adult learning and community activities, as well as study support and 8am to 6pm wraparound childcare. The FSES initiative introduced a particular emphasis on the co-location of services provided by other non-educational agencies and by Early Years providers, and developed loose structures to foster greater interaction and exchange of information (child- and family-specific) between different agencies and providers. In many ways, the FSES initiative paralleled for school-age children and young people the aims of the Sure Start programme for younger children, but with a stronger expectation that there might also be benefits for the wider community. Like Sure Start, the FSES initiative also underwent a significant transformation in the mid-New Labour years, becoming increasingly embedded within the universal policy approach of Every child matters. This required local authorities to integrate their children’s services, both in terms of governance and leadership, and in terms of creating shared working practices. This often meant establishing multidisciplinary teams working on a district basis, with the expectation that schools would be involved as key partners (DfES, 2004). As a result, schools were increasingly seen as part of a network of locally coordinated services, and the FSES model of individual schools creating their own area partnerships began to look somewhat inappropriate. Accordingly, in 2005, the FSES initiative was reformulated and rolled out nationally (DfES, 2005). As a universal policy, every state school was required to offer at least some of the provision made by FSESs. They were also expected to do so as part of a local cluster of schools and as part of the local network of children’s services. The government explained the rationale for these developments in the following terms: The Every Child Matters: Change for Children programme is a shared national programme of system-wide reform designed to ensure that children’s services work better together and with parents and carers to help give children more opportunities and better support.… This means long-term investment by the Government in bringing together more opportunities and services into single settings like children’s centres (for children from birth to five) and schools.

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Bringing services together makes it easier for universal services like schools to work with the specialist or targeted services that some children need so that problems are spotted early and handled effectively. Opening up schools to provide services and activities also means that parents can access childcare without worrying about children moving between school and childcare facilities. (DfES, 2005, p 6) There is no mention here of an explicit area focus, and no reference to a wider community role for schools. In this sense, the reformulation of extended schools may be read as another example of New Labour’s abandonment of ABIs. However, the creation of what were almost always geographically based school clusters working with similarly geographically based multidisciplinary teams meant that there was, in some important respects, perhaps an even stronger area dimension in the new version of extended schools (Carpenter et al, 2010; Cummings et al, 2011a). Moreover, this reformulated version retained a sense of the way in which disadvantaging factors interact with each other and positive outcomes reinforce one another. Accordingly, a later government guidance document declared that extended schools were ‘a key vehicle for delivering the Government’s objective of lifting children out of poverty’ (HM Government, 2007, p 2), and quoted approvingly the head teacher of an extended school to the effect that such a school ‘“aims to help meet not only the school’s objectives, but also to share in helping to meet the wider needs of children, young people, families and their community”’ (HM Government, 2007, frontispiece). Given these ambitious aims, it perhaps made sense – in principle at least – for extended schools to be embedded within wider governance structures and policy strategies. This same sense of the interconnections between education and improved outcomes for children, families and communities meant that education also found a place in ABIs that were primarily concerned with other issues. We have already seen, for instance, how schooling became a strand within the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, but there were also PATs on (adult) skills and on young people that dealt with educational issues. Similarly, the NDC had education components of one sort or another (Batty, 2013), as did the Single Regeneration Budget (DETR, 1997). In many ways, the incorporation of educational strands in regeneration initiatives parallels the ‘extending’ of the school role into regeneration initiatives. In both cases, education was understood as interacting with other factors to 77

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shape outcomes, not just for children and young people, but also for families and local communities – and, in this sense, they present a marked contrast with education’s own stand-alone ABIs such as EAZs, EIC and City Challenge. Looking at the history of education-focused ABIs as a whole, then, it is clear that there has been no single way of ‘doing’ area initiatives. Certainly, there are plenty of examples of what we have called ‘first generation’ or ‘stand-alone’ ABIs, resting on the assumption that the educational problems of disadvantaged areas could be tackled by some mixture of additional resources, flexibilities and expectations targeted towards those areas. However, there have also been examples of ‘second generation’ ABIs, in which area initiatives have been embedded within more wide-ranging national policies. If, moreover, we accept community schools as a form of area initiative, we can identify a third strand of area-based approaches that have often been developed locally and that may have taken advantage of the opportunities offered by national policy but have not been driven by central imperatives. It may not be too fanciful to see these as the predecessors of a new, ‘third’ generation of ABIs, which, as we shall see in Chapter Five, are currently appearing on the ground.

Do area-based initiatives work? As we have seen, English governments have, over time, invested significant amounts of resources and energy in ABIs of one form or another in an effort to tackle some or all aspects of disadvantage in particular places. It is, therefore, reasonable to ask: to what extent have ABIs been able to reduce disadvantage in particular places – and, indeed, to narrow the gap between these and more advantaged places? This question is far from straightforward to answer because ABIs are inherently difficult to evaluate. Robson (2005, p 214), for instance, identifies a series of what he calls ‘conceptual’ problems with evaluations of ABIs, namely, that they: • focus on changes in outcomes in an area during the lifetime of an ABI, but find it difficult to track changes in population that may explain those outcomes; • find it difficult to assess whether outcomes might have been achieved even without the ABI, or whether problems have simply been displaced into other areas;

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• find it difficult to assess outcomes where data at a sufficiently small area level are unavailable, or where the outcomes themselves do not emerge until after the end of the evaluation; and • find it difficult to attribute causality in complex ABIs, particularly where other policy interventions are taking place – outcomes may change, but it may be difficult to say whether that change has been produced by the ABI, let alone by particular strands within the ABI. Problems such as these are not insurmountable. There has been a move in recent years, for instance, towards using theory-based evaluations that seek to surface underlying assumptions about how an ABI’s actions are intended to impact upon an area, and then to track whether these impacts happen as anticipated over time (Connell and Kubisch, 1998; Rhodes et al, 2005; Dyson and Todd, 2010). We shall explore these approaches to evaluation further in Chapter Eight. However, such evaluations are resource-intensive and produce context-specific findings, so they are not perhaps commissioned as often as they should be or with the time and resources they need. Added to this, ABIs can, as the history set out earlier shows, be very different from each other, with different foci, aims and ways of working. This means that a blanket judgement on the effectiveness of ABIs is hard to achieve. Moreover, as we have seen, even within the same nationally mandated ABI, there can be different local approaches. This not only makes it difficult to say whether a particular ABI – such as NDC or FSES – ‘works’, but also casts doubt on the usefulness of such a judgement. As Pawson and Tilley (2004, p 2) suggest, the appropriate questions to ask in relation to policy interventions of this kind are more often: ‘What works for whom in what circumstances and in what respects, and how?’ Despite these difficulties, there have been many evaluations of ABIs, and even accepting their limitations, some kind of coherent picture does begin to emerge from them. For instance, Cochrane, reviewing area-based urban policies as a whole, sums up the situation in this way: the widespread academic and professional consensus seems to be that in terms of their stated or implicit aims, they have all been rather unsuccessful. In Britain, for example, it has been concluded that they have neither significantly improved the social and economic position of those living in the inner cities and peripheral estates nor have they succeeded in delivering the hoped for economic revival. (Cochrane, 2007, p 4) 79

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At this most basic level, it is certainly the case that, despite a plethora of ABIs of many kinds, the gaps between more and less disadvantaged areas have shown little sign of narrowing. As we saw in Chapter One, studies by Dorling and colleagues (Dorling et al, 2007; Fahmy et al, 2011) suggest that the spatial concentration of poverty and the polarisation of wealthy and poor areas have, if anything, increased over the time that ABIs have been in use. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that ABIs might have had an ameliorative effect and that polarisation and concentration might have been greater without them. But it does suggest that ABIs alone have not been enough to reverse whatever other factors have been at work in and on disadvantaged areas. The evaluations of particular ABIs suggest similarly weak or nonexistent effects. For instance, the evaluation of the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) reports encouraging, but nonetheless somewhat modest and distinctly mixed, outcomes: in the assisted areas SRB made a small but valuable contribution to improving the well-being of residents across a number of the social, economic and physical indicators. The evidence suggests that changes to the physical environment and housing feed through fairly quickly into resident satisfaction with an area and it is encouraging that perceptions relating to satisfaction with an area as a place to bring-up children also change fairly readily. Incomes in the study areas have also converged relative to relevant benchmark indicators and although it is difficult to be precise as to the contribution of SRB in this respect, it is an encouraging result in areas that have been so deprived for such a long time. However, employment change appears more difficult to achieve and although there is evidence of a relative improvement by the end of the study period, the seven areas combined still had an employment rate some 22% points lower than the England average, on a par with the ‘all deprived’ England average. (Rhodes et al, 2007, p xxi) The evaluation of NDC puts the matter somewhat more succinctly: ‘The key headline finding from data … is that, however the evidence is cut, change is relatively modest’ (Lawless, 2011, p 524). The National Evaluation of Sure Start reaches similarly cautious conclusions:

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The results … provide some support for the view that government efforts to support children/families via the original area-based approach to Sure Start paid off to some degree with parent outcomes, but not with regard to child outcomes.… Nevertheless, while the results are modest they do indicate value in the work of Sure Start Children’s Centres. (National Evaluation of Sure Start Team, 2012, executive summary) This pattern is repeated for education-focused ABIs. Rees et al, reviewing stand-alone education-focused ABIs in the UK, conclude that: the evidence to date suggests that ABIs continue to have limited impact and any benefits are, at best, patchy. With reference to education focused ABIs, research on England’s EAZs, for example, shows that relatively few of the programme’s original objectives were realized.… Even in terms of attainment targets, there was little measurable improvement and in some EAZs there was even a negative zone effect. (Rees et al, 2007, p 265) Indeed, the experience of NDC suggests that educational outcomes may be more difficult to change through an area-based approach than outcomes in other domains: There is little doubt that there was less change for education than for the Programme’s five other outcomes.… And when the 39 NDC areas were modelled to help understand why some changed more than others, then, unique to this outcome, spending more on education was associated with less area-level change. (Batty, 2013, pp 1532–3) However, other evaluations report more positive – albeit still modest – gains. The FSES evaluation reported important impacts on particular children, families and adults, but scarcely discernible impacts on overall levels of educational attainment, and mixed impacts on standards of school performance (Cummings et al, 2007b). Likewise, EiC appears to have had some impacts on attainments, even if it did little to reduce the gap between more and less disadvantaged students in its schools (Machin et al, 2006; NFER, 2007), and when interpreting this, its

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evaluators suggest that these gains need to be set in the context of the limited scope of the intervention: the effect of Excellence in Cities on the educational outcomes considered here suggests that educational policy can have an impact on students in their teenage years; such programmes can be cost-effective; and resource-based policies can show positive results, even when the resources expended are relatively modest. (Machin et al, 2006, p 34) Similarly, the evaluators of City Challenge claim that ‘City Challenge areas achieved the majority of their initial targets’ (Hutchings et al, 2012, p vi), and report reductions in the numbers of low-performing schools and improvements in student attainment at a rate above that achieved nationally and particularly for those entitled to free school meals. At the same time, however, they also point out that these achievements were not equally distributed across areas, and that some of the strategies used to bring about short-term improvements were not sustainable in the longer term. Overall, then, the picture in terms of education-focused ABIs is very similar to that in relation to other kinds of ABI. It would be too negative to say that ABIs are totally ineffective; as a whole, the evidence suggests that they may well make some positive impacts on their target outcomes for some children and families in their target areas. However, there is no evidence to suggest that, on their own, they can solve the problem of poor educational outcomes reliably and sustainably. As Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools recently pointed out, despite all the developments of the past two decades, which includes a host of education-focused ABIs and other area-based policies, the issues facing children in disadvantaged areas remain much as they were when the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) first drew attention to them some 20 years ago (Wilshaw, 2012).

Why area-based initiatives have not been transformational Many explanations have been offered for the relative failure of ABIs to transform the fortunes of disadvantaged areas and the people within them. Some of these are specific to particular ABIs and the way they have been implemented in particular areas. The Sure Start initiative, for instance, got off to a somewhat uncertain start, with only very limited impacts, some of which were negative (National Evaluation of Sure 82

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Start, 2005). However, in a relatively short time, outcomes began to improve, probably, the evaluators suggest, because local programmes had had time to mature and learn how to be more effective (National Evaluation of Sure Start, 2008, pp v–vi). However, even the most effective ABIs remain, as we have seen, somewhat limited and patchy in their impacts. It seems unlikely, therefore, that incremental improvements in design and implementation will change this situation, and some other explanation for ABIs’ overall ineffectiveness is necessary. In fact, the explanations that have been offered tend to be of two kinds – in terms of either fundamental design issues or fundamental mismatches between ABIs’ aims and the methods and resources at their disposal. Design issues can be traced to the absence of a clear and proven model of what constitutes an ABI, and hence to the range of choices that have to be made between multiple options and resolutions of dilemmas. While these choices produce an impressive diversity of ABI programmes and of local initiatives within any programme, it is highly unlikely that all the choices that are made will be the best ones. For instance, as Batty comments with respect to NDC: theories of change were often non-existent, or illdefined. Partnerships did not generally identify a set of evidence-based interventions which might plausibly change existing levels of disadvantage to desired outcomes over 10 years. Rather, projects were approved because of locally contingent factors: community demands, attitudes of agencies and available match-funding. It was widely assumed that projects would help to achieve outcomes, even if the processes through which this was to occur remained blurred. (Batty, 2013, p 1526) This is also true of many education-focused ABIs. The evaluation of FSES, for instance, found considerable variation among local initiatives as to how they conceptualised their aims, and the ways in which their actions were expected to support those aims. It concludes: Different FSESs seem to adopt different positions, but it is not clear that this is as a result of an informed debate about alternatives, or simply arises out of the assumptions of head teachers and other leaders. Moreover, there is no unambiguous lead on this issue from national policy texts. (Cummings et al, 2007a, p 83) 83

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This links to a second, even more fundamental issue. ABIs commonly seek to overcome some or all aspects of disadvantage in a particular target area, and the impacts of disadvantage on the lives of people in the area. These are major challenges, yet the resources available to ABIs are typically minute in relation to them. This is certainly true in relation to funding and material resources. Even though policymakers may present ABIs as constituting major investments, the reality is that the majority of funding and resourcing in an area is already tied up in mainstream services and infrastructure, and that, in comparison, the uplift provided by the ABI is very small. Reviewing the history of EPAs for instance, Smith concludes that one reason for their limited achievements was the ‘puny additional educational resources’ that they made available (Smith, 1987, p 33). A more detailed comparison of ABI versus mainstream resources is available for NDC: Between 2001/02 and 2005/06, NDC per capita spend amounted to £520 per annum. This is not a great deal of additional resource, it pales into insignificance when compared with other mainstream investment. For instance, estimates of public expenditure on selected elements of benefits, health, education, housing, social services, and police and fire services in the Bradford NDC area amount to over £4700 per capita for the one year 2005/06. (Foden et al, 2010, p 166) However, it is not simply a matter of funding and resources. ABIs are able to intervene in the factors at work in particular places. This is all well and good provided that it is these factors that produce the disadvantages people experience. However, it is quite inadequate where disadvantages arise from other factors that are not tied to place – from problems in the regional or national economy, or from deep social structures associated with class and ethnicity. Focusing specifically on efforts to regenerate deprived neighbourhoods dominated by council-built housing, for instance, Kintrea (2007) argues that, for many years, there have been only limited impacts, largely due to factors that originate outside those areas: structural changes in the labour market; decreasing social protection for some groups; housing policies that concentrate the poorest people in the poorest neighbourhoods; incoherent policy approaches; and a reliance on short-term, poorly funded initiatives. This has led some commentators to conclude that ABIs fundamentally misunderstand the causes of the disadvantages experienced by people 84

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living in their target areas, and to offer a particularly scathing analysis of the resurgence of ABIs under New Labour. In a critical assessment of the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, for instance, Chatterton and Bradley (2000, p 109) conclude that: the area-based approach of New Labour to tackling deprivation is limited in what it can achieve as local regeneration is influenced by factors inside and outside of localities.… It has long been understood that the ability of small-area regeneration strategies to encapsulate the complex nature of territorial development is, at best, naive and, at worst, a waste of resources. No matter how imaginative area based strategies become, they will remain fundamentally flawed in their conception of the nature of the problem. A further problem is that although ABIs tend to emphasise the importance of coordinated, holistic approaches to the areas in which they work, they also tend to be initiated by a sponsoring government department that has its own, more limited, priorities, and to rely on partnerships between organisations and agencies that are themselves answerable to different departments. Rather than powerful, holistic interventions, therefore, what tends to result is a proliferation of more fragmentary initiatives that may well fail to link up with each other (Cochrane, 2007, p 34). This has certainly been the case in relation to many educationfocused ABIs, which have tended to focus on raising a narrow range of attainment outcomes. Moreover, they have sought to do this principally by improving the internal working practices of schools, with little real interest in partnership-working with other agencies and organisations on a wider range of outcomes. As a result, there has tended to be a significant mismatch between the factors that are known to produce poor educational outcomes and the interventions that ABIs have brought to bear. As Dyson et al (2011a, p 78) reflect: [Education-focused ABIs] have typically been restricted to a limited range of actions aimed at improving the performance of schools and offering additional support to students in those schools. This is most evident in the City Challenge programme, which is essentially conceptualised as a school improvement initiative, focusing on ‘intensive support for underperforming schools’ and ‘a city-wide 85

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leadership strategy led by school leaders for school leaders.’ In none of the initiatives, however, has there been anything other than the most limited attempt to intervene in what might be regarded as the underlying causes of poor educational outcomes – poverty, poor housing, transport and services, limited opportunity structures, or class and other social group structures. Further to this, in their review of education-focused ABIs, Rees et al reach very similar conclusions to those of Chatterton and Bradley in respect of regeneration ABIs: In effect, ABIs are based on the view that social and economic disadvantage is a ‘residual’ category, which can therefore be defined in terms of remaining ‘pockets’ of disadvantage in a wider context of increasing affluence. They do not acknowledge that, in reality, local disadvantage is a particular manifestation of the wider social inequalities which are endemic to societies such as the UK. Far from being an exceptional feature of British society, which can be tackled by special state initiatives such as ABIs, areas of social disadvantage are complex, but normal manifestations of the characteristic patterns of social differentiation and inequality in the UK (and elsewhere). (Rees et al, 2007, p 271) Ultimately, such critiques lead to charges of political cynicism – that policymakers adopt ineffective area-based approaches because they are not really interested in tackling disadvantage, and that focusing on a limited number of small areas allows an illusion of action to be created without any prospect that such action will bring about fundamental change (Watt, 2000; Power et al, 2005). If such arguments are accepted at face value, they present an extremely bleak forecast for the future of area-based policy approaches, effectively suggesting that no matter what form they take, nationally or as local variants within a national initiative, they are, as the saying goes, restricted to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic – tinkering on the margins of an inherently unjust education system in an inherently unjust society. However, informed by the arguments made in previous chapters, we want to conclude this chapter by suggesting that there is a more positive reading of the history of ABIs that broadly points

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to some of the ways in which ABIs might be conceptualised more effectively in future.

Learning from the past A negative reading of the history of ABIs is that they have achieved relatively little and have, in any case, been largely abandoned by policymakers as a failure. We might add that they are unlikely to have been helped by evident uncertainty on the part of policymakers about how adequately to address the range of issues we outlined in Chapter One – not least, issues to do with what ABIs are for or what form they should take. The same can be said about a failure to address some of the more fundamental conceptual issues around ABIs. In particular, the ambition of solving the problems of disadvantaged areas solely through action within those areas fundamentally misunderstands the processes through which disadvantage is produced. At the same time, however, this is not quite the full story. One implication of the multiplicity of types of ABIs is that there is no one way of ‘doing’ area initiatives. This calls into question blanket judgements on the failure of ABIs (particularly given the problems of evaluation). However, it also suggests that it should be possible to take some of the underlying principles of area initiatives and implement them in new ways. The history of ABIs shows us that this has been done in the past and that different ways of designing and implementing initiatives can overcome what are sometimes taken to be problems that are inherent in ABIs. We are thinking here of the emergence during the New Labour years of a ‘second generation’ of ABIs, embedded within wider national policy and seeking to overcome the stark choices around whether and how to target. We are also thinking of the locally developed initiatives that have emerged from time to time and that show that ABIs (at least in our extended use of the term) do not have to be government-led and government-funded. We also take from the history of ABIs that by no means all of them have been failures. Any failure is in relation to an expectation that they might transform their target areas, but this is to ignore the many successes that stop short of transformation, and to ignore the fact that the expectation of transformation itself may well be unrealistic. As the evaluation of the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal points out: ‘The process of change in socio-economic conditions at neighbourhood level is complex. Reversing or stemming the concentration of deprivation and social exclusion must be seen as a long-term process’ (AMION Consulting, 2010, p 109). 87

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Instead of seeking to consign ABIs to the past, therefore, a more appropriate response might be to think of how their successes – however limited – might be strengthened and built upon. In this respect, the possibility of embedding ABIs within wider policy efforts to combat disadvantage is promising. So, too, is the possibility of building on some of the more complex understandings of education, disadvantage and place that emerge from ABIs that are not narrowly focused on raising attainment. Although, therefore, the history of ABIs is not entirely encouraging, there are some intriguing possibilities for how ABIs might develop in future. It is to these that we now turn.

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Learning from the present As we saw in Chapter Four, England has a rich history of area-based initiatives (ABIs), not least in the proliferation of education-focused and other initiatives between 1997 and 2010. Whether of the traditional stand-alone design or embedded within wider universally progressive policies to tackle disadvantage, these were initiated by central government. Their purposes – and, to greater and lesser extents, their actions and target areas – were state-determined. It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that they more often treated target areas as containers for poor outcomes into which additional resources could be dropped, rather than as dynamic and distinctive places. In response, we have suggested that the next evolutionary step for ABIs lies in their engaging more closely with an ecological understanding of how poor outcomes come to be concentrated and perpetuated in particular places. This, in turn, would require greater power and leadership to be located at a local level. Such arguments immediately invite challenges about where local leadership would come from, and whether – without the impetus of a nationally mandated initiative to provide resources, impose structures, require action and demand accountability – ABIs could actually be developed locally in future. These questions appear particularly pertinent to education-focused ABIs, not least because of the steady increase in school autonomy and growth in academies, and, correspondingly, the increasing emasculation of local authorities (LAs) vis-à-vis local educational arrangements. This means that in many places – as in Stockborough in Chapter Three – there may be no obvious mechanisms in place that can effectively bring schools together to address local concerns, or enable them to embed their actions in wider local strategies in any meaningful way. However, on the basis of our extensive engagement with disadvantaged places across England over the last 10 years, we would suggest that, in many places, the situation is perhaps not as bleak as it might appear. In no small part, this is because whatever the limitations of earlier ABIs, they have created important legacies in many places. For example, our research on extended services (Cummings et al, 2011a) found that the local coordination of more-or-less autonomous schools was beginning to emerge with respect to their extended service role. 89

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Similarly, in our 2012 national survey of locally emerging, area-based approaches (Dyson et al, 2012), we found instances where a variety of local stakeholders – sometimes front-line professionals, sometimes LAs – were taking leading roles in adapting previously established areabased structures to make them increasingly fit for purpose, or where they were capitalising on the relationships fostered during previous initiatives to develop new approaches. Such evidence suggests that the emergence of a new generation of locally developed ABIs is not beyond the realms of possibility, and that, in some places at least, a mutually supportive balance may be struck between school autonomy and local partnership-working. To consider these possibilities further, we now want to focus in detail on two examples of locally developed, area-based strategies emerging in the late 2000s, exploring how they developed, what they sought to achieve and what they can tell us about the potential of such approaches. While these are certainly not fully developed or trouble-free examples of what ABIs might look like in future, they do serve to illuminate some intriguing possibilities. The first of these examples focuses on ‘Weston’ (a pseudonym), where the ‘Weston Housing Trust’ sponsored an academy as a vehicle for creating a new area-based strategy for tackling the disadvantages experienced by Trust tenants. The second, ‘Transforming Heybury’ (a pseudonym), was led by ‘Heybury’ LA, and sought to use national imperatives to drive a locally developed, borough-wide strategy for educational reform. We have chosen to focus on these examples because they offer interesting contrasts in terms of their leadership, the scale at which they are intended to operate and the actions they have taken. We have also had privileged access to both initiatives. In Heybury, we were commissioned by the LA to undertake a process evaluation of Transforming Heybury during its early days, which involved reviewing strategic planning documents and interviewing a wide range of stakeholders at multiple scales within the borough – from the leaders of LA services, to neighbourhood managers and ward coordinators, to front-line professionals (including those in schools), to local councillors, residents and pupils. One of us (Dyson) also served on an LA-sponsored commission exploring the situation of young people in Heybury. In Weston, we formed partnerships with senior professionals in the academy and Trust, which involved interviewing them about their work, spending time in the academy and feeding the outcomes from these activities into our discussions with the initiative’s leaders. In addition, the Trust sponsored a PhD student, Harriet Rowley, to 90

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undertake a study of the initiative. This involved extended engagement with a group of children and their families who were seen to be likely to benefit from the sorts of provision the initiative was developing (see Rowley and Dyson, 2011; Rowley, 2013). In both cases, our involvement fell somewhat short of a comprehensive process and outcomes evaluation, but we are, nonetheless, still in a position to be able to draw some tentative conclusions about their potential to meet their aims, about how they may need to develop to address any early shortcomings and about what this implies for locally developed ABIs more generally.

Weston Academy Aims and expectations Weston Academy was one of the first wave of academies that followed the Education Act 2006, replacing two predecessor secondary schools. All these early academies replaced schools that were judged to be failing in highly disadvantaged areas, and operated outside formal LA governance processes. Instead, governance arrangements were the responsibility of a sponsor who also made a financial contribution to the academy’s start-up and who provided a series of back-office services more typically provided by LAs in other schools. There are two features that make Weston Academy distinctive among these early academies. First, its sponsor was not a commercial organisation or a company specialising in academy sponsorship, nor even a wealthy philanthropist, but the Weston Housing Trust, which was responsible for providing and managing social housing in the areas from which the academy recruited many of its students. Thus, while the academy movement has attracted a considerable amount of criticism for removing schools from local democratic control and transferring them to individuals and organisations with no social responsibilities or public accountabilities (see, eg, contributors to Gunter, 2011), Weston’s situation was rather different. The Weston Housing Trust has a clear social role locally, is subject to public accountability and, indeed, has public service origins itself, being spun off from the LA housing department as LAs were encouraged to divest themselves of their social housing stock. Second, although the 2006 Act effectively required academies to focus on achieving significant improvements in school performance, the Weston Housing Trust also expected Weston Academy to devote considerable time and resources to working on the kinds of issues that were important to the Trust’s mission of providing high-quality 91

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social housing in the context of thriving communities. It therefore explicitly planned for the academy to have an extended role in relation to children, families and communities. With this in mind, the Trust seconded a member of its own staff to the academy’s senior leadership team to act as community director. Her responsibility was to develop a programme of family and community engagement, turning the academy into a community hub. New purpose-built accommodation (although not ready for the opening of the academy) was designed with the intention of offering significant new facilities that local residents were expected to use extensively. In developing the academy’s extended role, the community director was also expected to liaise with her counterparts in the Trust. Since its creation, the Trust had taken the view that providing and managing social housing was not simply about ‘bricks and mortar’, and that for its housing stock to be viable, it needed to create a liveable residential area, free from disorder and other social and economic problems, and with attractive amenities. In line with this, it invested heavily in a range of community regeneration work, focusing on community safety, healthy living, social inclusion, employability and lifelong learning, and improving the local environment. In particular, it was able to put staff on the ground to work with families in difficulties and run community projects. The work of the academy’s community director was, in many ways, an extension of this work with tenants, and, in particular, offered the Trust a way of accessing and engaging young people. In return, the Trust’s community teams offered the academy a means of reaching out beyond the confines of its classrooms. There was also an expectation that, in much the same way, the Trust’s community teams would be able to link with and enhance the work of the academy’s pastoral system. Rather than just seeing this as another responsibility to be placed on teachers, the academy saw its work on students’ personal and social development – and, particularly, on personal and family problems – as something that demanded the attention of specialist staff. It therefore appointed non-teaching staff to follow up attendance issues, work with families and support students when they encountered personal difficulties. In principle, this extensive system of school-based support could link with the work of the Trust’s community teams. In this way, when the school became aware of family-related problems, it had more resources at its disposal than simply its own staff, and when the Trust became aware of problems with young people, it could call on school-based interventions to supplement what the Trust could achieve in community settings.

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Other synergies were anticipated. For instance, the Trust had already developed an extensive set of partnership arrangements with other services – such as the police and fire service – which could make a contribution to the well-being of the areas it served, and which could easily be extended to the academy. Likewise, the Trust was a major local employer and could offer work experience to academy students and contribute a vocational dimension to the academy’s curriculum. At the same time, the academy developed a specialism in business and enterprise with the intention of preparing young people not just for academic success, but for a successful transition to employment, and in order to inject a higher level of entrepreneurship into the local economy. Reflecting on this range of activity, the important point to be made is that it was, for the most part, underpinned by a high level of strategic planning by the Trust. As an essentially area-focused organisation, it was in the Trust’s interests to understand the dynamics of the areas it served. It therefore used neighbourhood statistics in a relatively sophisticated process of spatial analysis as the basis for understanding the factors that threatened the sustainability of those areas, and the ways in which their sustainability might be enhanced. The Trust, then, had developed an outline theory of change (see Figure 5.1) to show how it expected its involvement with the academy to tackle those threats and help build a Figure 5.1: Weston Academy theory of change Teaching & learning improvement

Diverse learning opportunities

Work towards Every child matters outcomes

Enterprise specialism

Learning

Citizenship

High achievement

Student leadership activities

Community learning

Skilled local workforce Problem solving community

Employability

Parental involvement

Community & family learning activities

Academy as community space

Actions to meet community needs

Life chances Sustainable community

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sustainable area. (We shall say more about our use of theory of change approaches in later chapters.) At the heart of the theory of change was the view that although the area served by the Trust and the academy shared some of the problems common to many disadvantaged areas, it also had some distinctive features. In particular, it was located towards the edge of a large conurbation where levels of unemployment might be lower than in some other disadvantaged areas, but where employment opportunities were in small to medium-sized enterprises that offered few opportunities for skilled work or for progression. Added to this, the area was somewhat remote from the centre of the conurbation and there was no established culture among local residents of taking the opportunities that were on offer there. As a result, the population had tended to settle for poor-quality employment and to see themselves as destined to remain where they were. For both adults and children, therefore, education was a low priority, and there was a sense that there was little pride in the area and little ambition to make it a better place to live. In this situation, the Trust saw its involvement with the academy as having two sets of aims. The first was to enhance the capacities of local people – particularly young people – in terms of their educational achievement, their employability skills, their confidence and aspirations, and their ability to offer community leadership. The second was to create a socially and economically thriving area that would help people progress rather than restricting their life chances. While this might originally demand interventions from professionals in the Trust and the academy, the longer-term aim was to develop the capacity of local people to organise themselves and tackle their own problems rather than creating a culture of dependency. These broad aims translated into a series of strands of action. These anticipated that the academy would focus not simply on raising standards of attainment in the narrow sense, but on engaging all pupils in a wide range of learning activities and providing pastoral support to overcome wider barriers to learning. In particular, the academy’s enterprise specialism would create vocational learning opportunities, and would encourage young people to think about employment opportunities more broadly than just as locally available, low-level jobs. The academy would also offer adult learning opportunities to help them to become more employable and alert to new kinds of employment opportunities. Learners who had benefited from these opportunities would also be better placed to take on community leadership roles to engage with community facilities and community support services. 94

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The academy would work with the Trust to engage young people in community leadership activities so that, along with newly energised adults, they could enhance the community’s ability to solve its own problems and to make the local area more attractive to live in. Developments and difficulties It is clear that the Trust’s plans were extremely ambitious, yet even within a relatively short timescale, many aspects of these plans were beginning to be realised. Despite the close scrutiny to which the academy was subjected by government officials and the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), and the fact that it had replaced two schools, one of which had been deemed failing, the academy survived the complex process of merger and a subsequent move to new accommodation. A sixth form was established and began to recruit well, offering students a pathway into post-16 education. Links were formed with a prestigious independent school in the centre of the local conurbation and with a major arts organisation, making it possible to offer young people and their families a new range of experiences within their wider local environment. A vigorous community programme developed, supported by the Trust, and strong links were forged particularly with the minority ethnic communities whose children were a sizeable presence in the school. This was a particular achievement given that community relations were often fraught in areas neighbouring those served by the academy. However, considerable challenges were also encountered. The academy inherited staff, practices and cultures from its two struggling predecessor schools, and these were slow to change. Attainment remained stubbornly low, and there was considerable pressure from central government and Ofsted to achieve rapid improvements in this respect. The Trust lacked in-house educational expertise and therefore relied on the academy principal for advice about what could and should be done. He was experienced in ‘rescuing’ schools at risk of failing in the short term through narrowly focused internal improvement measures, but in taking the academy in this direction, the wider area agenda became somewhat sidelined. Given concerns about the quality of teaching and learning, it was perhaps hardly surprising that there was little evidence of a new, more radical and enterpriserelated curriculum emerging. The sixth form, although successful in its own terms, focused on traditional academic options and so offered little to the majority of pupils. Meanwhile, the community director found herself constantly ‘fire-fighting’ in the school. Although she 95

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was able to organise many community activities, it was not clear how these fitted into the overall strategy outlined in the theory of change. Similarly, while the academy’s pastoral system was highly energetic, there was little evidence of effective links with the Trust’s community teams. While some pupils and families benefited considerably from the support they were offered, many more were largely untouched by the academy and it was difficult to see that it was making a major contribution to the Trust’s overall strategy. Put simply, it seems that Weston Housing Trust’s ambitious plans were knocked off course by the pressing short-term needs that followed from the academy’s foundation. The longer-term ambition of establishing the academy as a community hub and using the combined forces of the academy and the Trust to make a real difference to the area became secondary to the urgent task of ensuring that it was stabilised in its early years and that its results were good enough to avoid Ofsted or, indeed, direct government intervention. After four years in post, the academy’s principal left, and while the academy had survived its turbulent opening period, its potential relations with the Trust remained largely untapped. This is not, however, the end of the story. Unlike nationally developed ABIs, the Weston Housing Trust’s strategy was never short-term and time-limited, and its relationship with the academy and its overall strategy continues to evolve. Moving forward The appointment of a new principal in 2012 has re-energised both the academy and the Trust. The new principal used some of Ofsted’s concerns around the quality of teaching as an opportunity to recruit new staff who were committed to realising the academy’s broader area remit. He also recognised that the community director needed effective support, and has begun to build a team of staff around her, and to clarify her remit. At the same time, the Trust has taken the view that it needs to extend rather than restrict its ambitions. It has begun to recruit other schools into a growing academy chain, reasoning that this will enable it both to build internal governance capacity and to impact more widely on the areas where its housing stock is located. It has also revisited its original strategy and has started to consider how this might be realised. It has decided that instead of relying on a single school – and, more particularly, a single community director – to deliver the strategy, it needs to find practical ways of coordinating actions on an area-wide

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basis, and has started to consider how it can strengthen its partnership arrangements to support this. At the time of writing, it is too early to say whether these latest initiatives are bearing fruit. What is important, however, is that, despite the difficulties of the early years, the aim of developing an area-based approach remains intact. The potential for such an approach is no less now than it was when the academy was first planned. However, the base on which it might stand is now much broader in terms both of the range of partners involved and the experience of the lead actors.

Transforming Heybury: a local authority-led area-based initiative Aims and expectations Heybury is a small administrative borough, originally created as an overspill residential area for a nearby city. It has six distinct residential areas and high levels of social housing. Outcomes are poor at borough level, particularly in relation to health, economic activity and education, with the borough’s secondary schools often failing to meet national expectations. There are also notable inequalities between Heybury’s residential areas, with localised concentrations of extreme child poverty and third-generation unemployment in certain parts of the borough. In response, the LA developed an overarching strategy – referred to here as Transforming Heybury – which set out to transform the borough’s outcomes over a 15-year period. Notably, like Weston Housing Trust, this strategy was grounded in the LA’s own analysis of how poor outcomes came to be concentrated and sustained in the borough. This centred on Heybury’s weak economic infrastructure and identified a wide range of interrelated factors that were at work locally. For instance, having been overlooked within regional economic development plans, the borough was struggling to attract new employers, and this was compounded by low levels of adult qualifications. Employment opportunities in the borough tended to be in low-skilled jobs, and this was seen to create little incentive for young people who wanted to live and work in the borough to engage with the education on offer. Those residents in skilled employment tended to use the borough as a commuter base, taking advantage of its lower housing prices, but working and educating their children elsewhere, especially at secondary level. This reinforced inequalities between the borough’s residential areas, and also meant that Heybury’s secondary school population was more acutely and uniformly disadvantaged 97

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than the borough’s resident population. This, coupled with a falling school-age population, also meant that there were an unsustainable number of surplus school places in the borough. Reflecting this analysis, Transforming Heybury’s overarching strategic plan had five core aims: 1. to attract new employers to the borough, leading to sustainable economic growth; 2. to develop a local workforce, with the skills and qualifications to support this; 3. to improve residents’ quality of life through physical, social and economic regeneration; 4. to raise aspirations within the borough, retain aspirational families within the borough and attract new aspirational families to the borough; and 5. to develop social cohesion across the borough. The LA executive established two broad mechanisms to act on these aims. One was through locally tailored community development initiatives in each of the borough’s distinctive residential areas. The other was the development of borough-wide thematic initiatives on issues relating to health, education, employment and housing. Transforming Heybury’s education strand was designed by the LA Children’s Services department to address the pressing issues of the school system, which were seen to cluster around secondary education. The strategy they developed revolved around managing the issue of surplus places by closing the borough’s secondary schools, and reopening a smaller number of purpose-built Community Learning Centres (CLCs) equally distributed across the borough’s residential areas. The CLCs were expected to play a pivotal role in improving the borough’s outcomes in three main ways. First, they would employ innovative curricular structures and approaches to teaching and learning that would engage young people, have greater relevance to employment, raise attendance and attainment, and attract new families. Second, they would engage local residents in a full range of extended service activities, including on-site access to leisure facilities and specialist services. Third, they would act as strategic leaders for the physical, social and economic regeneration of their local areas. To do this, they would: involve other services and wider stakeholders, including residents, in the CLC’s leadership and governance arrangements; coordinate their actions with other local and thematic initiatives; federate with local primary schools; and, as a network of CLCs, learn from each other 98

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and develop shared strategies. In all of this, the LA anticipated that its primary role would be to ensure equality across the borough. Developments and difficulties As in Weston, the sheer scope of ambition, and the challenges inherent in trying to realise such a strategy, were daunting. If, for instance, we reflect on efforts to manage surplus school places in Stockborough, as reported in Chapter Three, it is remarkable that the LA was able even to begin to implement its plans, and that the CLCs were built as scheduled. A notable factor in this was that the LA invested a considerable amount of time and energy in working with front-line educational professionals to build a shared commitment to Transforming Heybury’s education strategy. There was good evidence that CLC principals were trying to find ways to fulfil the CLCs’ wide-ranging remit, and as one CLC principal reflected: “My general view is the powers-that-be took a really brave step for the future. In some sense, [the LA] got us all to jump off a cliff together.” Inevitably, however, significant difficulties were also encountered, and we want to explore these in some detail in relation to efforts to: transform teaching and learning; link education to employment; and offer extended services through the CLCs. In doing so, our purpose is not to cast aspersions on Transforming Heybury’s strategic plans, nor to undermine its achievements. Rather, we do so because Transforming Heybury provides valuable insights into some of the operational considerations with which locally developed ABIs must engage, and the relationship between operational and strategic concerns. Teaching and learning Part of Transforming Heybury’s education strategy required the CLCs to develop innovative teaching and learning practices. In an effort to ensure this would work as anticipated, the LA used a research and development process to identify models of ‘good’ practice in the international literature, which it used to create a teaching and learning framework for the CLCs. This promoted a thematically oriented (rather than subject-specific) curriculum, which the LA believed would increase the time spent developing core skills and competencies, and would foster a learning environment more closely attuned to workplace practices. To help the CLCs to implement this, the LA also set out the principles it saw as underpinning practice in the CLCs, and created an audit tool that would help teachers to evaluate their practices against 99

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this. Its intention was then to create training opportunities matched to teachers’ needs. Overall, the LA believed that these measures would ensure both equality of opportunity and a higher quality of teaching and learning across the borough. In practice, however, tensions started to emerge between this uniform approach and the need for local adaptation identified by staff at CLC level, with both the CLCs and the LA seeking to take control of this aspect of Transforming Heybury’s education strategy. At an LA level, Transforming Heybury’s designers were concerned to ensure that teachers did not, in the words of one LA officer, “default to previous practice” because “they know what they’ve done before won’t work”. However, staff in the CLCs, while often enthusiastic to develop their practice, believed that this could not be achieved effectively by importing an externally developed framework. They were more concerned to build on their existing good practice, professional concerns, local knowledge and day-to-day experience, and there was some evidence that the CLCs were already starting to share experiences and learn from one another. Undoubtedly, this difficult dynamic also owed much to the extreme pressure the LA was under from Ofsted and central government to raise standards quickly – a situation that had led it to perhaps put more faith in external research evidence than local and professional knowledge. Linking education to employment Strategically, the LA was committed to creating an educational offer that could engage young people in the borough’s most disadvantaged communities and would attract employers. However, it had started to encounter two difficulties in practice. One of these related to whether Transforming Heybury was sufficiently and equally in tune with the identities, values and dispositions of its resident communities. For instance, a family support worker and long-time resident suggested to us that there was a mismatch between Transforming Heybury’s drive to improve attainment and local needs. As she explained: “There’s a problem that there’s a simple belief that if pupils are given a good level of education, that’s attainment not achievement, they will move on and up on their own, but it’s not so.… If the borough get five A*–Cs, what do our young people get out of it? New people coming in will probably look for the five A*–Cs but the local people just want things that will get their young people into school 100

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and keep them in school … for instance, a new curriculum focusing on construction is very much something local people are interested in.” The second difficulty related to those aspects of the borough’s local dynamics in which Transforming Heybury could realistically intervene in an effort to promote opportunities for skilled employment. It was becoming increasingly apparent, for example, that even at executive level, the LA had very little influence over the creation of local employment opportunities. For instance, employment in the construction industry was an established aspiration in parts of the borough, and significant investment in improving the borough’s physical infrastructure had been projected. Indeed, investment in new housing had been secured in relation to the one of the CLCs. However, there was no guarantee that this could generate local employment. As an LA officer with a regeneration remit explained: “job opportunities will be constrained by European law whereby projects have to be put out to tender, you can’t just employ local people, so there’s investment but there’s a constriction of opportunities. You’ve actually got to identify where the local opportunities are that can be accessed – in the public sector, business sector. We need to grasp that because we’re not matching up with what young people need.” It appeared that, in practice, there was some divergence between what was known about Heybury’s economic infrastructure and the spatial scale(s) at which this could be influenced and some of the assumptions implicit in Transforming Heybury’s overarching strategy. This is not to suggest that links between education and employment could not, or should not, have been integral to Transforming Heybury’s education reforms. However, it does point to some possible limitations in the theory of change for this aspect of the initiative’s overarching strategy. Offering extended services through the Community Learning Centres The CLCs were financed through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), a government scheme for funding public infrastructure projects with private capital. They were purpose-built, designed to be easily accessible by the community, with integral leisure and sports facilities, and rooms for multi-agency use. This was seen as central to enabling the CLCs 101

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to engage local residential communities in a full range of extended services. In practice, a series of difficulties emerged in relation to this agenda, centring on the ownership of the CLC buildings and whose interests these were actually seen to serve. While, strategically, the CLCs had been designated as community assets, in practice, they were owned by a national construction company and then leased back to the LA under the PFI initiative. This meant that to provide community access to the CLCs beyond the statutory school day, the LA had to cover the cost of hiring the buildings. As part of its operational strategy, the LA had established a centralised booking and payment structure for hiring CLC facilities. These were set at uniform rates to ensure equity across the borough. However, for many local residents, and especially for those in the most disadvantaged communities, this was reportedly creating financial barriers to access. This prompted a LA regeneration officer to ask: “is it really for the community? I mean [the CLC is] physically in the middle of it, but there’s a great concern that [the community] will be priced out.… I reckon each CLC needs to take £70,000 just to break even.… This is one of the most economically deprived communities in the country so, well, 50p is okay but.… So, we’ve got this thing that’s right in the middle of the community and for six months no community members have used it.” This was also reported to be creating tensions between Heybury’s more and less advantaged residential groups – and, indeed, between Heybury and non-Heybury residents. As an LA ward coordination officer commented: “We were having trouble with the all-weather pitches at [the CLC] because the people who were using them were the people who could pay to use them and travelled in specially. Some young people were throwing stones over and the comments were ‘You don’t live round here, this is ours, we’re being kept out and if we can’t afford to go on here, you’re not going on it either’.” There was some suggestion that this feeling of exclusion was heightened in Heybury’s most disadvantaged ward by the LA’s success in attracting investment in new housing linked to the CLC. The same ward coordinator reported that during a neighbourhood meeting: 102

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“One of the residents said ‘You’re going to move us out and move new people in and they’ll get the benefit of that new CLC. You’re bringing new people in who have got jobs and got money and that’s for them, not for our kids.’ Never have I ever heard or ever believed that it wasn’t for the local people, but to hear that took me back.” It was also reported that because the construction company who owns the CLC buildings saw the LA, not Heybury’s residents, as its client, it had not included residents in decisions about what was intended to be their community resource. For example, a community governor from one of the CLCs reported that: “When it was being built [the builders] wouldn’t actually talk to us because they said ‘Well, you’re not actually the client’. I mean I am a governor and it’s kind of, well, what power do we have?” Equally, despite being cast as local leaders, some of the CLC principals we spoke to said that they were unable to respond to what they saw as their communities’ needs, as they had no real input into how the CLC facilities were used. As one CLC principal commented: “There is nothing to stop anybody booking a room in the centre but it is not in my gift because the local authority organises that.… So, I’m in the process of emailing out to someone in the health service who wants to run sessions here to say ‘By all means but you have to go back to the local authority’.” Services that were actively seeking to take a role in building community capacity were also reporting the costs associated with hiring the CLCs’ facilities to be prohibitive. Moving forward The findings we have reported earlier relate to the early implementation of a long-term transformation strategy. When our involvement in Transforming Heybury ended, we can say that the strategy was not always working as its designers intended, but, equally, the strategy itself was not set in stone. There was still the potential for Transforming Heybury to evolve in response to feedback from across the borough, and for its original strategy to be revisited. All of the difficulties we outlined earlier had – insofar as it was possible to influence these from within the borough – the potential to be resolved. For instance, whereas 103

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the LA had taken the lead during the strategy’s early implementation, Transforming Heybury’s design actually anticipated that the CLCs would be the drivers of the strategy: acting as community hubs and community leaders at a community level; and operating as a network and generating shared strategies at a borough level. To get back to this strategic vision, the LA and CLCs needed to agree on which aspects of the strategy should be driven centrally at LA level, which aspects should be driven at CLC level, and what would need to happen to allow responsibilities to be shifted accordingly. In principle, there was no reason why such a dialogue could not take place, and it should have been possible to realign Transforming Heybury’s operational and strategic concerns. In sum, while there remained considerable challenges to be addressed, there was still also huge potential for the long-term, systemic reform of the local education system – both in itself and as embedded within a borough-wide programme of social and economic reform.

Towards a new style of area-based initiatives? Clearly, there are notable differences between the Weston and Heybury initiatives. Heybury was LA-led and operated within an administratively defined borough. In the Weston initiative, leadership came from outside the LA and was focused on an area of housing managed by the Weston Housing Trust from which the Trust-sponsored academy recruited many of its students. But, nonetheless, we would argue that they have enough in common to be considered variants of a new way of ‘doing’ ABIs. Specifically, they mark the beginning of a shift from nationally mandated initiatives – whether stand-alone or embedded in wider policy – to a new generation of locally developed and locally owned ABIs. We outline some of the distinctive characteristics of this shift in the following. Distinctively, neither Weston nor Heybury was brought into being by a central policy promoting ABIs. They arose in response to local decisions, and were led by local actors – who could have chosen not to involve themselves in such complex and risky ventures. In the reverse of the way stand-alone ABIs had worked, in both instances, national policies were used to support locally determined plans. Established in the late 2000s, both took advantage of New Labour’s major school rebuilding programme, and its eagerness to see new kinds of schools and new kinds of school–LA relationships. Both built on nationally mandated ideas about extended services and local coordination, but used these to their own ends. As a result of this, rather than nationally 104

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mandated partnership structures being imposed locally in order to create temporary alliances to manage short-term projects, both initiatives sought to build stable and formalised local relationships that could not be disturbed by a change of personnel or government priorities. In turn, this commitment led both to actively rethink the role of schools – indeed, Heybury chose the term ‘Community Learning Centre’ to characterise the sorts of multidimensional institutions it was trying to create. In both cases, a radical reform of schools’ ‘internal’ practices – their approach to pedagogy, curriculum and student support – was expected to be aligned with an extension of their ‘external’ role – in relation to families and communities – and both were to be aligned with wider area-based strategies for tackling disadvantage locally. These strategies were not simply a matter of tackling an assortment of presenting problems within a short-term finite project. Rather, they envisaged a fundamental long-term transformation of their target areas, not only in education, but also culturally, socially and economically. Insofar as they were able, the initiatives saw themselves as dealing both with the local manifestations and with the causes of disadvantage. To achieve this, both initiatives based their strategies on an analysis of how their target areas worked. Whether those analyses were accurate or sufficiently wide-ranging is another matter, but they were at least attempts to understand area dynamics and to intervene in them fundamentally, rather than to assume that each presenting problem needed a separate intervention. In all of these ways, these initiatives were different from many of the ABIs – particularly education-focused ABIs, which we discussed in Chapter Four. It is perhaps not too ambitious a claim, therefore, to say that they represent the emergence of a ‘third generation’ of ABIs, drawing on the opportunities and resources provided by national policy, but determinedly local in origin, and based on a more-or-less sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of disadvantage in their areas. Above all, they indicate a move from what, in Chapter One, we called ‘minimal’ towards ‘maximal’ conceptualisations of what ABIs are and can achieve. Having said all that, it would be difficult to argue that Weston and Heybury were more than merely promising. Neither was an unequivocal success in the first few years of their existence, and both encountered significant problems. If, as we have suggested, they are indicative of the emergence of a new generation of ABIs, it is important to look at these problems to understand the obstacles similar developments elsewhere might face. 105

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One immediate issue is the nature of strategic thinking in these initiatives and the link between that and actions to deliver the strategy. A notable feature of both Weston and Heybury is that their work was based on an analysis of local dynamics and a theory of change for how it might be possible to impact positively on those dynamics. However, in both cases, these theories left something to be desired. At a strategic level, they were highly plausible, but in neither case were they implemented successfully, at least in the short term. A good strategy, therefore, is not enough. It needs to be elaborated in terms of detailed implementation plans that take into account the realities ‘on the ground’. Unless proven to be flawed, it also needs to be adhered to in the face of the inevitable difficulties of implementation. A second related issue is essentially one of governance. Complex area initiatives need to hold together a range of local partners and stakeholders in a way that is strong enough to ensure the effective formulation and implementation of strategy, but flexible enough to accommodate the different interests and priorities of partners. The Weston initiative had apparently strong leadership from the Trust, though this meant that the key partnership was between itself and the academy and it was not always clear how other partnerships the Trust had developed related to this. More importantly, as its sponsor, the Trust’s supposed leadership of the academy proved somewhat illusory. A determined principal, responding to aggressive external accountability, was effectively able to marginalise the Trust’s overall strategy in pursuit of narrower and more short-term goals. The situation in Heybury was perhaps not dissimilar. The LA occupied a dominant position that could effectively marginalise other voices. This meant that it was able to drive through a highly ambitious programme of reform and service reconfiguration that might not otherwise have been achievable. However, it appeared that this had also started to create tensions between central and local (CLC and community) concerns within the borough. These could ultimately threaten the initiative’s viability if local stakeholders opted out – in the case of CLCs, by seeking independence from the LA, and for residents, by accessing schools outside Heybury. It is easy to see these difficulties as the result of the idiosyncrasies of key actors or of individual bad decisions. However, they are also indicative of the difficulties of establishing area-level governance structures that balance competing needs and imperatives without degenerating into ineffective talking shops. It is particularly significant that neither initiative had developed effective strategies for including residents in their target areas in governance arrangements, not least, 106

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perhaps, because whatever the strategy, there was still an assumption (whether tacit or explicit) that families and community cultures were part of a problem that required professional intervention. Nor was either initiative helped by unsupportive aspects of national policy, particularly with respect to school standards. In both areas, the newly founded schools were under intense pressure to produce short-term improvements, and it is hardly surprising that, at times, the broader area strategy was sacrificed in pursuit of immediate results. A third issue leading from this is how the success of initiatives of this kind is to be judged. If that judgement is made on the basis of shortterm performance data, and particularly school attainment data, it is hard to argue that Weston or Heybury did anything other than fail. Weston Academy did no better in relative terms than its predecessor schools, and Heybury’s secondary schools continued to perform at well below national averages, with little evidence of positive impacts from borough-wide reforms. This does not, however, present the full picture. In Weston, Rowley’s (2013) long-term engagement with families suggested that the academy’s extended role was, indeed, impacting in significant ways on some families, even if impacts were patchy across the wider population. It is also the case that neither initiative was subject to an overarching comprehensive evaluation, and that, in any case, improvements in outcomes might only become apparent when the major reforms and restructuring in both areas had bedded down and overcome their initial difficulties. The short-term monitoring of limited performance data was highly unlikely to identify any underlying or longer-term impacts, even though these may eventually prove to be the most powerful in relation to improved outcomes. Amid all this uncertainty, therefore, what we can say is that promising initiatives of this kind need appropriately sophisticated and longitudinal evaluation. This is important so that convincing rationales and well-formulated strategy are not taken as guarantees of better outcomes. However, it is also important so that the real impacts and improvements such initiatives may bring about are not glossed over by crude monitoring systems. This is an issue to which we shall return in Chapter Eight. The Heybury and Weston initiatives, then, are anything but blueprints for a new style of ABI that can simply be implemented elsewhere. They are full of problems and shortcomings, some of them due, no doubt, to local factors, but others indicating major issues that any similar initiative would need to overcome. They are, nonetheless, distinctively different from previous education-focused ABIs. They suggest that, despite the difficulties, it is, indeed, possible to generate 107

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coherent local strategies for tackling educational disadvantage, which do not need to be narrowly focused on school improvement or driven by central government. In the remaining chapters, therefore, we will seek to build on the principles that Weston and Heybury point to in order to consider more fully what a new generation of locally developed ABIs might look like, and how these might be realised in practice.

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A rationale for a new generation of area-based initiatives So far, we have seen that area-based initiatives (ABIs), and particularly education-focused ABIs, have a distinctly mixed track record. Perhaps, at best, they can claim a modest degree of success in ameliorating conditions and improving outcomes, to some extent, for some people, in some places. This has led some critics to argue that ABIs are not an appropriate vehicle for tackling disadvantage, and that their time is over. However, we have also seen that this is not the whole story. Modest improvements are undoubtedly better than nothing – and perhaps even life-changing for some. Furthermore, ABIs have not remained static, but have evolved, and we have sought to distinguish between: • first-generation, nationally mandated stand-alone ABIs, separate from mainstream programmes, with discrete funding and targeted at specific urban areas; • second-generation, nationally mandated embedded ABIs, where separate initiatives have been embedded within mainstream programmes to create universally progressive provision with the capacity to respond to spatial concentrations of disadvantage; and • newly emerging, locally developed ABIs, where groups of local stakeholders are beginning to act to develop their own area-based strategies to tackle a range of interconnected issues, drawing on national policies to support their aims where possible. In Chapter Five, we looked in detail at two newly emerging, locally developed ABIs. While neither was without its problems, we, nonetheless, saw how they seemed to offer ways forward that promised to overcome some of the well-known difficulties with previous generations of nationally mandated ABIs. Our purpose in this chapter is to stand back from the detail of these examples to examine the principles that underpin them. In doing so, our aim is to develop a rationale for action that is considerably more robust than the common-sense assumption that additional resources will be enough to overcome the problems of disadvantaged places. In our discussion, we will draw particularly on an ecological approach 109

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to understanding place – as initially explored in Chapters One and Two. We will also revisit the issue of the purposes ABIs might serve, and in addressing this, will introduce notions of ‘risk’, ‘protection’ and ‘resilience’. We begin, however, by revisiting one of this book’s underlying themes, namely, what it is that ABIs can realistically be expected to achieve.

What can be changed? Any new rationale for ABIs as interventions in the relationships between education, disadvantage and place depends upon establishing that those relationships can, in fact, be changed. However, as we saw in Chapter Four, one of the most damning criticisms of ABIs is that their modest outcomes are an inevitable consequence of their failure to engage with the overwhelming societal forces that act to maintain and reproduce disadvantage. The implication of such critiques is that ABIs fail to bring about significant change in disadvantaged areas because nothing short of fundamental economic, social and political transformation is likely to make much difference. As Dorling and Pritchard, in a review of developments over the past century and a half, point out, neither ABIs nor a host of other ameliorative measures have succeeded in eradicating poverty or making poor places affluent: the general level of poverty in Britain has had a persistence that is stronger than we thought during much of the middle of the last century. If a longer perspective is taken then … the map of poverty in London and elsewhere in Britain … has not changed greatly. (Dorling and Pritchard, 2010, p 90) Not surprisingly, scholars such as these point not only to the inadequacy of policy responses, but also to the inevitability of poverty and poor places in a capitalist economy. The work of the American scholar Pauline Lipman, who has spent many years tracing the links between the poor neighbourhoods and poor residents of Chicago and the workings of global capital, is illustrative of this. As she argues: Cities across the world typify the contrasts of wealth and poverty, marginality and centrality that Harvey pointed to over 35 years ago. These contradictions are magnified in gated communities and favelas, glittering downtown developments and decaying working class neighborhoods, and a globally mobile elite is juxtaposed with contained 110

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low-income communities. Although urban contradictions play out differently in different contexts, they are produced by a global political, economic and ideological project geared to capital accumulation through dispossession and exploitation. (Lipman, 2011, p 4) We suggested in Chapter One that although ABIs are unlikely to be widely transformative, the ameliorative impacts they can realistically make are, nonetheless, worth having. Analyses such as Lipman’s, however, pose a major challenge to the significance – or, indeed, possibility – of any form of ameliorative effort. They suggest that the only way to address spatial inequalities is through a fundamental social and economic reorientation – and given that this is improbable, Lipman (2011) argues that the only meaningful course of action available is political resistance. Approached from this starting point, it is little wonder that some critics see ABIs, with their ‘puny resources’ and local focus, as little more than a displacement activity. We would argue, however, that such a stance is inherently limiting. It is undeniable that macro-level forces matter in concentrating and sustaining disadvantage in particular places and communities, and that this calls for macro-level policy change in response. However, as we saw in Chapter Two, those forces work differently and produce different outcomes in different places. Similarly, while socio-economic status remains the strongest predictor of children’s educational outcomes in England (Perry and Francis, 2010), the fact is that not all children born into low-income families do badly. Poor outcomes may be a likely consequence of family background but not an inevitable one. However powerful the macro-level forces that produce and reproduce disadvantage may be, therefore, they are not so powerful that they entirely overwhelm the local and familial processes which mean that different outcomes are possible for different individuals and in different places. There is, moreover, evidence that policy interventions can, indeed, impact on outcomes, however limited those impacts may be. The history of ABIs that we reviewed in Chapter Four is a depressing one if we look to ABIs in isolation to overcome the effects of disadvantage on individuals and to transform disadvantaged places. However, it also shows that well-formulated ABIs can make some differences to some outcomes in some places. Likewise, as we have argued elsewhere (Dyson et al, 2010b), there is good evidence that relatively modest policy differences between countries that have many economic and political similarities can produce different outcomes. The same is true 111

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within countries. This is why, for instance, the 1997–2010 Labour governments’ policies, often roundly criticised for being insufficiently radical, nonetheless seem to have made a positive, if modest, difference to disadvantaged people and places (Lupton et al, 2013b). In other words, policy directions that fall within the umbrella of ‘normal politics’ can cumulatively have an impact on the nature and extent of disadvantage in different countries and at different times. Whether ameliorative change of this kind is enough is, of course, ultimately a political and ethical question. Nonetheless, the evidence is that such change is possible. While limited interventions such as ABIs cannot fundamentally change the underlying socio-economic processes that produce disadvantaged people and places, this does not mean that they can change nothing. Indeed, over time, suitably aligned, multiple policies, tackling particular disadvantaging factors and processes at different spatial scales may be able to produce significant cumulative impacts. As we frame it, the question is not whether anything can be achieved in the face of global forces, but how much can be done, and how to ensure that ABIs have the maximum impact possible. Again, to be clear about our stance, we are not suggesting that ABIs are an alternative to macro-level changes; it is not an either/or choice. Rather, we are interested in what they might contribute, ideally as one element within a coordinated, multi-scale attack on disadvantage.

Towards a rationale for intervention One way of exploring how ABIs might have maximum impact is to understand why and how it is that individuals who face unpromising starting circumstances might, nonetheless, go on to do well. Knowing what it is that enables these individuals to overcome their circumstances might indicate the kinds of things that ABIs need to do to support children, families and communities in disadvantaged areas. The notions of ‘risk’, ‘protection’ and ‘resilience’ (Schoon, 2006) are, we believe, helpful in this, and have often been used for understanding why it is that some individuals do well despite starting in unfavourable circumstances. From a psychological perspective, it has long been noted that some individuals are more resilient than others, with resilience being understood as the capacity to adapt successfully despite challenging or threatening circumstances – or, put more simply, ‘risks’ (for a discussion, see Howard et al, 1999). Resilience, in this sense, is often seen as a characteristic of the individual, albeit one that can be nurtured, for instance, through the supportive environment provided by families – or, in other words, by protecting against and mitigating risks. 112

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Life-course studies present another approach to understanding resilience, and successive longitudinal cohort studies have concerned themselves with tracing associations between the outcomes achieved by individuals and groups and various factors in their family and social backgrounds. Such studies have tended to find that certain factors are routinely associated with poor outcomes – and these are labelled ‘risk’ factors. However, they are only ‘risk’ rather than ‘determining’ factors because some individuals who experience them, nonetheless, go on to do well. These individuals are labelled ‘resilient’, and researchers try to identify the factors that are associated with this resilience and that are, therefore, ‘protective’ of individuals in the face of risks. As Bartley, summarising a programme of research into risk and resilience, puts it: We know from many studies that people who experience socioeconomic disadvantage have much poorer prospects throughout their life course. It is harder for them to do well at school, to get good, secure, and well paid jobs, and to remain healthy and happy in later life. There are, however, quite a few people who go through periods of poverty, unemployment, family breakdown and other social disadvantages and yet go on to lead healthy and rewarding lives. The findings of our research suggest the importance of social relationships, of ties to the community, and social interactive ‘relationship’ skills as key sources of protection. (Bartley, 2006, pp 4–5) From this perspective, resilience is less likely to be seen as a purely psychological phenomenon. The individual’s capacity to cope with life’s challenges is important, but this capacity is built in interaction with a set of protective factors in the local environment. While Bartley emphasises the importance of ties and relationships, other studies find a whole range of factors that seem to enable individuals to do well despite adversity. For instance, the Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education Project (EPPSE 3–14) in England is tracking a cohort of children from early childhood to adolescence, attempting to identify the factors at one stage of childhood that are associated with better and poorer outcomes at another stage. Not surprisingly, well-known risk factors such as being born into an economically poorer family turn out to be associated with poor outcomes (Sylva et al, 2012). However, there are some children and young people who perform ‘against the odds’. This group is characterised by having parents who are able to actively ‘cultivate’ 113

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their children’s learning, by having access to high-quality pre-school provision, by encountering supportive schools and teachers, and by accessing enriching extra-curricular activities (Siraj-Blatchford et al, 2011). As the researchers argue: it is never ‘just’ the one factor of child, family or school, or broader social context that brings about success or failure in an academic trajectory. Rather, it appears to be the particular ecological niches that arise through the active reciprocal interactions between these factors that determine the parameters for children’s pathways to academic success. In other words, the real world context of development is complex but while characteristics at macro or meso level, such as school policies and curriculum or parental jobs, exert some influence on children’s day-today learning experiences, the best opportunities to help children are within reach right there on the micro level. (Siraj-Blatchford et al, 2011, p 71) With this in mind, the issues we raised in Chapter Two around children’s identities, their access to cultural capital and their access to schools with different characteristics can all be viewed through the lens of risk and resilience. The importance of the risk–protection–resilience framework from the perspective of ABIs is twofold. First, the idea that some individuals are resilient in the face of adversity shows that, although background factors are strongly associated with poor outcomes, they do not necessarily cause those outcomes in a strongly deterministic way; alternative trajectories are possible. Second, the notion of protective factors indicates the kinds of circumstances that need to be in place for those alternative trajectories to materialise. These factors do not appear to require any fundamental macro-level societal reforms – desirable though these might be for other reasons. Rather, they are the kinds of things that policymakers might reasonably hope to have an influence upon and that may well be amenable to local-level action. As Bartley argues: Living in adverse conditions of poverty and disadvantage gives people less opportunity to build up and less capability to maintain good physical or mental health. Poorer neighbourhoods are far less likely to have good schools, pleasant parks and play areas for example. We cannot expect 114

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individuals to develop resilience all by themselves: this could put us in danger of ‘blaming the victim’ instead of investigating underlying obstacles and barriers to positive functioning. (Bartley, 2006, p 5) Our view is that a new generation of ABIs could reasonably be expected both to tackle those local risk factors that are within their sphere of influence and to enhance the protective factors to which people living in the area have access. In doing so, they could, we suggest, valuably intervene in the processes that perpetuate poor outcomes in particular places.

The case for an ecological approach to intervention While some of the research within the risk–protection–resilience framework focuses on identifying particular risk and protection factors, much is also concerned with identifying interactions between these factors. The picture that emerges is often complex, and these complexities have considerable significance in building a rationale for a new generation of ABIs. A simple model of how these factors work might assume that each new risk factor adds a finite and quantifiable amount of risk to individuals’ trajectories, and that each protective factor would ameliorate one or more risks to a greater or lesser extent. However, research shows that this is not quite how risk and protection operate. For example, a study by the Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning explored the relationship between children’s attainment in primary schools and the various risk and protective factors at work in their environments (Duckworth, 2008). It saw these factors as sited within three ‘contexts’: a distal context made up of background sociodemographic features; a proximal context made up of parental support and parent–child relationships; and a school–peer context – to which it added a fourth context, the child’s ‘ability’. Not surprisingly, the study found that children with better experiences across all of these contexts tended to have better outcomes, and that children who have good-quality experiences in one context are likely to have better experiences in others. However, it also found that the relationships between contexts were not simply linear and cumulative. Instead of each context having an independent effect on outcomes, the effect varied depending upon the quality of the other contexts. In particular, for children at greatest risk of doing badly, the effects of improvement in any one context – in the quality of their school experience, for 115

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instance – were likely to be much more marked than an equivalent improvement for children who are doing well. Once again, this suggests that the presence of particular risk factors can be offset by enhancing protective factors elsewhere in children’s lives. Expanding on this, the EPPSE study referred to earlier pointed to what it called ‘the relative and historical (longitudinal) contribution of many positive and negative factors to students’ pathways’ (Sylva et al, 2012, p vii, emphases in original). As well as echoing Duckworth’s findings, it also found that factors present at one point in an individual’s life may continue to have an impact long afterwards. This is particularly true of high-quality pre-school provision, which can continue to have a positive effect on outcomes into secondary education, and possibly adulthood (Schweinhart et al, 2005). Studies of this kind suggest a rationale for ABIs that is not simply about tackling particular risk factors or strengthening particular protective factors. By highlighting the interactions between factors and their potential longitudinal impacts, they suggest that interventions need to be conceptualised systemically – that is, they need to be based on an understanding that changing one factor at one time may well have implications for other factors and at other times. It is not, therefore, simply a case of tackling risk factors or strengthening protective factors in isolation, but of understanding and intervening in the complex, longitudinal interactions and processes that may help to shape outcomes over time. One way of understanding these is to take the kind of ‘ecological’ multi-scale perspective that we have employed in earlier chapters. This sees the individual and her/his environment as constituting a set of interacting systems and subsystems – in Bronfenbrenner’s well-known formulation, as an ‘ecological environment [which can be] conceived as a set of nested structures, each inside the next, like a set of Russian dolls’ (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p 3). In the original presentation of this model, Bronfenbrenner suggested that one set of structures might be constituted by the settings where the individual is present, learns and grows – the family, the school, the neighbourhood. A second is formed by the interactions between these settings, so that, for instance: ‘A child’s ability to learn to read in the primary grades may depend no less on how he is taught than on the existence and nature of ties between the school and the home’ (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p 3). A third level is formed by settings where the individual is not actually present but that, nonetheless, have an impact upon his/her development – the example given being the conditions under which parents are

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employed. Finally, there is an overarching societal culture that structures these settings as they directly or indirectly impact upon individuals. Such ideas have, as we have indicated in earlier chapters, been widely developed. More recently, for instance, Lee has proposed a ‘cultural and ecological framework for human learning and diversity’, which she defines in the following way: The fundamental idea is that people learn and mature as a consequence of the interplays among individual characteristics (genetic, physiological, psychological); characteristics of the groups to which the individual belongs (either by self-identification or ascription by others); and the characteristics of settings (e.g. social, physical, cognitive).… This interplay is dynamic in that people influence settings and settings influence people. This interplay entails people’s participation within and across multiple settings, within and across multiple dimensions of time.… The fact that human learning and maturation occur within and across various routine settings indicates that it is the ecology of people’s lives that matters, rather than a singular impact of participation in any one setting. (Lee, 2012, pp 174–5) Such theories have significant implications for the ongoing development of ABIs. It is, as Lee suggests, the ecology of people’s lives that matters because the factors that impact upon people in particular settings do not work in isolation. Interventions in people’s lives, therefore, are always interventions in these ecologies. The implication is that ABIs can be conceptualised as means of marshalling effective interventions in the ecologies of the people they seek to benefit. They are not – or should not be – simply in the business of making one-off interventions to tackle whichever outcomes seem to be particularly problematic at any given time. In reality, of course, this is precisely what many stand-alone ABIs have done, and particularly so in education – directing a little extra resource to schools where performance is poor, or giving a little extra support to groups of students who are doing particularly badly. However, an ecological perspective suggests that ABIs should be aiming to change the ecologies out of which such poor outcomes originate, and that this might mean looking elsewhere in those ecologies than at presenting problems. For example, improving reading outcomes might require a focus on home–school links as much as in-school practices. It might also involve paying attention to how children feel about themselves as 117

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learners, to their relationships with their teachers, to the capacity of their families to support their reading development, to the availability of reading material outside of school, to the pressures and supports offered by peers, to the material circumstances under which children and their families live – indeed, to a host of factors and interactions across children’s ecologies. Overall, the implication is that ABIs must understand as precisely as possible how people’s ecologies ‘work’ and what kinds of interventions are likely to produce what kinds of outcomes amid their complex dynamics. This is something that in their previous formulations as nationally mandated initiatives, they have simply been unable to do.

The importance of place The rationale for ABIs as ecological interventions aimed at building resilience is, we suggest, a promising one. However, in focusing on what ABIs might do for individuals – and particularly in the case of education-focused ABIs, what they might do for children and their families – it does not explain why interventions need to take place on an area basis. It is to this that we now turn. The case for intervening on an area basis can be made on both conceptual and pragmatic grounds. The pragmatic reason for targeting places is that even if interventions are directed at whole populations or whole population subgroups, they still have to be delivered in places. Schools, leisure facilities, youth clubs, primary healthcare facilities, community centres, police stations and a range of other bases for service delivery are all located in particular neighbourhoods and, indeed, are often clustered together or co-located locally. Moreover, services in England have a long history of local organisation and delivery, with the local authority as a key (if somewhat diminishing) provider and coordinator. Although the Every child matters (DfES, 2003) agenda of the New Labour years has gone, it has left a legacy in many places of areabased working, and, at the time of writing, the Coalition government continues to emphasise the role of community-level decision-making and locally organised services (see, eg, HM Government, 2010b). There are, therefore, rich networks of collaborating organisations of services at the local level, supported by local decision-making structures and systems of community engagement and accountability (however imperfect these may be). Therefore, it makes a great deal of practical sense to think in terms of delivering interventions at a local level. However, there is also an important conceptual case to be made relating to the nature of place. As we saw in Chapter Two, places differ 118

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from each other not only in terms of relatively superficial features such as the configuration of services and infrastructure, but also in more fundamental ways. Such differences can be found at many spatial levels, from region, to town or city, to neighbourhood (Ballas et al, 2012). To take just one example, a recent study of wage inequality and the polarisation of the labour market into high- and low-skill sectors has shown that they are problems right across the UK, but that they take different forms in different places (Lee et al, 2013). In London and the South, towns and cities tend to be particularly unequal, largely because of the relatively high proportion of high-skilled, high-paid residents and because of the consequent increase in costs even for those who are poorest. The towns and cities of the North tend to be less unequal, but also poorer overall, because they have a preponderance of low-skilled, low-paid residents. This situation certainly calls for a national response in terms of economic development, welfare support and the progressive taxation of the affluent. However, it also calls for differentiated local responses that will be different from place to place in terms of developing the skills of the workforce and improving conditions for those who currently do worst. Such variability, of course, extends down through the spatial levels to the neighbourhood. Neighbourhoods, and their ‘bundles of spatially based attributes’, are different one from another on a wide range of dimensions, including environmental characteristics, infrastructure, demographic characteristics of the population, quality and extent of local services, political characteristics, and social networks. Even where neighbourhoods share important characteristics – for instance, where they are disadvantaged on a range of indicators – it cannot be assumed that their other characteristics are similar, or that the dynamics within the neighbourhoods are identical (Dyson et al, 2012) – with our accounts of Stockborough, Weston and Heybury acting as cases in point. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that the same interventions will have similar effects wherever they are delivered. To give an example, there has been considerable emphasis in policy texts, particularly over the past decade, on the importance of ensuring that children and young people in disadvantaged communities are encouraged to have ‘high aspirations’ in order to do well in and beyond education. This has spawned any number of local and national initiatives, the best-known probably being Aimhigher (HEFCE, no date). These initiatives have generally started from the assumption that disadvantaged children and young people have uniformly low aspirations, and that boosting aspirations in some straightforward way is all that is needed (in Stockborough, 119

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for instance, schools often had displays of motivational slogans in classrooms and corridors). In fact, the research evidence tends to suggest that the assumption of uniformly low aspirations is somewhat problematic (see, eg, Menzies, 2013) and, more significantly from our point of view, that the nature of aspirations varies from place to place, depending, among other things, on the characteristics of local populations and the employment and other opportunities available in the local area (Kintrea et al, 2011). Bright’s (2011) study of aspirations in former mining communities, for instance, traces how the distinctive histories, cultures and opportunity structures of these places create a kind of ‘resistant aspiration’ in which young people aspire to futures quite different from those they see as officially expected of them. As he concludes: I have suggested that attitudes toward aspiration and mobility, in these former coal-mining localities at least, can only really begin to be understood if they are seen … as situated.… [Resistant counter-aspiration] sets itself against the dominant discursive model of aspiration as individual economic advancement that predominates in current discussions. If that is the case, then the implications for practice models that fail to move beyond that discourse are fairly clear – they will likely meet the same forms of resistance. (Bright, 2011, p 75) It is at this point that the pragmatic reasons for ABIs begin to overlap with more conceptual concerns. As Bright suggests, and as we have argued in earlier chapters, interventions are unlikely to be successful unless they take into account the circumstances of particular places. Therefore, it makes sense for interventions to be designed and delivered at a level sufficiently local for them to be shaped in accordance with these circumstances. However, as we are seeing, this is not simply a matter of identifying a set of disconnected characteristics of places, but of understanding places as ‘ecological units’ (Johnson Jr, 2012, p 29), in the sense that the different characteristics of places interact with and shape one another within a set of distinctive dynamics. Such an ecological perspective reminds us that the ecologies of individuals are intimately bound up with the places where they live. Although people are not bound by the places where they live – they interact with people, ideas and events well beyond their own neighbourhood environment, for instance – much of what they are and do is shaped by the place in which they find themselves. Among 120

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other things, they typically attend local schools, use local services, interact with other residents and find employment in travelling distance of where they live. At the same time, they shape the place where they live – they become part of the populations that schools and services serve, form a more-or-less loosely structured community in which social interactions take place, constitute the labour pool from which employers recruit, and so on. From this perspective, places and people constitute an interactive whole, just as, from a human development perspective, individuals are not independent of the family, social and other contexts in which they learn and develop. The place where an individual lives is part of that individual’s ecology, just as the individual is part of the ecology of place. This, again, has implications for how we might conceptualise a new generation of ABIs. We argued earlier that ABIs could be seen as risk-reducing and resilience-building interventions in the ecologies of (primarily disadvantaged) people. We can now say that they are also interventions in the ecologies of (primarily disadvantaged) places, and that there is no contradiction between these two formulations because the ecologies of places and people are closely intertwined. Therefore, ABIs need to understand not just how people work, but also how places work. We saw earlier how Bronfenbrenner argues that strengthening home–school relations might be as important for helping children read as improving the teaching of reading in the classroom. We can now add that improving housing conditions or employment prospects, or helping to shape local literacy cultures, or improving local support for families might also have a part to play. Theoretically, since ecologies are characterised by their interactive nature, any aspect of an ecology might impact on any other. Of course, the extent to which they do so is an empirical question. Bringing about a short-term gain in children’s mechanical reading skills might well be tackled most effectively by focusing on what happens in the classroom; enhancing children’s wider engagement with literacy might require a more broadly based approach; creating a literate and literacy-promoting community that is sustainable in the long term might require a very different approach again. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, once ABIs are clear about the ecological perspective they need to adopt, they still have a great deal of work to do to clarify their aims, understand the ecologies in which they are working and find and develop interventions that actually make a difference.

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Responding to the critics: issues of scope, targeting and effectiveness The conceptualisation of ABIs we are proposing goes a long way, we suggest, to addressing some of the powerful critiques of ABIs that have historically been made. For instance, nothing in what we are proposing would give ABIs the capacity to significantly impact upon the macro-level. However, the notion of ecology is one that presumes the permeability of boundaries between different contexts and spatial scales – so, for instance, just as macro-level policies can shape local and individual conditions, so might individual and local concerns also influence national policy. Human and social geographers have long drawn attention to the way in which different spatial levels interpenetrate one another. For example, Massey, in arguing for a ‘global sense of space’, has famously made the case that we should understand each place as ‘a meeting place’: Instead, then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself. (Massey, 1991, p 28) This suggests: first, that neighbourhoods must be understood in relation to higher spatial levels – be they towns and cities, regions, or national or international contexts; and, second, that this relationship works both ways – from micro to macro and vice versa. It follows that ABIs have to be formulated with an understanding of how those higher spatial levels impact upon the target area – and, in turn, how the area can impact upon those higher levels. Thinking about ABIs in this way also helps to direct attention to the possibilities for intervention at different spatial levels, to what might reasonably be achieved at each level and to how complementary actions could be taken across multiple levels. As Ballas et al (2012, p 70), considering the possibilities of intervention in a specifically European context, argue: action is likely to be necessary at different spatial scales. There is scope for EU [European Union], national, regional and local policy interventions but a need for clarity about what can reasonably be tackled at different levels. The 122

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‘failure’ of neighbourhood-level interventions, for example, to eradicate educational inequalities is hardly surprising when many of the mechanisms driving these inequalities are operating at wider spatial scales. But this does not mean that neighbourhood-level interventions have no role to play. In a recent review of the contribution of educational policies to reducing social inequality, Ross (2009) analysed 284 national, regional and local projects in fourteen European countries and came to the conclusion that investment strategies should cover multilateral approaches to the whole population as a range of approaches are more successful in addressing inequalities. This perspective also goes some way to solving the long-standing problems of definition and targeting to which we alluded in Chapter One. As we have seen, the areas that are subject to ABIs have tended to be defined in a somewhat arbitrary manner – perhaps in terms of administrative divisions, or school intake areas, or perceived communities, or simply on the basis of spreading available resources around – including some people within their boundaries who are not disadvantaged, and excluding others who clearly are. Understanding areas in terms of ecologies, however, has two advantages. First, the idea of interventions being nested within each other at different spatial levels means that targeting an area for special attention is not an either/ or decision. It is not the case that targeted areas get everything and others get nothing, but that resources are distributed in different ways to different places. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter Four, the rationale for embedding ABIs within wider universal policies in the latter part of New Labour’s term in office was to allow for spatial intensifications of universal provision, rather than providing disadvantaged places with something separate from mainstream policy, as did stand-alone ABIs. In turn, this creates a rationale (albeit one that needs considerable thought to operationalise) for how areas might be defined. Such definitions need not seek simply to draw a boundary around the most disadvantaged places, including many disadvantaged people but inevitably excluding many more. Instead, they are defined ecologically. In other words, the boundary seeks to capture processes not people, identifying factors, and interactions between factors, which operate in distinctive ways and produce distinctive (usually, distinctively poor) outcomes. Above all, the boundary seeks to encompass a set of factors in which intervention is possible, and where intervention stands a good chance of making a significant difference to the outcomes of interest. 123

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This means that boundaries are always a matter for inquiry and debate, rather than being based on largely arbitrary decisions or inadequate analyses of local ecologies. To take an example, if enabling young people to have different ambitions is the purpose of intervention in the kind of mining communities Bright (2011) describes, boundaries need to be drawn in relation to the processes that have generated the ‘resistant aspirations’ he found, and in a way that will facilitate action in the relation to the factors that can be influenced or changed to moderate those processes. For this purpose, there is little point in including in the target area places where aspirations are shaped differently, even if those places might appear to be equally disadvantaged on many standard indicators. This perspective also offers something to the debate about the effectiveness or otherwise of ABIs. In one sense, effectiveness is simple to judge. If an ABI seeks to raise educational attainment in an area, or improve health outcomes, or reduce levels of street crime, there are good measures available and well-established evaluative techniques for determining whether the initiative has made a difference. However, an ecological perspective suggests a need for more sophisticated approaches to judging effectiveness. While it is difficult to imagine an ABI that would not seek to improve outcomes of some sort, the question of which outcomes are of interest is not necessarily straightforward, since it depends upon how the local ecology is understood. The most obvious presenting problem may not be the most appropriate focus for action, and there may be many intermediate changes to achieve before this outcome improves. In Bright’s mining communities, for instance, evaluators might need to do much more than measure aspirations on a simple scale if interventions were instead seeking to change the conditions under which resistant aspiration had arisen. More subtle measures of how young people’s thinking was changing, and measures of changes in the wider environment, such as the availability of employment, might be more appropriate. Likewise, the question of attribution might need to be rethought. Typically, interventions are judged to be effective if they can be shown to have had a positive effect on outcomes, independently of the effects of other factors. However, the interactive nature of ecologies means that ecological interventions inevitably and deliberately interact with a wide range of factors, including other interventions. For an ABI focused on, say, improving the employment prospects of young people, an unexpected improvement in the performance of local schools, or an influx of migrant families, or the appearance of a new employer are not confounding factors, but parts of the local ecology with which the 124

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initiative needs to work. They may (as we shall see in Chapter Eight) multiply the challenges of evaluation, but in terms of the formulation and delivery of a new generation of ABIs, making best use of such factors outside the initiative itself will be crucial. Moreover, because we see the next generation of ABIs as ecological interventions, they necessarily have to be customised to fit the situations in which they are located. A group of ABIs may, therefore, follow a common set of principles, but it is important that those principles are adapted to local circumstances. While, again, this may cause problems for evaluation, and hence for the unequivocal demonstration of effectiveness, the new generation of ABIs we are proposing are not centrally designed interventions that just happen to be delivered locally; they are interventions that are necessarily in and of their particular area, being both locally developed and owned.

Intervention, delivery and democracy Throughout this book, the language we have used to talk about ABIs – typically, as ‘interventions’ that are ‘delivered’ – suggests that they are very much controlled by professionals who see themselves as using their professional expertise to act in what they see as the best interests of disadvantaged places and people. This reflects the reality of many ABIs, where professionals have focused on improving the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of their own services – the assumption being that engagement with high-quality services is essential to change local people’s outcomes. This tendency has been particularly strong in education-focused ABIs, perhaps not least because education is often seen as a way of escaping disadvantage, and it can only achieve this if it takes people beyond their place-based identities, values and dispositions (Cummings et al, 2007b). However, as we suggested in earlier chapters, there are dangers in focusing exclusively on a redistributive agenda that positions the residents of disadvantaged areas as dependent upon the good offices of professionals to solve their problems. Moreover, describing ABIs in these terms ignores the substantial efforts made in some ABIs outside education to give due weight to notions of recognition and, specifically, to establish a different set of relationships between professionals and the community members on whose behalf they supposedly work. While critics might argue that these efforts still leave control substantially in the hands of professionals, Shaw and Robinson (2011, p 133) suggest that, in the regeneration field at least: ‘There is now a well-established consensus that local communities need to be involved in the process of 125

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regeneration and we now know much more about the appropriateness and effectiveness of different approaches and methods.’ Whatever has actually been achieved in this respect, the implicit violence of the language of intervention and delivery should alert us to the dangers of professionally dominated ABIs. At the very least, they are likely to ignore the assets that are available in otherwise disadvantaged places and among the people who live there, which some approaches to community development have long recognised (Kretzmann and McKnight, 1993; Foot and Hopkins, 2010). At worst, they may create a situation in which already disadvantaged places and people are further disadvantaged by becoming dependent upon professionals who – however well-meaning they may be – have interests that are significantly different from their own (Crowson, 2001b; Small, 2004). The new way of conceptualising ABIs that we are proposing offers no absolute guarantees that such situations will not arise. However, the ecological perspective places at least two requirements on initiatives that create something of a safeguard. The first is that they have to be based on a thorough understanding of how local ecologies work. Such an understanding has to include an appreciation of the assets that are available locally, but also an understanding of how the people who are intended to benefit from the ABI think and what they want. Second, however much professional leadership there may be in ‘delivering interventions’, such interventions have to be effective in the context of local ecologies. Specifically, they will almost certainly need to go with the grain of what people want and will support. Interventions that ignore these, or that – intentionally or unintentionally – inflict status injuries on children, families and communities, are likely to be unsuccessful, regardless of what support they might have from research evidence gathered in other contexts. If these requirements are to be fulfilled, it is highly unlikely that this will be achieved simply by professionals working at arm’s length from the people they seek to benefit. Some authentic form of engagement is essential, though the precise form of that engagement and the degree of control exercised by different parties are matters for debate. Unfortunately, the education system (in England at least) has a distinctly patchy track record on such matters. Its attempts at involving community members in governance have had mixed success in disadvantaged areas (Dean et al, 2007a), while policies on community involvement have tended to restrict themselves to enlisting parents to support their child’s learning rather than pursuing any more democratic ambitions (see, eg, DCSF, 2008). Nonetheless, there is some interesting work coming out of the US which suggests that there 126

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may be ways in which disadvantaged communities can be enabled to exert greater influence in the education system (Warren and Mapp, 2011). The aim, as we suggested in Chapter One, is not to replace professional dominance with the dominance of local residents, but to create ‘relational power’ (Warren et al, 2009) in which the resources of professionals and of the people they are seeking to benefit are pooled in order to create a new kind of social capital in disadvantaged areas. While the likely problems and pitfalls of such an approach are all too clear, it seems to us that something of this kind is an inevitable corollary of an ecological perspective on ABIs.

A new generation of area-based initiatives: area-based initiatives as locally developed ecological interventions The model of ABIs that we are proposing as the next step in their evolution is very different to the sorts of ABIs with which we are familiar from previous initiatives. We have seen that, historically, ABIs have tended to take the form of low-resourced interventions in rather arbitrarily defined areas, aiming to improve a limited range of outcomes over what has usually been a relatively short timescale. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising, therefore, that their outcomes have been decidedly mixed, and they have been criticised for failing to engage with the macro-level factors that ultimately generate disadvantaged people and places. Looking to the future of ABIs, the conceptualisation we have offered makes no claims that local action is an effective way of dealing with the structural nature of disadvantage. Rather, the next generation of ABIs will inevitably be about amelioration. However, that amelioration has a purpose and can (and, we would argue, should) be part of more ambitious policy aims. We see these new-style ABIs as essentially riskreducing and resilience-building endeavours. Their aim is to enable disadvantaged people, within their local environments, to do better than they otherwise might, and it is possible for them to do this because even in relatively unfavourable socio-structural conditions, people’s lives are not entirely determined by their starting points. While it may be unreasonable to expect ABIs to bring about any fundamental transformation of social and economic structures, this does not mean that their aims need be narrowly conceived. Both Transforming Heybury and the Weston Housing Trust, for instance, had wide-ranging and highly ambitious agendas that, while they may not have been able to fundamentally transform their target areas, were certainly highly innovative in their local contexts. Furthermore, it is 127

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entirely reasonable to expect that this new style of ABI should become an element within a wider policy strategy to tackle disadvantage across multiple spatial scales. In order to achieve the degree of amelioration of which they might potentially be capable, we have argued that the next generation of ABIs will need to be conceptualised as ecological interventions – and that to engage with local ecologies, they must be developed locally. Rather than targeting isolated outcomes through short-term interventions, they will need to: understand how the ecologies of people and places work; be able to identify the wide range of factors, working at different scales, which impact on local outcomes; and appreciate the interactions between those factors. From this basis, the new style of ABIs we are proposing will be able to formulate interventions that can change the underlying (albeit local) processes through which poor outcomes are created and sustained locally. These interventions may not be aimed directly at the outcomes of interest, and may need to produce a wide range of changes over time before those outcomes improve. The effectiveness of these new-style ABIs will need to be judged on this basis. Finally, we have suggested that ABIs of this kind have an inherently democratising element. At the very least, they have to go with the grain of local ecologies, which means, among other things, working with the understandings and values of the people they hope to benefit. In order to do that, they have to find some way of engaging with those people and respecting who they are and what they wish. Some ABIs in the regeneration field have attempted this, though there is much less of a track record in education-focused ABIs, which have remained resolutely professionally dominated. However, there are some indications that authentic forms of engagement might be possible, in ways that value the contributions of both professionals and nonprofessionals. All of this begs questions as to whether such ABIs can exist in reality, and our answer to this is that initiatives of this kind can exist and are starting to emerge in the current political and economic climate. In Chapter Four, we saw that the stand-alone ABIs that originated in the 1960s began, during the New Labour period, to give way, in part at least, to what we called ‘embedded’ ABIs. Based on notions of progressive universalism, they began to reconceptualise action at the area level as an intensification and customisation of policy action at higher spatial levels. Arguably, this was a promising, if short-lived, attempt to explore how far overarching national strategies for tackling disadvantage might be given a spatial dimension. In Chapter Five, we saw how, in response 128

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to this, local actors were trying to construct holistic responses to the presenting problems of the areas where they worked. These were no longer simply short-term interventions mandated by national policy, but were envisaged as longer-term efforts to work with and within local ecologies in order to change the local conditions that generated those problems – or which at least exacerbated the problems that were generated outside the area. In Chapter Ten, we will present further examples of the new forms of ABI that are now emerging. Before then, however, we wish to spend some time exploring how the principles we have outlined in this chapter might actually be realised in practice. We turn, first, to the question of how ABIs might, in practical terms, go about analysing and understanding the ecologies of the places they serve, and then to how they might be evaluated and governed effectively.

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Developing understandings of place as a basis for intervention We have proposed that the future of area-based initiatives (ABIs) – and education-focused ABIs in particular – lies in reconceptualising them as locally developed interventions that engage with an ecological understanding of place. This means that they need to be able to engage with the complex interactions between the different factors that help to shape – but do not fully determine – people’s outcomes. With a particular concern for poor educational outcomes, in previous chapters we have explored how different factors can originate and/or operate at different spatial scales – from the micro-level context of the individual and family, to macro-level social and economic policies – and may be experienced differently by different people. We have also considered that in different places, different factors may be present, or may be more or less influential, or may interact differently. Moreover, we have seen that people and places exist in a dynamic relationship; places can shape people’s lives, and how people live can, in turn, shape the places where they live. A new generation of ABIs will somehow need to be able to understand and engage with these complex dynamics. Our purpose in this chapter is to explore how they might go about doing so. We approach this task wearing both of our professional ‘hats’. As we explained in the introduction to this book, we are university-based academics, a position that allows us to bring a range of disciplinary perspectives to bear on the task at hand. Therefore, in the first part of this chapter, we outline the sorts of issues within local ecologies of people and place that a multidisciplinary approach can help to illuminate. However, our thinking – and, indeed, our view that ABIs have a future – is grounded just as strongly in our empirical experience. In this respect, much of our work has involved supporting local stakeholders – typically, groups of professionals, including head teachers, local authority (LA) officers and the leaders of third sector organisations – who are in a position to take direct action to change local services, and who, as in Weston and Heybury, have been trying to develop new responses to seemingly intractable problems. We are, therefore, also well aware of the considerable operational challenges that local stakeholders will face in trying to understand the situations 131

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in which they want to intervene, and in subsequently taking action. Indeed, the challenge of generating a coherent analysis of what is happening locally, outside schools, to help create and sustain poor educational outcomes is the one that we are most often commissioned to undertake. We realise that our situation as researchers – with access to a multidisciplinary knowledge base, time to dedicate to the task and effective local neutrality, in that we do not belong to any local service, group or agenda – is distinctly different to that of local stakeholders seeking to develop their own analyses and actions. While we cannot resolve the challenges and dilemmas they will face, we can at least share what our experiences to date have taught us. We focus on this in the second part of the chapter.

Using disciplinary lenses One problem with many existing approaches to understanding areas is that they tend to be undertaken from a single disciplinary perspective – a classic example being in the neighbourhood effects literature, where quantitative researchers search (often in vain) for statistical evidence of such effects, while qualitative researchers find innumerable examples of these effects at work in people’s lives (Van Ham et al, 2012a). We suggest, therefore, that an ecological analysis requires a set of disciplinary approaches that help to explain why things are as they are. This recognises, for example, that thinking in geography, sociology, history, economics, policy science and psychology all provide important ‘conceptual lenses’ through which different aspects of the relationship between education, disadvantage and place can be viewed. There are, of course, overlaps between ideas, concepts and theories associated with each discipline, and attempts to categorise thinking into disciplinary silos is not always helpful. However, as our purpose here is to present a broad set of ideas that can be brought to bear in developing an ecological analysis, we treat these separately for the sake of clarity. In doing so, we both summarise and elaborate upon the range of conceptual approaches that we have drawn on in earlier chapters. Using geography as a lens In Chapter One, where we first introduced the concept of spatial scale, we presented Taylor’s (2009) framework for exploring local ecologies in relation to education. Ranging from micro, to meso and macro geographical levels, this focused attention on: the learner (child, 132

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adult, employee); the site of learning (school or college, workplace, household); the community of learners (neighbourhood); the local authority (region); the central government (nation); and international contexts. Studies in the geography of education have been important in illuminating factors at each of these levels that influence educational outcomes. In the interest of clarity, we group these into three major strands of work. First, there are studies focusing on children’s geographies and the simultaneously physical and social environments of childhood. These include work on: psycho-geographies, with their emphasis on the relationship between environmental contexts, and children’s emotions and ambitions (Sibley, 2003; Matthews and Tucker, 2006); home dynamics and their bearing on children’s relationships and identities (Duncan and Smith, 2002); and schools, in terms of their design and architecture and how the use of space within the school, and the teaching and learning opportunities offered, promotes or inhibits their engagement with education (Fielding, 2000; Edwards and Usher, 2003; Woolner et al, 2007). A second strand of work focuses on neighbourhood and community contexts. This has, for example, included studies on the challenges to education within disadvantaged urban and inner city contexts, and on patterns of school choice and their relationship to residential segregation and gentrification (as, eg, in Anyon’s [2005] work). A third strand has focused on higher spatial scales, typically LA and regional contexts. This has generally focused on the uneven provision of education and on differential attainment within and across LAs (Gray et al, 1984). While this brief overview is far from comprehensive, it suggests that looking though geographical ‘lenses’ can focus attention on: spatial differences in educational provision; the processes that concentrate different groups of children in different schools; and how these affect their education. Using sociology as a lens Sociological studies are, as Lauder et al (2009) note, important in shedding light on the role education plays in shaping the life chances of different groups in society, and why some groups systematically do better than others, both in education and beyond. In doing so, they demonstrate how macro-level societal inequalities relating to gender, social class and ethnicity (separately and in combination) have pernicious effects throughout the education system at multiple spatial scales (Gilborn and Mirza, 2000; Thrupp et al, 2002; Reay, 2006; 133

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Goldthorpe and Jackson, 2008). They also suggest that particular attention should be paid to the extent to which the choices children (and their families) make during their educational careers, and the educational experiences that are accessible to them in their local school system, are about maintaining or disrupting the status quo, and how this relates to wider social and economic processes and the distribution of power in society. In Chapter Two, for instance, we drew on Bourdieu’s (1998) account of how school curricula devalued the place-based identities, values and dispositions of children in disadvantaged areas, and the knowledge held within their local environments, with injurious effects. We also reported evidence that some academies were adopting admissions processes designed tacitly to exclude families from less advantaged backgrounds (Academies Commission, 2013). We have also considered a criticism frequently levelled against ABIs: that they operate from a deficit perspective as a vehicle for professionals to impose their beliefs on disadvantaged communities in order to ‘rescue’ them from their local environments. Using economics as a lens In recent years, economics has increased its influence as a discipline in efforts to understand educational outcomes (Dearden et al, 2009). One reason for this is that it attempts to provide answers to policy questions in quantifiable terms. With the right data and right methods, economists can measure the rate of return on the investments that have been made, and this is clearly appealing to policymakers who have to justify how they allocate resources and spend public money. They can, for instance, explore the impacts of particular investments in education both on educational outcomes (in relation to qualification type, level and subject, and over time) and in relation to local and regional economies. In doing so, they can also point to where the greatest returns on investment might be seen in relation to particular outcomes; for instance, Heckman (2007) suggests that investments in early years education may be more economically valuable than investments in adult education. Economic studies also raise a series of interesting issues relating to how the effectiveness of ABIs might be considered. The evidence base suggests that ABIs have had, at best, somewhat patchy, modest impacts. However, they have, as we noted in Chapter Four, typically also only had access to ‘puny resources’ – and might therefore be considered to offer a positive return on the small investment made (Machin et al, 2006). Even more interesting is that while ABIs have 134

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often been considered as relatively unsuccessful, there have been cost– benefit analyses of some area-based approaches which suggest that, in economic terms, they actually have considerable value. For instance, in their national evaluation of Full Service Extended Schools (FSES), Cummings et al (2007a, p 3) reported: The cost benefit analysis suggested that both the costs and benefits of FSES approaches were high. However, since benefits balanced or outweighed costs, and since they accrued particularly to children and families facing the greatest difficulties, FSES approaches represented a good investment. Using history as a lens Exploring poor educational outcomes through a historical lens can provide an understanding of the characteristics of local education systems as they have developed over time – both in terms of how they are organised locally and how the system, people and place interact (Burke et al, 2010). It can focus attention on the impacts not only of successive education policies, but also of the changing nature of places over time, and of the place-based ‘collective memory’ that can continue to shape local identities, values and dispositions (Saint, 2010) – sometimes even when local conditions have changed dramatically. Using policy science as a lens Policy science, as we use the term, is concerned with the conceptual critique of concrete policy issues, relating to their design, operationalisation and impacts. At one level, it can invite an exploration of technical issues relating to organisation and administration. On another, sometimes characterised as ‘policy scholarship’ (Avis, 2006), it can set out to analyse issues of power – asking, for instance, who has the greatest control over resources and the strategic direction of a particular initiative, and how it operates in a particular place. On another level again, it can ask detailed questions about whether policy is enacted in ways that take account of local area dynamics, and the ways in which people and institutions in places are part of that enactment. It also allows fundamental questions to be asked about whether an initiative’s aims and intended actions are in concord. We have, for instance, considered the charge levelled against ABIs that as small-scale, low-powered initiatives, they could never challenge patterns of spatial inequality. 135

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This allows a wide range of perspectives to be brought to bear on an equally wide variety of issues. For instance, we have seen that ABIs have been criticised for the way in which their boundaries have been drawn, excluding as many disadvantaged people as they include, and perhaps failing to take relationships between places into account. However, we have also noted that ABIs may be a technically efficient way of distributing resources in places where there are high concentrations of particular needs, and also providing opportunities for synergies between different services and initiatives that reflect the interaction of different factors in particular places. This, in turn, points to issues of governance and the difficulties of coordinating services that are accountable to different LA and national government departments, have different funding streams, priorities and targets, and may have different protocols for sharing information or developing interventions. It also raises questions about power relations between professionals and communities, not least about the extent to which professional understandings dominate local strategies. Just as valuably, a critical policy perspective helps to guard against the danger of making simplistic responses to the difficulties inherent in previous initiatives (Grace, 1984; Whitty, 2002). For instance, rather than simply promoting greater community engagement in local initiatives as a counter to professional domination, critical perspectives help to illuminate the complexities inherent in this. They invite careful consideration of the role of community members in relation to the development of local strategies, for example: is their role to contribute insights from their experiences of living locally for professionals to consider, or is it to work jointly with professionals to develop initiatives, or is it to offer democratic challenge to professionally developed plans? Are community members intended to represent themselves, or to represent a ‘community’ (which, in any case, cannot be considered a homogeneous body)? Using psychology as a lens In Chapter Six, we considered the contribution that the concepts of risk, protection and resilience, deriving in part from a perspective grounded in psychology, can make in creating a strong rationale for a new style of ABIs. We saw that studies from this perspective are concerned with the risk factors that impact upon children’s development and, following this, upon their outcomes, and also how these risks are mediated by factors associated with children’s environments – their families, peer groups and communities. 136

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There are many studies that present lists of risk and protective factors at particular spatial scales and that can helpfully be utilised in exploring how particular outcomes have been generated. These studies also often categorise factors as ‘proximal’ or ‘distal’ in nature (Feinstein et al, 2008). Proximal factors are those experienced directly by individuals, and distal factors operate at a distance from the individual. So, for example, in relation to children’s outcomes, proximal risk factors might include parental stress (exacerbated by poverty, poor housing and limited access to resources) and particular processes within families that disturb family functioning (eg lack of close parent–child relationships, insufficient child monitoring and supervision). Distal risk factors might include levels of social isolation experienced by particular communities, established patterns of ethnic-residential segregation and weak local infrastructures. Perhaps more importantly from our perspective, more recent trends in resilience research have sought to shift the focus from individual character traits to social processes (Luthar and Zelazo, 2003). This dynamic view suggests that individual resilience arises from interactive processes within the local environment between the child, family and community. Research from this perspective also suggests that as risk levels increase, so resilience levels need to increase to counter their effect. It is not, therefore, just risk per se, but the accumulation of risk factors, which represents a significant threat to children’s outcomes. For instance, in their discussion of improving outcomes for children by supporting parents, Garbarino et al (2002) suggest that risks to parenting arise not only from direct threats, but also from the absence of normal opportunities in the local environment. Paralleling this, it has been suggested that it is the accumulation of protective factors that can promote resilience that may be significant for positive outcomes. This cumulative effective is not simply a nested effect – of multiple factors in multiple contexts within the local environment – but also invites a developmental perspective over time. This, as Yates and Masten (2004) point out, also requires the consideration of age-appropriate expectations and indicators of good outcomes. Using the lenses together Even from this necessarily brief review of available perspectives, it is clear that it should be possible to create a rich ecological understanding of how poor outcomes – and poor educational outcomes specifically – come to be created and perpetuated in disadvantaged places. The account we presented of Stockborough in Chapter Three, although 137

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inevitably somewhat abbreviated, may indicate something of the value of having these lenses available when trying to understand an area. It also allows us to raise some vital issues about the purposes for which such an ecological analysis is undertaken, as this has a bearing on the approach taken to the task. Our analysis of Stockborough was undertaken as part of a wider independent research study, specifically designed to explore the processes through which places shape learners’ educational experiences (see Ainscow et al, 2007). The study was designed to be illuminative, not to lead directly to action; it was led by us, as university researchers, for the purposes of policy critique. By contrast, in looking to the future of ABIs, our argument is that ABIs must be underpinned by an ecological analysis. This analysis must explicitly create the basis for action (and it also, therefore, may have a role in evaluating the effectiveness of that action – an issue we deal with in Chapter Eight). Its purpose, therefore, is not simply to understand local processes, but to identify factors within these, and interactions between factors, in which an ABI can realistically and effectively intervene. In the new style of ABIs we envisage, the strategy that is developed must match this analysis. It must, in Grace’s (1984, p 12) formulation, shift from an emphasis on contextual rhetoric that ‘rehearses the elements of the wider framework in which a particular problem is located but does not develop these in any significant detail’, to engaging with ‘substantive’ concerns, namely, ‘what is seen to be at the heart of the particular problem under examination’. In this respect, the task is not just to apply multiple perspectives to create a rich understanding, but to bring an instrumental action orientation to this. At a general level, this task can be approached by asking questions of the analysis that reflect different disciplinary concerns. To give but a few examples, the perspectives set out earlier invite questions such as: • What aspects of class, ethnicity and gender are reflected in children’s and young people’s identities in particular places? How should an ABI respond to these? • What are the historical features of places that influence the ways in which people understand and operate in their neighbourhoods and how should an ABI respond to these? • What administrative, service delivery and governance issues would need to be examined in relation to developing an ABI in a particular place?

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• How should particular places be understood in relation to regional, national and international developments, and how should an ABI reflect these developments? There are also organising frameworks that might be brought to bear in order to develop a more systematic approach. For instance, in their work on risk–protection–resilience, Yates and Masten (2004) suggest three foci that, applied together, can bring an action orientation to an ecological analysis. These are: • Risk-focused. What needs to happen in local environments to reduce or prevent risks such as premature births or teenage pregnancy? • Asset-focused. What resources can be brought to local environments, or are already present within them, which might help to moderate risks – such as positive child–adult relationships, positive identification with place, improved access to healthcare, provision of parent education, job training opportunities for parents and so on? • Process-focused. How can the interaction between different protective factors in local environments be restored, activated, strengthened and protected? However, it is ultimately the purposes that an ABI is intended to fulfil that will help to determine how an ecological analysis is interpreted as a basis for action. To illustrate this, it is helpful to revisit some of the distinctions made in Chapter Two regarding the general purposes of education-focused ABIs. For instance, Raffo (2010) distinguished between ABIs that might pursue a broadly redistributive agenda in an effort to ensure that, in disadvantaged places, the local environments to which children and young people had access offered the same range of opportunities and protective factors as in more advantaged places, and those that pursue a broad agenda of recognition, seeking to value and build upon place-based identities, values and dispositions. From each of these positions (which are, of course, not mutually exclusive), a rather different response might be offered in relation to the risks, assets and processes identified. As university researchers working with local actors, this overarching agenda and sense of purpose have never been ours to determine; put simply, we are not the ones taking action. Rather, our role has always been to provide technical support for generating and analysing data, and to offer challenge to local stakeholders as they have then interpreted and decided how to act in relation to the ecological analysis produced. As such, we now want to don the second of our professional hats, and 139

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to share our learning about the considerable operational challenges that local stakeholders face in trying to understand the situations in which they want to intervene.

Generating an ecological analysis: lessons from practice In practice, generating an ecological analysis involves: • probing beneath the surface of headline performance indicators to understand how local dynamics shape particular outcomes; and • identifying, in so doing, the key underlying factors at work, how these interact, which of these factors and interactions can be acted upon, and who can influence them. We would suggest that there are two general sets of issues to be engaged with in acting on this: one technical and the other relating to professional identities. We address these in turn in the following. Technical issues Our experience is that generating an ecological analysis as the basis for taking local action is a relatively straightforward technical exercise, and with clear professional leadership, one that need not entail a huge amount of additional work or other resources. As we saw in Chapter Three, knowledge about how places ‘work’ is already embedded in communities, and in the institutions and organisations who work with them. Generating an analysis is, therefore, primarily a case of accessing and assembling this knowledge into a coherent narrative, using some of the different lenses outlined earlier to make sense of the story it tells. In referring to professional leadership here, we are not seeking to preclude community involvement or to deny the capacity of the voluntary and community sector to generate their own analyses of local issues from multiple stakeholder perspectives. Rather, we are seeking to reflect the capacity professionals have – in terms of skills, resources, access to a wide range of stakeholders and multiple data sources – to manage data generation and analysis, and then, as importantly, to coordinate the development of strategic and operational responses to this. In the places in which we have worked to support emerging local initiatives, there has been a lead organisation (like the Weston Housing Trust) or partnership structure in place (often, one that has its origins in a national initiative and has since evolved locally) that has positioned itself to take this role. This has significant implications, of course, both 140

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for the practicalities of undertaking the analysis and for the question of who has the power to define the area, its challenges and opportunities and preferred solutions. We shall return to these questions when we explore the governance of locally developed ABIs in Chapter Nine. To begin to develop an ecological analysis, it is important, at least initially, to have a series of agreed parameters that loosely bind the analysis and provide a focus for exploration. These are pragmatically chosen starting points for the analysis, but may well not be where it ends up. They may, for instance, focus on understanding the processes that create poor outcomes in relation to: • a unit of action – for example, an administratively defined area, where there are already structures in place that can be used to drive action; • a geographical and/or socially bounded area – this might be an area that has clear physical boundaries (eg main roads) or imagined boundaries (eg a housing estate that residents strongly identify with and is also understood by local professionals and wider stakeholders to have its own identity) or some combination of the two; and • a particular issue – for instance, rather than focusing on a particular neighbourhood or an administrative area, a starting point might be trying to understand why young people become NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training). These are, of course, not mutually exclusive, and can be beneficially used in combination. Transforming Heybury could have started from any of these points – a borough-wide level, distinctive residential areas in the borough or an issue seen across the borough – but it would still need to have developed to cover all of these. The important point to be made here is that the purpose of an ecological analysis is to explore interacting factors and the processes that shape outcomes. Therefore, it perhaps matters less what its exact starting point is than that it leads to a process of exploration that can engage with the local dynamics underlying particular outcomes, and evolve as required in order to understand these. The issues to be addressed, or the actions that might be most effective, might not be apparent at the outset, but will become more so as the analysis is developed. For instance, we worked with an area-based federation of schools serving an isolated social housing estate whose starting point was children’s poor speech language and communication skills (SLCS) on school entry. Their immediate concern was to procure effective in-school SLCS interventions in the early years. However, when they started to explore what it was about children’s local environments 141

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that created this situation, and to engage with the knowledge held by parents, health visitors and Sure Start workers, they started to develop a much more complex response. They found, among other things, that a high proportion of infants lived with young, single mothers who often had poor support networks, rarely left the estate (with this limiting children’s exposure to SLCS used in other contexts), often had poor SLCS themselves and while reluctant to access services, were more willing to engage with community support offered by peers. One of the possibilities the schools then started to explore, with support from the National Volunteer Council and National Literacy Trust, was whether community members might be trained to support vulnerable mothers. While this example is far from comprehensive, and is in its very early stages, it is, nonetheless, indicative of how even a very limited analysis that starts to adopt a more ecologically oriented approach might extend the focus of local actions beyond a focus on symptomatic issues. A point that follows from this is that for the purposes of stimulating the development of strategic responses to local dynamics, ecological analyses need not be exhaustive. A simple sampling framework can be established at the outset that identifies the key stakeholders in relation to a particular issue – in the previous example, parents, Sure Start workers and health visitors – and can then be extended to include other stakeholders that the unfolding analysis indicates as necessary. Once a coherent story has started to emerge, this can be tested more widely to see how it might be refined or elaborated, or whether there are missing elements and perspectives and how these might best be addressed. For instance, one of the partnerships we have worked with has trained community members as interviewers in order to access a wider range of community perspectives, and there are many innovative methodologies that can be employed to access the views of hard-toreach groups or pupil voices, or for community consultation. A second point to be made is that an ecological analysis is not a oneoff static affair. It may need to evolve to reflect demographic changes, changes in service organisation, local employment opportunities or other factors that change the dynamics of place. This is particularly pertinent for long-term developments like Weston and Heybury, where strategies will need to be responsive to changes in the local environment over time. A partnership structure that allows a variety of stakeholders to share their daily ‘on the ground’ knowledge will be important in enabling such changes to be detected and explored long before they are likely to be reflected in statistical monitoring data.

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Similarly, an analysis may need to evolve to illuminate particular issues as they are seen to become strategically important to an ABI’s development. In Transforming Heybury, for instance, we saw that the initiative’s designers had developed an overarching analysis accounting for poor educational outcomes in the borough, which they had used to develop a strategy for educational reform. However, while this had enabled them to determine a series of aims and strands of action, they had not then ‘drilled down’ in their analysis in relation to these strands. So, for instance, although the link between education and employment was considered vitally important, the actions that were then taken in relation to this seemed not to have engaged with an understanding of young people’s aspirations and the futures they envisaged for themselves, or with the relationship between the borough’s education offer and the employment opportunities that could be accessed locally. It may be, therefore, that in such ambitious programmes, an ecological analysis has to be approached as a multi-stage process, focusing in on particular issues as they are seen to require some form of action. This will also need to identify existing activity in relation to actionable factors, and it will be important to explore how the administrative boundaries that services work within, and across which resources are distributed, correspond to the processes operating in place to produce poor outcomes. These points can all be considered as broadly technical design issues, regarding: who leads and coordinates the analysis; the frameworks that will be used to shape the analysis in terms of bounding its focus and identifying key stakeholders; the importance of verifying, testing and elaborating the analysis; and the need to revisit issues over time and as strategic plans begin to be operationalised. Organisations like Weston Housing Trust or Heybury LA are perhaps not used to accessing and analysing the wide range of perspectives and types of data implicit in an ecological analysis, but they are, nonetheless, used to generating, coordinating and analysing data systematically, and have in-house technical expertise that could be developed further. Thus, while there are undoubtedly technical challenges to be addressed, we would suggest that these are not insurmountable – and, as we have already noted, local stakeholders who do not have the capacity to undertake analyses themselves can buy in technical support for this. In our experience, a far greater set of difficulties comes from the challenge – or even threat – that engaging with an ecological analysis can present to professional identities.

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Professional identities Local professionals are rooted within a particular service agenda, typically mediated by the cultures and practices of a particular organisation and their own roles within that organisation. They are, moreover, often used to employing short-term interventions to tackle presenting problems. In Stockborough, for instance, an LA regeneration officer we interviewed explained that ‘solving’ the issue of young people who became NEETs was not his service’s responsibility, and suggested that schools should be set targets relating to their pupils’ post16 destinations. Similarly, our work with the Stockborough Schools Equity Research Network found that the school action research teams: focused on what they knew best and what lay most obviously within their control – their own practices in classrooms and, beyond that, the organisational practices of the school as a whole.… The problem with this essentially inward-looking approach is that what happens within schools is inextricably bound up with what happens between and beyond schools.… None of these things, of course, is directly in the control of the individual school, yet all have a major bearing on how equitable students’ educational experiences and opportunities prove to be. (Ainscow et al, 2012, p 128, emphases in original) An ecological analysis, therefore, is likely to require a reorientation in professionals’ thinking: from a ‘silo mentality’ to a focus on interactive cross-cutting factors and processes. This might be considered challenge enough, but an ecological analysis also requires that different stakeholders’ perspectives are attributed equal status. Again, to take Stockborough as an illustrative case, we saw that parents’ beliefs about what constituted a good school (eg being safe and reaching out to the community) were rather different to those of many professionals, who more often defined good schools as schools with good attainment. There is a danger that without an appropriate level of challenge, professionals will interpret views that do not align with their professional concerns from a deficit stance or, as Foot (2009) notes, that ‘local knowledge’ will lose out in competition with professionals’ ‘privileged knowledge’. This may be a particular concern when the stakeholders driving local developments and acting to reform local services are exclusively from professional organisations. Perhaps an even greater risk is posed when an analysis is led from within a single service 144

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or organisation, and may therefore be dominated by a very particular professional stance. Within formal partnership arrangements, there may be greater potential to offset such dangers because there is at least the promise that the partnership can act as an arena in which a variety of stakeholders can be represented, multiple perspectives can be aired and common understandings and commitments can be forged. We have no easy answers to these issues, but in the following chapters, we will consider how the ways in which new-style ABIs might be evaluated, and how they might be governed and held to account, could help to both challenge professional thinking and distribute power within initiatives between different stakeholders.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Evaluation and monitoring In previous chapters, we have suggested that there is an emerging new generation of locally developed area-based initiatives (ABIs) that are founded on an ecological understanding of place. We have suggested that they may be able overcome the tendency of many earlier ABIs to focus on single issues and narrow targets rather than on the real complexities of disadvantage as experienced in place. We have, moreover, suggested that it is possible for locally based organisations or partnerships to take the lead in developing an ecological analysis of local outcomes, and to use this to inform the development of strategic and operational plans. In this chapter, we now want to explore how the new style of ABIs we are proposing could best be monitored and evaluated. This, in turn, focuses our attention on a fundamental dilemma in the monitoring and evaluation of ABIs’ impacts. ABIs – whatever their form – have always been underpinned by the rationale that focusing intensively on disadvantaged areas is necessary to be able to tackle the factors that produce poor outcomes in those areas. We have argued that tackling this complex array of factors and the processes through which they interact is a long-term process, in which improving particular outcomes demands interventions at points some way distant from the outcomes themselves. In other words, it is not enough to intervene in symptomatic issues – interventions must also be made in the underlying causes of those symptoms. However, ABIs have to be funded in some way, and newly emerging ABIs, as in Weston or Heybury, also consume considerable amounts of in-kind resources in terms of time, energy and commitment in ventures that are inherently risky. Their sponsors and partners rightly need to know whether their investment is bringing any returns. If, as is often the case, the ultimate funder is, at least in part, central government (for even without discrete funding for an ABI, the professionals involved are likely to be publicly funded), there is also likely to be a concern to show that those returns are in line with national policy priorities and that they are delivered in a timely and cost-effective manner. Not surprisingly, therefore, monitoring and evaluation activities have tended to focus on relatively short-term improvements relating to a

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few priority outcomes – a situation at odds with complex long-term strategies. This tendency has been particularly strong in the recent history of education-focused ABIs. As Reid and Brain (2003) observe, even when ABIs were founded on confused and contradictory rationales, they always included the national priority of raising attainment at pupil and institutional levels. Whenever these ABIs were evaluated or held to account, therefore, short-term gains in measured attainment were always central to deciding whether or not they were succeeding (see, eg, Ofsted, 2003; Kendall et al, 2005; Machin et al, 2006; NFER, 2007). Although other outcomes might be taken into account, they were also typically those judged to have the most direct impact on attainment, for instance, attendance or behaviour. Even in our own evaluation of Full Service Extended Schools (FSES), where we attempted to do justice to the complexities of area interventions, we, nonetheless, felt obliged to assess the extent to which these schools had been able to raise attainments over the three-year period for which they were funded (Cummings et al, 2007a). It perhaps comes as no surprise that we found their impacts in this respect to be decidedly limited. It is this last point that is crucial. There is, of course, every reason to anticipate that education-focused ABIs should have an impact on children’s attainment. However, to prioritise measures of attainment risks overlooking other, equally important, outcomes that initiatives might produce. Even clearly educational outcomes – engagement in learning, the development of personal and social skills, participation in post-compulsory education, and the enhancement of employability, to name but a few – tend to feature little in monitoring and evaluation reports. Moreover, concentrating on short-term gains also means overlooking the possibility that gains might take time to materialise. As a result, initiatives that depend upon short-term funding have also tended to be judged in the short term – and, as we saw in Chapter Four, this led to a rapid succession of increasingly more tightly prescribed education-focused ABIs. If these issues have been a problem for the ABIs of the past, then they are even more of a problem for the new generation of ABIs that we are advocating. Whatever the conceptual merits of doing so, there is little point in undertaking long-term interventions in deep-seated processes if the most powerful judgements to be made about them will inevitably focus on a narrow range of short-term outcomes. In this situation, all that is likely to happen is that the partners driving these initiatives will experience considerable pressure to pursue short-term priorities, and that the initiative itself will be judged to be more or less 148

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of a failure before it has begun to become properly embedded. As we saw in Chapter Five, Weston Housing Trust’s plans had already been knocked off course once by the need for the academy it sponsored to make rapid gains in attainment. Equally, though, we acknowledge that we cannot simply sit back and wait to see what outcomes, if any, might start to emerge several years down the line. Feedback about how the initiative is working, and about changing local dynamics that might necessitate a change of strategy, will be vital to keep developments on course if they are to be in with a chance of achieving their anticipated aims. Monitoring and evaluation are essential, but a new style of ABI requires a new approach to this that can support developments over time. We turn now to consider what this might look like.

The challenges of evaluation Regardless of what is being evaluated, the task of an evaluation is to find out what ‘works’ (by which we mean whether it achieves its intended outcomes) and why. This is quite straightforward in cases where an intervention can be specified clearly, and where it has equally well-specified outcomes for which measures exist or can be developed. However, these conditions often do not apply in more complex initiatives for a number of reasons (Dyson and Todd, 2010). Such initiatives may be difficult to specify other than in somewhat broad terms. They may, like Sure Start, for instance, rest on some general principles to inform provision, but leave considerable flexibility for these principles to be interpreted in the light of local circumstances. In the case of Sure Start, this led to a large number of ‘local programmes’, which set off in widely different directions and with widely different outcomes, posing significant challenges to the evaluators (Allen and Black, 2006). Chief among these is the difficulty of knowing precisely what it is that is being evaluated – a broad set of principles that can take on different forms in different places, or particular local interpretations where it is local factors rather than the principles themselves that account for outcomes. Even where single-site initiatives are being evaluated, a similar problem arises over time, as the nature of the initiative changes in response to changing circumstances and changing understandings on the part of its leaders. There are also challenges relating to the outcomes of complex initiatives. In England at least, educational attainment outcomes are relatively easy to measure because there is a national programme of testing that takes place at fixed points in a child’s school career. Although there is ample scope for debate about what these tests are 149

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measuring and how reliable they are, they, nonetheless, generate a wealth of statistical data that evaluators can use to explore the impacts of different initiatives in relation to attainment outcomes. However, no such readily available measures exist for other important outcomes. There is, for instance, no equivalent publicly available data set on child well-being, family functioning or the development of personal and social skills. Researchers, therefore, have to make use of data sets relating to population samples (eg in various cohort studies; see the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at: http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/) or administer their own measures. This becomes even more problematic if the intended outcomes of an initiative are inherently difficult to measure. For instance, one of the locally developed ABIs we are working with has specified, among its overarching aims, that it will develop community empowerment, a sense of positive community identity and the community’s capacity to support young people to realise their aspirations. There are no ready measures of such outcomes, and although it is possible to devise proxy measures, there is no guarantee that these will adequately capture the outcomes that are intended. Moreover, outcomes of this kind are likely to take many years to materialise – and the likelihood of a small, locally developed ABI sustaining a suitably powerful evaluation for that length of time is remote. A final set of issues has to do with the open environment in which ABIs are typically located. This has a number of implications. First, initiatives are, by definition, located in complex contexts where multiple factors and processes are at work. It is entirely possible that during the lifespan of an initiative, schools may close or open, waves of inward and outward migration will change the nature of the local population, major sources of employment will appear and disappear, and national policies will change. Certainly, personnel in services will change and residents will age and move on with their lives. In these circumstances, it is very difficult to be sure whether changes in outcomes are the result of the initiative or of these other factors. Even more troubling, it is not possible to be certain whether any apparent failure on the part of the initiative is actually caused by other changes masking its effects. At the same time, there is no guarantee that the initiative itself might not be replicated, in whole or in part, outside the area. It is very likely that any promising ideas from the initiative will be drawn upon elsewhere, while the initiative itself is likely to have been developed from promising ideas that may already have been widespread. If evaluators find, therefore, that outcomes from the initiative are not markedly different from outcomes elsewhere, this may simply mean 150

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that the effective parts of the initiative are more widespread than they supposed. The same problem may occur if evaluators decide to compare outcomes in the area post-initiative with those pre-initiative, unless they can be absolutely sure that no aspects of the initiative were present before its official commencement. To make matters worse, the complexity of area dynamics is such that comparisons between areas or across time may be misleading. Areas that superficially appear to be similar on the basis of a limited range of standard indicators may actually be very different from one another. In short, any difference made by an initiative may be unduly minimised or enhanced by factors that are nothing to do with the initiative itself. None of this means that the standard questions asked by evaluators – ‘What works?’ and ‘Why?’ – cannot also be asked of ABIs. However, it does mean that there are considerable dangers in using inappropriate evaluation methods and thereby reaching false conclusions about what initiatives have or have not achieved. In particular, simply deploying a few readily available outcome measures and then seeing whether they look better with or without the initiative is likely to be highly misleading. The problem is even more serious where evaluation is undertaken for accountability purposes and where designs are likely to be even less sophisticated. Fortunately, there are alternatives. As the evaluators of the Children’s Fund initiative in England point out, there has been a tendency to evaluate social programmes by means of supposedly ‘gold standard’ experimental and quasi-experimental approaches. However: experimental approaches are regarded as inappropriate for evaluating multi-layered, complex area-based initiatives where simple cause-and-effect analyses are inappropriate in terms of identifying why an intervention works or what elements of an intervention make it effective.… [S]ocial problems such as social exclusion and health inequalities have multiple facets relating to poverty, unemployment, family, education, neighbourhood, opportunity and lifestyle. Hence, there can be no simple, causal association between a policy intervention and its potential impacts.… [The] evaluation of [complex] interventions needs to be more exploratory and explanatory than it has been previously, and needs to identify intended and unintended outcomes of policies. Evaluations should also recognize that it is unrealistic to assume that direct cause-and-effect relationships exist between interventions and outcomes, and 151

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hence it is important to account for the influence of context, including the mediating institutional and organizational effects on outcomes of policy interventions. (Spicer and Smith, 2008, p 79) Spicer and Smith neatly summarise the key features of evaluation designs that are appropriate for complex initiatives: a focus on exploration and explanation; an understanding of indirect and recursive causal pathways; and an awareness of context. The National Evaluation of the Children’s Fund, in fact, did what many evaluators have done in response to these challenges, and used a complex array of methods to explore the complex nature of the initiative and its context. These included the use of multiple databases (some of them populated through purpose-designed measures), case studies aimed at capturing the dynamics of local partnerships and studies of the workings of services aimed at particular target groups of children (Edwards et al, 2006). Similar multi-strand designs, based on a similar rationale, can be found in the evaluation of Sure Start (National Evaluation of Sure Start, no date) or of FSES (Cummings et al, 2007a). However, it is not simply a matter of assembling a wide range of methods in the hope that, between them, they will capture complexity. As Spicer and Smith suggest, it is about rethinking how initiatives might work and how they might be understood. Ideally, developing the sort of ecological analysis we set out in Chapter Seven could provide a valuable foundation for this. We have suggested that it should be possible to develop an intervention strategy that models the processes and interactions suggested by a local ecological analysis, and on which an evaluation strategy might therefore also be modelled. Comparing the initiative’s strategy with the analysis would then be a central element in thinking through how it might work. A useful resource in exploring this possibility further is the notion of ‘realist’ or ‘realistic’ evaluation (Pawson and Tilley, 1997, 2004).

Realist evaluation In essence, realist evaluation questions an assumption made in many other approaches to evaluation, namely, that interventions can (or, indeed, should) be detached from their contexts in order to determine whether and how far they are effective. The challenge for standard approaches to evaluation is to ensure that outcomes can be attributed securely to the interventions, rather than to other factors in the situations where they are implemented. For instance, a new reading 152

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scheme may produce excellent outcomes not because the scheme itself is superior to others, but because it is implemented by bettertrained teachers, or because the pupils have better reading skills preimplementation and so can make greater progress. The aim, therefore, is to control for these ‘extraneous’ factors, perhaps by ensuring that contexts with and without interventions are as similar as possible in all other respects, or by calculating the effects of these factors and taking them into account when estimating the effect of the intervention. The problem with this approach is that it overlooks the extent to which interventions are inevitably embedded in particular contexts. To some extent, it may be possible to context-proof certain kinds of interventions. Classroom interventions, such as reading programmes, for instance, can be packaged and manualised in the hope that they will be implemented in the same way regardless of the teachers’ skills or pupils’ characteristics. However, even when this is possible, context tends to creep back in: teachers may do things slightly differently, pupils may respond differently and events outside the intervention itself may affect how the intervention is delivered. This is even more of an issue when, as in the case of ABIs, the intervention cannot be packaged and manualised, and where the environment in which the intervention is delivered is complex and open. Under such circumstances, the possibility of controlling for ‘extraneous’ factors is remote. Moreover, it is far from clear that even if it could be achieved, it would be desirable. Interventions such as ABIs are intended to make a difference amid the messy realities of real-word situations. The complex factors and processes in those situations are not in any sense extraneous, but are precisely the medium in and through which the intervention has to work. Therefore, it makes sense to try to understand the interactions between the intervention and its context, rather than trying to bleach context out of the analysis. With these issues in mind, realist evaluation eschews the task of identifying the outcomes of interventions in a decontextualised way, and instead embraces context as part of its explanation. As Pawson and Tilley (2004, p 2) put it: ‘Realist evaluation asks not, “What works?” or, “Does this program work?” but asks instead, “What works for whom in what circumstances and in what respects, and how?”’ It does this by seeking to identify ‘context–mechanism–outcome pattern configurations’. In other words, it focuses on clarifying what it is about an intervention that enables those who are involved in it to make it work (the mechanisms), the conditions that are relevant to the operation of these mechanisms (the context) and the intended and unintended consequences of the intervention that produces different 153

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patterns of outcomes in different contexts (see Pawson and Tilley, 2004, p 7). The output of a realist evaluation is, therefore, not simply a quantification (such as an effect size) of the gains in outcomes to be expected if the intervention is implemented as it was under evaluation conditions. Rather, it is a documentation of how the intervention acts in different contexts to produce different outcomes. As Pawson and Tilley (2004, p 9) explain: By now it should be clear that realist evaluation has little use for a ‘find-the intervention-X-that-cures-problem-Y’ notion of programme building.… Realist evaluation is about theory testing and refinement. Context–mechanism– outcome pattern configurations (CMOCs) comprise models indicating how programmes activate mechanisms amongst whom and in what conditions, to bring about alterations in behavioural or event or state regularities. These propositions bring together mechanism-variation and relevant context-variation to predict and to explain outcome pattern variation. Realist evaluation thus develops and tests CMOC conjectures empirically. Inevitably, something is lost in this approach. At their most powerful, experimental evaluations (as Pawson and Tilley call more standard approaches) are able to quantify the effects of interventions so that it is ultimately possible to compare a range of them and decide which is the most effective, and, indeed, cost-effective. For example, this is currently the approach taken by the Pupil Premium ‘toolkit’ (Higgins et al, 2013). This aims to ensure that schools can make best use of their Pupil Premium funding by providing them with trustworthy information on the effectiveness of different interventions in improving the attainment outcomes of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. Realist evaluations cannot and do not seek to make claims of this kind since they start from the assumption that interventions will produce different outcomes in different contexts. This does not mean, however, that they can only make claims about particular cases. From a realist perspective, interventions do not take the form of random actions. They are purposeful attempts to change a situation in order to improve it in some way. They are, therefore, based on an implicit or explicit theory that actions of a particular kind in a particular situation will produce better outcomes of some more-or-less clearly specified kind. Realist evaluations test and elaborate these underpinning theories, moving from assumptions about what will happen as a result of the intervention, 154

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to a detailed, evidence-based account of what actually happens. By understanding what happens in one intervention, it becomes possible to develop a more robust theory about what will happen in related interventions. The claim is not ‘What happened here will happen in exactly the same way everywhere’, but ‘What happened here makes it easier to predict what will happen elsewhere – even though things will not be the same in those other cases.’ This kind of claim, of course, is highly relevant to the evaluation of ABIs. As we have seen, ABIs are variable, multidimensional interventions set in complex, open contexts. No guarantees can be given to their designers, leaders and funders that what they are attempting will ‘work’ – nor, indeed, is there likely to be a singular understanding of what is meant by ‘working’. However, what they can know is that the theory on which the ABI is based is robust, and what they can learn from the evaluation of that theory is how to fine-tune it so that the initiative can become more effective as it develops over time. This leads us to turn our attention to theory of change evaluations.

Theory of change evaluations Theory of change evaluations, like realist evaluations, start from the assumption that interventions are based on theories of how particular actions, in particular contexts, will produce particular outcomes (Weiss, 1995; Connell and Kubisch, 1998; Anderson, 2005). They also share a common view of the inadequacies of experimental evaluation and the need for a different approach. As Blamey and Mackenzie (2007, pp 440–1) suggest, both: argue that questions of efficacy and effectiveness have proved difficult to answer within the experimentalist paradigm because it conceives programmes as unified entities through which recipients are processed, and where contextual factors are conceptualized as confounding variables that it behoves the evaluator to control. This leads to programme outcomes being aggregated across different groups of individuals in heterogeneous contextual settings and across the many and varied manifestations of a single social programme. For the theory-based evaluator, on the other hand, programmes are not monoliths, people are not passive recipients of opportunities to improve their health, wealth and social standing offered through various initiatives, and context is

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key to understanding the interplay between programmes and effects. From this starting point, theory of change evaluations focus their efforts on explicating an intervention’s underpinning theory, and doing so in a form that makes it testable. In the form we have used in our own evaluation work (Dyson and Todd, 2010), this involves working with leaders of the intervention to map out their understandings of the situation they face, the long-term outcomes they seek to generate and the actions they propose to take in order to generate those outcomes. Crucially, it involves mapping out the intermediate changes that are expected to follow from the intervention and that will lead, step by step, to the intended outcomes. Doing this makes it possible to observe whether the changes do, indeed, take place as predicted. This has a number of implications for how the evaluation works and what it can claim. First, it means that feedback can be provided to intervention leaders from an early stage. There is no need to wait until long-term outcomes can be assessed before determining not only whether the intervention is being implemented as intended, but also whether it is having the impacts that were predicted. Leaders can, therefore, maintain or modify the intervention as necessary. Second, the process documents and evidences the chain linking intervention to outcomes. This makes it much easier to attribute outcomes to the intervention, even where the link between them is lengthy and indirect. By the same token, if, as is often the case in complex interventions, outcomes are expected to materialise over a lengthy timescale, the likelihood of their appearing can be predicted some way in advance. This helps intervention leaders to know if they are on the right track, but it also means that likely outcomes can be attributed to the intervention even if the evaluation itself comes to an end before they have appeared. Moreover, as the unfolding chain is followed, outcomes can be attributed to the intervention that might be difficult to detect through standard outcomes measurement procedures, or that were not anticipated when the intervention was formulated. Third, the focus on this chain of intermediate changes means that theory of change evaluations necessarily generate accounts not only of how far interventions work in producing outcomes, but also of how they work. They generate these accounts early in the process on the basis of expectations as to how the intervention is expected to work. They then modify them in the light of evidence as to what actually happens, producing a more refined and elaborated account of how the intervention works. As we noted in respect of realist evaluations, 156

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although these accounts are necessarily specific to particular contexts, they are capable of informing the development of more robust theory that can underpin similar interventions in future.

Some principles for evaluating new-generation area-based initiatives Both realist and theory of change approaches are increasingly widely used for the evaluation of complex interventions, often with an area dimension (see, eg, Sullivan et al, 2002; Edwards et al, 2006; Geddes, 2006a; Greenhalgh et al, 2009; Marchal et al, 2012). Nonetheless, they are not so much fully specified methodologies, complete with detailed tools and procedures, as broad approaches that can be, and are, interpreted differently by different evaluators (Marchal et al, 2012). Moreover, it is worth remembering that these two forms of evaluation are part of a wider range of theory-based approaches (Stame, 2004), which are themselves capable of being implemented in many different ways (Coryn et al, 2011; HM Treasury, 2011). In terms of evaluating new-style ABIs, then, it is probably not possible to say that there is a single evaluation methodology that can be specified in detail and that is superior to all others. Rather, there is a set of principles on which evaluations can be based and that have been developed into broad approaches – which have themselves been operationalised in the context of a range of complex interventions. We suggest that these principles might be stated as follows: 1. Do no violence to the intervention. ABIs are complex interventions set in open contexts. They should not, therefore, be subject to evaluations that fail to take account of their fundamental characteristics and that ask them to produce outcomes of a kind, over a timescale, which they are not capable of doing. This means that the sponsors of ABIs need to resist the temptation to believe that there is a ‘gold standard’ form of evaluation that should be applicable to all kinds of intervention. In turn, the developers and leaders of interventions have to resist the temptation to design their interventions in ways that are most compatible with currently fashionable approaches to evaluation. 2. Focus on theory. ABIs imply a theory of how a set of actions in a given situation will lead to a set of intended outcomes. Surfacing this theory is a necessary precondition to being able to trace the impacts of the intervention through to outcomes. It makes it possible to offer feedback to intervention leaders, to identify outcomes and to 157

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attribute outcomes to the interventions. The theory then becomes available as a basis for better theories to improve the current initiative and to underpin others in future. 3. Build context into the analysis. In ABI evaluations, the context of ‘implementation’ – who is involved, what other policies and interventions have an impact, the dynamics of the area – are not extraneous factors to be filtered out, but are the medium through which the initiative works. Evaluations, therefore, must document these contextual factors and understand how they interact with the ABI. 4. Deal with outcomes. Evaluations of the kind we are advocating are not ways of avoiding the question ‘What works?’. Actual and potential sponsors of initiatives quite rightly want to know whether they produce the outcomes that are intended, and whether they represent the most promising ways to invest time and resources. ABI evaluators, therefore, need to be as concerned about changes in outcomes as more traditional evaluators might. The difference lies in the way those outcomes are identified and attributed to the initiative and with the wider concern to show how it works. 5. Make modest claims. Evaluations of the kind we are advocating will not result in simple claims that ‘ABIs do (or do not) work’. Pawson and Tilley’s more modest aim of finding out what works for whom and under what circumstances is more appropriate. This means that ABIs are always at risk of losing out in competitions to find interventions with the biggest effects or the greatest cost benefits. There is an onus on evaluators, therefore, to engage with sponsors and the wider public to educate them as to the kinds of claims that are reasonable, and why modest claims might still form the basis for major commitments of resources. 6. Work differently with stakeholders. The kinds of evaluation we have in mind change the relationship between evaluators and the leaders of interventions (Dyson and Todd, 2010). Instead of being irrelevant to the concerns of evaluators, other than as more-or-less faithful implementers of the initiative, leaders become key partners. It is they who must help to articulate the ABI’s underpinning theory, who must receive feedback as to any impacts and who will reshape the initiative over time – and must also, therefore, help to articulate any revisions to its theoretical basis. Therefore, they become partners in the evaluation, in what is effectively a design-based research activity (Anderson and Shattuck, 2012). In other words, leaders and evaluators both play a part in designing and redesigning the intervention. 158

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Evaluation in action Although the principles set out earlier can lead to many variants of evaluation practice, an example of what they look like in one case may help make their implications clear. At the time of writing, we are involved in offering technical and evaluation support to a set of ABIs modelled (albeit loosely) on the principles underpinning the Harlem Children’s Zone in the US (Dyson et al, 2012). We shall say more about these initiatives in Chapter Ten. Suffice it to say for now that they are attempting to improve outcomes for children and young people in areas of disadvantage through an approach that we characterise as ‘doubly holistic’. This means that they seek to develop coordinated efforts to tackle the factors that disadvantage children and enhance the factors that support them across all aspects of their lives, and across their lifespans, from conception through to adulthood. Beyond this principle, the initiatives are not pre-specified in great detail. The areas already have a high level of collaborative activity around outcomes for children and young people, together with resources and more-or-less well-developed governance structures that allow them to develop their work more fully. They also have an understanding that is shared within and across the areas to varying degrees as to: the relevant factors, and interactions between factors, in children’s and young people’s lives; the outcomes they are intending to generate; and what kinds of actions might generate these outcomes. However, in each area, some of the actions that are being developed have grown up, at least in part, on an opportunistic basis, or in response to pressing problems, rather than as part of a more strategic approach. In this situation, the work of evaluation and development are closely intertwined. A good deal of time has been spent with the leaders of the initiatives trying to surface their theories of change. Figure 8.1 shows one of the working documents that this has produced. Here, we see that the initiative understands itself as tackling a collapse in community morale as the result of the decline of heavy industry. A combination of material disadvantage and a sense of purposelessness is seen to perpetuate the difficulties faced by children and young people. The initiative sees itself as working to equalise their life chances with those of other young people in the wider LA area. This means both creating greater opportunities locally and creating a capacity among young people and the community as a whole to take advantage of those opportunities. In order to do this, the initiative is undertaking a wide range of activities, around tackling children’s difficulties early, working on health and well-being, supporting parents to support their 159

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Sufficient community fabric (Fractured)

Self-contained community (Maintained)

Tradional gender roles (Maintained)

100% employment (Lost)

Ship-building (Lost)

Past context

Resentment – feeling that something has been taken away from the community (if not sure what)

Reluctance to commute (locally/into the city)

Inability to connect to local service jobs

Lack of jobs/unemploy ment

Recent context

Perpetuating situation

‘Unhealthy place’ physically and mentally

Loss of area esteem – some fracturing of community (eg parts of the area ‘in work’ resented)

Lost generaon of grandparents /parents

Resulting in:

1. THE STARTING SITUATION

Presenting as:

Figure 8.1: Children’s community theory of change

Underlying problems In some cases: – Parents have low expectaons of their own children – Families don’t know how to be good parents or find it too hard – Families abdicang responsibility to services or refusing to engage with services – The hard to reach are sll hard to reach – Children have aspiraons but not the opportunies/capacies /support to act on these – Community not supporve of aspiraons – Opportunies that are available are not recognised and acted on

– Youth unemployment – Youth disorder – Poor mental and physical health – unfit families – Children starng Key Stage 3 below level 3 – Poor early language development – ‘Troubled’ families – High benefit claimant rates – disability and JSA

Presenting problems – Reducon in presenng problems (no noceable difference to other areas in the local authority) – The area has the same opportunies and support structures as more advantaged areas. It provides the same ‘offer’ in terms of life chances (ie employment/parental support/community support) – The community supports the realisaon of aspiraons. It establishes and sustains another way of behaving – ie: • the community becomes selfempowered • parents expect beer for their children and act on this (services stop substung for parents) • the community is ‘fit for life’ mentally and physically • there is a posive community identy linked to employment • community members can connect to ‘wider world’ contexts and opportunies – There is upward mobility, both in and out of the area – The area aracts and sustains employment

Intended outcomes:

3. Realising aspirations and behaving in new ways – eg empowering the community to support children to achieve their aspiraons and to do things they have not done before – making the community posive for residents and aracve to others (including employers)

2. Being fit for life– eg making sure children are healthy (physically and mentally) and are able to engage with opportunies

1. Getting things right early – eg speech, language communicaon, parenng. Aim to set children on posive pathway rather than addressing deficits later

Suggested core strands of action for the community

2. THE CHILDREN’S COMMUNITY

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children, and making the area attractive to aspirational residents and to employers. This outline articulation forms the basis for a series of activities. The first step is to put the outline to other stakeholders and manage a process through which a consensual – and more developed – outline theory can be articulated. As part of this process, stakeholders are challenged to provide evidence for their analysis of the state of affairs in the target area, and to seek such evidence if it is not currently available. Once this process is complete, the next step is to work out precisely how the strands of action currently proposed are expected to lead to the intended outcomes. This is best done together with the teams responsible for each strand, the evaluators’ role being to push for statements of observable changes that together form a plausible chain linking action to outcome. So, for instance, the ‘being fit for life’ strand includes actions designed to tackle excessive alcohol consumption by young people. Specifically, the initiative found that young people were drinking outdoors, particularly at the weekend, and so set up a series of activities in which they could participate. The theory, here, is that young people will, in fact, participate in those activities, that these will be the young people who were involved in alcohol consumption, that they will cease to misuse alcohol, and that this change in behaviour will be maintained. It is, of course, a relatively simple matter to find evidence for each of these expected changes. However, this chain can be extended and further evidence sought. If the young people cease to misuse alcohol, they might be expected to engage in lower levels of criminal and antisocial behaviour. They might begin to feel themselves less alienated and more pro-social. The area itself might become more attractive, so there may be an effect on how other residents feel about the area. The young people may experience fewer health and well-being problems. This may mean that they do better educationally. Chains can be developed for many actions and will, of course, intersect and interact with one another. They can be tested both for plausibility (with the evaluators offering challenge to the initiative leaders) and against the evidence. However, it is important that the attempt to articulate such change does not over-rationalise what is likely to be a complex and unpredictable process of change. As Mackenzie and Blamey (2005, p 166) caution: There are also some limitations to the ToC [theory of change] approach. To some degree it can still lead to very linear approaches to planning and evaluation. Such linearity 161

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may miss or mask some of the very complex interactions within and between projects or across target groups or areas. Such linearity is also a distortion of the way in which most organizations develop and learn from strategy and implementation. A balance has to be struck, therefore, between specifying the underlying logic of the intervention in sufficiently clear terms for it to be tested and for appropriate evidence of change to be gathered, while, at the same time, retaining flexibility to deal with realities on the ground that are too complex to be captured in linear terms. One indicator of this quest for balance is that evaluations of this kind tend to be eclectic in the kinds of evidence they use. The test is not whether the evidence is robust in relation to some external criteria, but whether it is capable of indicating that change has or has not taken place as predicted. Equally important, the testing of these chains has to take account of context. In other words, evidence has to be gathered not just on whether the changes took place as predicted, but on how they occurred and what other factors were implicated in their occurrence. This means that the search for evidence is not always undertaken on the somewhat mechanistic basis of finding discrete pieces of evidence for each link in the chain. In past evaluations (Cummings et al, 2007a; Dyson and Todd, 2010), for instance, we have found that case studies of individual children and families, assembled perhaps from interviews with them and with professionals working with them, have been particularly powerful. This is because although they point to changes that confirm the theory’s predictions, they are able to capture the more complex and holistic ways that change has occurred than the somewhat linear articulation of that theory might lead one to expect. However, it would be a mistake to assume that evidence need be overwhelmingly qualitative and/or anecdotal. Quantitative evidence is often more appropriate; for instance, we need to know how many young people participate in activities and how far levels of anti-social behaviour decline. In some cases, it is possible to quantify links in these chains in a robust and detailed manner so that analyses of how measurable increases in an action lead to measurable changes along the chain become feasible. This may involve generating primary quantitative data and is, thus, a costly task. Nonetheless, by selecting particular chains that are central to the initiative’s overall theory, it is possible to go a long way towards quantifiable testing of the theory overall. Likewise, the evaluation process has to be iterative and collaborative, as evaluators and leaders work together to clarify and develop the 162

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initiative’s theory. This does not mean, however, that evaluators must simply follow the initiative leaders, nor that the initiative is judged in entirely idiosyncratic terms. There are extensive research literatures on the factors that shape outcomes for children and young people, on the way that these outcomes feed into later life chances, and on the kinds of interventions that are likely to make a difference to outcomes. The evaluation, therefore, develops a framework of key outcomes and key factors in the situation that will need to be monitored. This forms the basis of our dialogue with initiative leaders, offers some stable comparison points across the three initiatives we are working with and ensures that there will be evidence relating to the kinds of outcomes that concern policymakers and potential external sponsors. In the short and medium term, it will be possible to offer feedback to initiative leaders as to whether they are on track and how their initiative might need to be developed if it is to generate their intended outcomes. It will increasingly be possible to document how, and how far, the initiative is bringing about the kinds of changes it envisages. Eventually, it will be possible to show whether the initiative has generated its intended outcomes and, equally important, to explain how this happened. It will not, of course, be possible to claim that if other initiatives organised themselves similarly, they would get identical results. However, by understanding not only the outcomes from the initiative, but also how they came about, it will be possible to help other initiatives think through what might need to be done in their situations.

Principles for monitoring So far, we have focused on how ABIs might be evaluated, on the grounds that evaluation is crucial for informing the development of ABIs and rendering them accountable to their sponsors. However, the reality is that interventions, not least in educational contexts, are monitored in many other ways than through formal evaluations, and such monitoring is commonly tied to accountability. Where this is the case, ABIs can be monitored in ways that operate on shorter timescales and are more significant in their consequences than formal evaluation processes. In particular, we noted earlier in this chapter that the government’s accountability mechanisms – and in education, this tends to mean the publication of annual performance measures and the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) inspection process – tend to focus on a narrow range of short-term outcomes, with high-stakes consequences if those outcomes are not up to the expected standard. 163

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In Chapter Nine, we will look in more detail at the kinds of accountability arrangements that might be put in place as part of the governance of new-style ABIs. However, reflecting on our discussion of evaluation, it is possible to draw out some principles for the kinds of monitoring that seem likely to provide good evidence, and on the basis of which ABIs can be held to account. It is clear, for instance, that monitoring cannot simply be about checking whether an intervention achieves externally imposed targets in a short timescale. At the same time, the need for accountability, and for processes that are sufficiently speedy to ensure that public money – and, more importantly, children’s lives – are not wasted, is undeniable. What we would advocate, therefore, is not an abandonment of accountability on the grounds that professionals should simply be trusted to get on with their job, so much as a shift in relations between professionals and those holding them to account that would parallel the shift in relations between intervention leaders and researchers. In the past, we have argued for ‘dialogical accountability’ (Dyson et al, 2010a). In essence, this means that inspectors and others should enter into a dialogue that focuses on what leaders are trying to achieve and seeks evidence that they are making progress towards their goals. In other words, monitoring for accountability purposes, like formal evaluation, should be based on eliciting theories of change, testing the plausibility of those theories and then testing them against empirical evidence. As with evaluation, this does not, of course, mean abandoning a concern with end-point outcomes. Nor is it technically any more challenging than current monitoring processes, since it would involve a mixture of desk analysis and field visits with which inspectorates are familiar. It need not even be particularly expensive if the process were undertaken selectively, focusing on key aspects of an initiative’s strategy. The major change, therefore, is in the reorientation of relationships. Ministers and their agents have a democratic right to determine priority outcomes and acceptable levels of change, and have a duty to ensure that public money is spent on the best methods for achieving those outcomes. However, this does not mean that they have a monopoly of wisdom in these matters. Their rights and duties have to be exercised in a way that takes into account local knowledge and priorities, and, therefore, involves a dialogue between the local and the national. Such dialogues are not necessarily comfortable, but, in the long run, they are likely to produce better outcomes than a simpler process of central determination.

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Governance and accountability In Chapter Eight, we explored not only how area-based initiatives (ABIs) might be evaluated in what would inevitably be a long-term process, but also how they might be monitored. In this chapter, we want to consider how monitoring information of this kind might be used within a wider governance and accountability framework. Our concern is to outline arrangements that are practicable within the current policy context, and, therefore, we focus particularly on the policy trajectory set by the Coalition government in office at the time of writing. However, it is worth noting that this trajectory is, in many respects, a continuation of policy trends that have been evident for at least the past 30 years and that there is little evidence of a serious political movement to develop radically different policy directions. Some of the principles that these arrangements will need to embody are already clear. Crucially, the process of developing an ABI locally will need to be led and managed in such a way as to ensure its democratic legitimacy across stakeholder groups. Creating mechanisms for effective partnership-working will be vital to acting on factors and processes that cut across service and administrative boundaries, and spatial scales. This cannot simply be a mechanical exercise of setting up systems and structures. As we indicated in Chapter Seven, it will also be important that whatever systems and structures are put in place, they are able to create and protect spaces in which stakeholders can: learn from one another; allow their current beliefs and practices to be challenged; and (re)negotiate their roles in tackling disadvantage on an area basis. We have also envisaged that the next generation of ABIs will be part of a multi-scale spectrum of policy approaches to tackling disadvantage, and, insofar as is possible and desirable, should be aligned with strategies being pursued at other spatial scales. Fundamentally, all of this will require that new-style ABIs are underpinned by governance and accountability arrangements that can support the development of new relationships between: local and national concerns; education and other services, and education providers themselves; the education system, children and young people, and their families and communities; and the diverse communities within places. Moreover, although we focus in this chapter on structures, we do not underestimate the social and political challenges inherent in 165

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developing these relationships. As we indicated in Chapter One, even in the apparently most homogeneous communities, governance inevitably involves working with the differences and conflicts that arise between different groups. Furthermore, as we saw in Chapter Seven, the process of developing an ecological analysis is one that is likely to challenge professional identities and existing power relations. The sheer complexity of developing appropriate arrangements to support new-style ABIs is indicated more fully in the wider literature on governance. For instance, Ranson and Crouch (2009, p 61) argue that to ‘accommodate and reconcile the tensions that presently frustrate the practice of good governance’, a governance framework is needed that can ‘strive to accommodate: multi-layered governance; executive and scrutiny functions; specialist and civic knowledge; difference and deliberation; professional and citizen membership’. Approaching this task conceptually, Van Marissing et al (2006, cited in Bunar, 2011) propose a model that identifies three aspects to governance – cooperation, power sharing and accountability – and suggest that these must be addressed in three dimensions: first, horizontally, between citizens themselves; second, institutionally, between local authorities, institutions and stakeholders; and, third, vertically, between policymakers, local stakeholders and citizens. With reference to this model, but looking to practical concerns, Bunar (2011, p 2852) notes that while many authors ‘argue persuasively for its necessity they also underline certain problems in relation to its implementation’. He suggests that these problems pertain to some core questions, not least: ‘Who is responsible for what?’; ‘Whose goals should be worked on first?’; and ‘Who is representing whom?’ The purposes that an ABI’s designers choose to pursue, the arrangements and processes they put in place to determine and act on these, and how they are then held to account will have a significant bearing on how these questions are answered. It is also important to acknowledge that local stakeholders seeking to take a lead role in developing an area-based approach will not be starting from a blank canvas. As we saw in Chapter Four, the New Labour years saw a proliferation of nationally mandated structures intended to support the development of multi-agency strategies at local authority (LA) and sub-LA levels. They also saw a range of structural reforms within the education system that changed relationships within the system, and which have been furthered since 2010 by the Coalition government. We start, therefore, by considering what can be learnt from past practices and what the governance landscape currently looks like. 166

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Learning from previous partnership approaches As we have seen, there was an explicit recognition on the part of New Labour governments, first, of the multidimensional nature of disadvantage and, second, of the need for multidimensional responses to this. Moreover, the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal recognised that multidimensional responses were only likely to be effective if they were joined up in some coherent way. Accordingly, Policy Action Team 17 was commissioned to produce a report on ‘joining it up’ locally, and its conclusion bears repeating here: Holistic government in particular places cannot be imposed top-down from a distance. If frameworks for co-operation are to be effective, they need to be more than lists of externally imposed priorities. They must also reflect the whole needs of communities and the priorities of local people. Joined-up working must create room for personal initiative and creativity. (DETR, 2000, para 1.7) Various structures were then developed nationally and implemented locally to support joining-up at a local level. These included, as we saw in Stockborough, Local Area Agreements (LAAs) and Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs). LAAs were three-year agreements that set out the priorities agreed between all public sector agencies working in an area and central government, and the targets and indicators that would be used to judge progress. LSPs were then intended to operate at a local level to implement LAAs. They were single bodies intended to bring together public services and private, community and voluntary sector organisations and to provide an overarching framework within which other partnerships could operate (Ainscow et al, 2008, p 13). Alongside, and to some extent embedded within, this agenda, New Labour governments were also committed to the pursuit of excellence across the public services, seeking to drive up standards through more straightforwardly mechanistic accountability systems. For instance, national Public Service Agreements were used to set out the government’s expectation for performance across the public services on a series of indicators, with failure to meet these ultimately leading to external intervention to ensure improvement, and in education, to school closure. Thus, while, on one level, there was an appreciation that the causes of poor outcomes in disadvantaged areas were multifaceted and required joined-up responses, on another, poor service outcomes

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at a local level were attributed to failings in those services, with context being bleached out as an explanatory factor. With hindsight, there is a widespread consensus that, in practice, structures intended to support joining-up, such as LSPs, were fundamentally weak compared to the power of national accountability systems; as Foot (2009, p 5) reflected, ‘one feature of partnership bodies … is that these bodies are not where the “real power” lies; the ultimate accountability for services lies elsewhere’. Such structures had little power either to make demands of partners or to act in a mediating role between local and national concerns (Geddes, 2006b; Fuller and Geddes, 2008). This also meant that while, in principle, they may have been well-placed to facilitate community involvement in local area strategies and to be held democratically accountable by the communities they served, there were often considerable limits on the influence community members were able to exercise (Ellison and Ellison, 2006). Reflecting on such difficulties, Ainscow et al (2008) argued that the best many local partnerships were able to achieve was a form of ‘restricted collaboration’, where: national targets were used to set local priorities; analyses of local contexts were restricted to reviewing local performance on national measures; partners focused on their own targets; and collaboration was restricted to mutual support at the margins. Consequently, such local strategies as were developed tended to line up with simplistic national priorities; they typically set out to align with service silos, rather than enabling professionals to cross the boundaries between services and to develop the sorts of new shared understandings of local factors, processes and needs required by the ecological approach that we have been advocating. The position of education as a public service within this wider context was perhaps even more tenuous. On the one hand, LAs were typically becoming increasingly emasculated with respect to local educational arrangements, and schools were not made a statutory partner in key collaborative arrangements, such as the Children’s Trust partnerships established by the Children Act 2004 (HM Government, 2004). On the other hand, following the Children Act, there was an expectation that schools would cooperate with interagency groups and should be encouraged to do so, and even, in some instances, that they might act as hubs for coordinating services. Further to this somewhat ambiguous situation, Dean et al (2007b, p 3) also reported that ‘school governing bodies were poorly connected into local policy partnerships, and there were few links between governors and local activist groups’.

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Changes to the structure of the education system also meant that schools were able to secure greater freedoms from local governance arrangements in order to pursue their self-improvement. For example, schools could apply for foundation status, allowing them to become their own admissions authorities, and they could then apply for trust status in order to establish a trustee body to act in the school’s interests. Schools could also form collaborative networks, often as hard or soft federations, in which they agreed to share expertise and resources to support improvement across the partner schools. New Labour established the first academies in disadvantaged areas, freed from LA control and managed by sponsoring bodies (and, as we noted in Chapter One, their numbers have since grown considerably). Furthermore, a shift in the delivery of some services from LAs to groups of schools and their partners (who might also be a federation or trust) was made possible, in some places, through the creation of Education Improvement Partnerships (EIPs) (DfES, 2005). EIPs enabled partners to define a common set of purposes and to have a joint agreement with the LA to deliver (and to be held accountable for delivering) specific functions, which might range from school improvement activities to establishing extended service clusters. The impact of these changing relationships was somewhat doubleedged. On the one hand, there were opportunities for the institutional dimension of governance to be strengthened – if primarily between schools, and between school leaders specifically. For instance, in his report on school federations, collegiates and partnerships, Arnold (2006) identified a wide range of positive impacts arising from these arrangements: improved leadership and management practices; collective planning and shared curricula opportunities, which made it possible to meet the needs of larger numbers of pupils and to use resources more effectively; and greater cost efficiencies. Indeed, Arnold cites an interview in the New Statesman where Ruth Kelly, then secretary of state for education, remarked: In the future I think co-operation will become not only the norm, it will probably be the only way of delivering a decent all-round education for all pupils.… We have to get schools to operate as part of a network to deliver a fully comprehensive education. (Arnold, 2006, p i) This, in turn, could be seen to hold the promise of being able to address inequalities in educational opportunities within places (a

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concept integral to the Transforming Heybury initiative outlined in Chapter Five). On the other hand, however, there is little notion of multilayered governance in this, which would allow the education system to be scrutinised from different perspectives by different stakeholders. LAs were typically left with reduced influence over local school systems, with their absence in some governance arrangements creating an increasingly strong and direct accountability relationship between individual schools and central government, and weakening ties between schools and communities, and schools and other services (Ranson and Crouch, 2009, Ranson, 2011, 2012; Hatcher, 2012). Barker (2010, p 8, cited in Hatcher, 2012, p 22) argues that this centralisation of accountability means that ‘Parents, children and even education authorities find themselves ignored or discounted as central authorities intervene to micromanage institutions in Ofsted [Office for Standards in Education] categories (e.g. special measures) or to impose new types of school (e.g. academies)’. Furthermore, as Edwards (2009, p 8) notes, even when professionals were able to use the spaces allowed by multi-agency arrangements to develop innovative responses to disadvantage, they could find themselves ‘uncomfortably out of tune with their organisations’ and ‘potentially vulnerable as they make decisions and push forward against the grain of established practices’. Overall, it seems fair to characterise New Labour’s approach to tackling disadvantage as riven by a tension between the commitment to local joining-up (albeit nationally mandated), on the one hand, and an even more powerful pull towards central control, on the other. This tension was particularly acute within the education system, given the system’s fragmented and competitive nature, the punitive consequences of failure for schools individually, and the lack of viable mechanisms for tying schools into the development of local strategies. Moreover, as we saw in Stockborough in Chapter Three, such local strategies as were developed typically required little of schools other than to improve their institutional performance – an aim that they would have been pursuing in any case – while offering little by way of support to achieve this.

The current situation Looking to the current lie of the land, policy developments since 2010 have moved in a direction, which is arguably a logical extension of New Labour’s approach, but which, nonetheless, has some distinctive features that may be important for the future of education-focused 170

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ABIs. At the time of writing, the current Coalition government has maintained – and, indeed, further widened – the gulf between local governance arrangements as coordinated through LAs and the structural reform of the education system. With respect to the former, the Coalition government has set out to devolve greater powers to a local level, and to do so without attempting to impose nationally determined operational structures on the development of local strategic plans. In this respect, if part of the difficulty with New Labour’s approach was that imposing nationally mandated structures at a local level made it difficult for local stakeholders to develop approaches that mirrored complex local dynamics, then the Coalition’s approach seemingly allows much greater freedom. For instance, in the Foreword to the Plain English Guide to the Localism Act 2011, Greg Clark, as minister of state for decentralisation, stated: Trying to improve people’s lives by imposing decisions, setting targets and demanding inspections from Whitehall simply doesn’t work. It creates bureaucracy. It leaves no room for adaptation to reflect local circumstances or innovation to deliver services more effectively and at lower cost. And it leaves people feeling ‘done to’ and imposed upon – the very opposite of the sense of participation and involvement on which a healthy democracy thrives. (DCLG, 2011a, p 2) In line with this, the Act has created greater freedoms for local government. As well as addressing issues relating to infrastructure and housing developments, LAs also have greater freedoms to: take on local public functions previously administered by Whitehall; develop local governance structures, such as area committees, which can cover wider or larger geographic areas as suited to addressing local concerns; and determine how best to carry out their scrutiny role in examining the work of local public bodies. It also allows for voluntary and community sector groups and social enterprises to take over some council functions and to manage community assets. The underlying emphasis on creating greater space for innovation is also driving further structural reforms within the education system – but with an institutional rather than local area emphasis. As well as a rapid growth in academies, the introduction of free schools has also made it possible for teachers, charities, parents and others to open schools with the legal status of academies, and 80 free schools had been opened by 2013 (DCLG and DfE, 2013). There is now a greater variety of 171

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types of school than ever before, and through sponsorship and trust arrangements, the involvement of a much wider range of organisations in school governance. As Ranson and Crouch (2009) argue, this shifts the very basis of the education system from one where education is held to be a publicly and democratically determined ‘universal good’, to one in which ‘self-governing trusts will be driven by the personal ambitions of a charitable sponsor, the particular belief systems of diverse faiths or the private interests of business’ (Ranson and Crouch, 2009, p 50). This, they suggest, means that rather than being informed by the views of people in a locality, schools will be informed by the ethos of their sponsors. As they explain: The argument for ethos rather than place can be that … if a particular association can bring to school the necessary passion about learning this will communicate itself to children and young people.… It can also be proposed that in a mobile society place and locality will no longer form the inspiration for children and young people growing up as they are likely to migrate from place to place as their families follow opportunities in the labour market. (Ranson and Crouch, 2009, p 51) The assumption underpinning these arguments is that if schools are to act, in Michael Gove’s (2011) words, as ‘engines of social mobility’, then the divorce of education from place, and particularly so in disadvantaged places, is necessary. However, as we have argued throughout this book, education, disadvantage and place are inextricably intertwined. It is, we would suggest, not divorce from place that holds the greatest promise for tackling the impacts of disadvantage on education, but engagement with place, as we set out in our rationale for new-style ABIs. The question is, however, whether the current direction of policy – the fragmentation of the education system, its divorce from local governance and the intense government scrutiny of schools that comes as the corollary to greater institutional freedoms – can allow for this, and, in particular, for the development of the sorts of initiative we have proposed. Some commentators, while arguing for the reconnection of schooling to local communities, present a pessimistic view of the opportunities currently available. For instance, Hatcher (2012, p 21) reflects: The Labour government showed no interest in extending local democracy in the school system, in spite of a 172

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policy rhetor ic of local democratic renewal. The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government’s localism agenda promotes the autonomy of schools from local authorities without proposing alternative forms of local democracy in the school system. He also expresses a particular concern about the growth in free schools and chains of academies where one sponsoring body manages several schools, arguing: Strategic power is handed over to a super-ordinate governing board of sponsors, management companies or owners with no parent or community representatives. Such chains are often unwilling to collaborate with other schools. Meanwhile local authorities, suffering savage cuts and the loss of schools, will contract, decline and perhaps virtually disappear, removing the last vestiges of locally-elected democratic accountability. (Hatcher, 2012, p 32) Focusing specifically on schools, Barker (2012) also presents a far less positive assessment than Arnold (2006) of structures, such as federations, which might at least support the joining-up of schools locally. He argues that the strong leadership required to drive such arrangements provides a further conduit through which centralised agendas can be locally imposed, describing head teachers who take on the role of leading system change as: bastard leaders who embrace their role as conduits of government policy, asked to manage output and performance rather than direct ‘the moral and value basis’ of children’s education. The more effective the ‘bastards’ become, the more likely they are to reduce problems to elements that can be resolved through a technology of priorities, targets and simple solutions. They cease to visualise schools as complex adaptive systems beset by ‘wicked problems’. This is a classic Catch 22 dilemma, with leaders torn between their professional instincts and the welfare of their school communities on the one hand, and the insistent demands of government agencies on the other. (Barker, 2012, p 78)

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This dilemma was evident in both of the locally developing initiatives explored in Chapter Five, though, in each case, there was also considerably more commitment and action directed to addressing the wicked nature of disadvantage than Barker perhaps thinks possible. Indeed, while the Weston and Heybury initiatives were undoubtedly fraught with difficulties – some of which will need to be worked out locally, and some requiring a supportive wider policy environment – they nonetheless indicate that it is possible for local stakeholders to drive the development of local area-based strategies. These examples also point to the fact that it is possible for local stakeholders to design strategies that seek to tackle disadvantage by engaging with the dynamics of place – however imperfectly they may have done so themselves. In addition, they suggest that autonomous schools can be tied into area strategies. Again, the relationship between institutional and strategic area interests was far from easy in either initiative, particularly when schools were called to account for their attainments by Ofsted, but schools were, nonetheless, key players. The example of the Weston Housing Trust, in particular, shows that it is possible for an academy’s sponsoring body to have an ethos and ambitions that are tied to place, and to position themselves as leaders of local initiatives on that basis. They also show that professionals can work beyond their service boundaries – not only was Weston Housing Trust learning rapidly about education, but one of its community development workers was based full time at its academy. What is important from our perspective is that this indicates that it is possible to do things differently: institutional interests can be aligned, at least to some extent, with strategic area interests; partnership structures can be developed to facilitate the development and implementation of local strategies; and professional understandings and identities can develop beyond specific service remits. What we want to consider now is what possibilities exist for changing the nature of accountability arrangements, and for developing the sorts of partnership arrangements that might support new-style ABIs.

Accountability arrangements Accountability arrangements in relation to new-style ABIs will necessarily be complex. In Chapter Eight, we suggested that a dialogic form of accountability was needed; as Roberts (2003, p 660) argues: dialogue’s advantages outweigh its cost as a mechanism of accountability under a particular set of conditions: when 174

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public officials confront ‘wicked problems’ (Roberts 2001a) that defy definition and solution, and when traditional problem-solving methods have failed, thus preventing any one group from imposing its definition of the problem or its solutions on others. Dialogue can be successful in a complex, pluralistic society (Bohman 1996; Drysek 2000), but its usage depends on courageous public officials who are willing to absorb its risks in return for the enormous potential it holds. Roberts (2003, p 661) summarises its potential thus: ‘if dialogue achieves its purpose, then a deeper connection and shared identity emerges among the participants and informs their relationship’. This relationship, to refer back to Van Marissing’s model, is not simply between local and national concerns, but: horizontally, between citizens themselves; institutionally, between local authorities, institutions and stakeholders; and vertically, between policymakers, local stakeholders and citizens. Area-based strategies currently developing outside education point to interesting emerging models which suggest that the vertical and institutional dimensions of governance can be strengthened through dialogue. Two that appear particularly pertinent to our arguments relate to the development of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and Whole Place Community Budgets (WPCBs). It is worth outlining these here, not because they are without problems, but because: first, they offer concrete examples of national government’s engagement in exploring alternative ways of holding area-based approaches to account; and, second, although developments in education have been largely separate from those in local governance, in principle at least, these models could still be transferable to new-style ABIs with an education focus. Alternative approaches to accountability LEPs were introduced by central government in 2010 to replace Regional Development Agencies. Their early development was the subject of a review by the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee (2013), and this explored the central features of LEPs’ governance and accountability arrangements and made recommendations for addressing the challenges associated with these. It is important to note that although LEPs are a nationally mandated model, they have many of the characteristics that we have associated with new-style ABIs. The House of Commons review characterises 175

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LEPs as ‘joint local-authority–business bodies brought forward by local authorities themselves to promote local economic development’ (House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, 2013, para 2). As such, LEPs are expected to operate as local public–private sector partnerships to promote sustainable economic growth in local areas. Within this broad remit, LEPs have considerable freedoms. First, as ‘local’ initiatives, LEPs have been able to define the local areas they focus on. As the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee (2013, para 40) review states: ‘LEP geography is a bottom-up process, identified and decided upon by LEPs’. Moreover, it is understood that these areas are not fixed; their boundaries are fluid and can move over time as local circumstances, or a LEP’s strategy, require. Second, the composition of the partnership is for each LEP to work out, but will typically include the LA, local businesses and further education providers. Third, LEPs set their own agendas, informed by their own analysis of local issues. This analysis is formulated by the partnership and may draw together a range of data and the different partners’ understandings of local needs and opportunities. LEPs then set their own objectives and priorities and develop their own strategic and business plans. Therefore, LEPs have essentially been able to define the parameters within which they will be held to account – a scenario that is quite different to previous ABIs. Thus, rather than working to a central formulation, ‘the view of the LEPs is that their diversity is their strength in that they should be free to focus on what is important to the local area in question and pursue an agenda reflective of that’ (House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, 2013, Ev 79). However, while the House of Commons committee was highly supportive of LEPs’ autonomy, it also identified accountability arrangements as an associated area of weakness, stating: ‘While we agree that LEPs (and the private investors within LEPs) should set their own priorities, we were troubled to find no tangible way of measuring success or allowing private investors to hold LEPs to account against these priorities’ (House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, 2013, para 65). This was seen to be a particular problem given that: first, LEPs draw on public money, and must be held publicly to account for how this is used; and, second, there is no clear mechanism to counter strong individual or institutional interests and agendas. For this latter reason in particular, the review felt that it was important that LEPs should not be too heavily dependent on LA resources so that they could avoid

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being dominated by a particular public service agenda, but, equally, that they should not be overly reliant on a single private source of support. To respond to these issues, the committee sought to identify ways of strengthening accountability without undermining local autonomy, arguing that ‘accountability is best achieved through excellent communication, transparency and lucidity’ (House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, 2013, para 66). Its central recommendations in this respect included: that ‘LEPs develop a set of benchmarks, relevant to their local economies, against which communities can measure their success’; that ‘Government monitors LEPs’ objective setting processes closely … [which] would also facilitate the provision of advice and best practice between LEPs and the Department [for Business, Industry and Skills]’; and that ‘all stakeholders should have the opportunity to engage with the development [of] their local economy through LEPs.’ (House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, 2013, paras 58, 55, 65). For instance, one suggested mechanism for local stakeholder involvement was for LEPs to hold public meetings in which they present their objectives, strategies and impacts, and receive feedback on these, thus creating a mechanism for democratic debate. The committee also suggested that the government can create conditions and develop guidelines that would support LEPs to exercise their autonomy more effectively and to justify their actions publicly. For instance, it recommended that the government could ‘re-articulat[e] a clear vision for what actions LEPs should be focussing on at a time when economic growth is so vitally needed’ (House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, 2013, Ev 79). In line with this, the government ‘could do more to consistently align national policy approaches with the functions of LEPs to ensure greater buy-in for their role’ (House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, 2013, Ev 79). Providing LEPs with core funding from a ‘single pot’ was also seen as a potentially important mechanism so that the need to pursue multiple funding streams, possibly with competing requirements, would not undermine the coherence of the LEPs’ strategies and actions. Other suggestions included that LEPs should have a single point of contact in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, both to help facilitate an in-depth dialogue as part of monitoring and accountability mechanisms, and to support LEPs by acting, in effect, as a broker, connecting them to wider opportunities and resources. This emphasis on dialogue, though, more specifically, between local public service providers’ and central government’s concerns, has 177

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also underpinned the WPCB pilot. Set up in 2011, the pilots were intended to enable local services to ‘work jointly by aligning their objectives, activities and resources where they believe a collaborative approach can add most value’ (National Audit Office, 2013, para 3). Again, these have been the subject of a recent review, this time by the National Audit Office (2013). Most interesting from our perspective is that the review reports that pilots have involved close collaboration between local and central government officials. It finds that, working in area teams, they have co-produced operational plans and developed full business cases that set out ‘the problem being tackled, the proposed new delivery model and the return public bodies might expect for the investment they commit, supported by a cost–benefit analysis’ (National Audit Office, 2013, p 4). These business cases are bespoke to each pilot area, founded in an analysis of local data and existing service configurations, and require a clear rationale and justification for the case being advanced, and a robust plan for monitoring developments over a number of years. The operational plans and business cases are then also submitted to the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) for scrutiny and challenge from central government. In addition, the pilot areas have been provided with support from central government analysts, coordinated through a single technical advisory group. Thus, rather than central government defining the problem and developing the solution outside the area, the WPCB pilots demonstrate that a collaborative local–central approach to policy development is feasible. They also suggest that it is possible for new forms of accountability to be developed through a dialogue between LAs and central government about what might feasibly be achieved and over what timescale, in relation to goals that are determined locally. The emphasis on cost–benefit analysis is also interesting given that, as we saw in Chapter Seven, such economic analyses can be more positive in their assessment of ABIs’ achievements than evaluations that focus on single ‘end-point’ outcome measures – such as educational attainment. Reflecting on the pilots overall, the National Audit Office makes the important observation that through the collaborative processes that inform the development of business plans, and through the DCLG’s scrutiny of each pilot’s local plans, both local and national government accept the uncertainties and risks inherent in these, and both parties make a shared commitment to supporting robust monitoring process and ensuring that assumptions and plans can be adapted in response to monitoring data.

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We have drawn particular attention to WPCB pilots and to LEPs as these seem to suggest the emergence of new ways of thinking about governance and accountability in relation to locally developed strategies. As we saw when exploring the recent history of education-focused ABIs in Chapter Four, when the balance between local autonomy and public accountability has been questioned, the response has previously been to tighten central control of the initiative and for government to define potential outcomes and measures for these more narrowly. By contrast, WPCB pilots and LEPs suggest that it may be possible for initiatives that are essentially locally led and developed, although operating within a national framework, to be held to account in line with their own locally developed strategies. In allowing for greater local freedoms, there is a concomitant central commitment to strengthening mechanisms for scrutiny by central government, and in LEPs, also by local stakeholders, but not at the expense of enabling local actors to develop responses to their own analyses of local issues. It is not difficult to see how the sorts of processes and dialogues set out in these examples could have been integrated into a development such as Transforming Heybury, where the LA plays a pivotal role in leading the initiative and could provide a clear arena for partnership between central and local government. Moreover, if Transforming Heybury’s community consultation mechanisms were strengthened, it would be possible to see how the initiative could come to be underpinned by strong, dialogical, vertical accountability. In the case of Weston Housing Trust, the structures that could facilitate local–national dialogue are less apparent; as a social landlord, the Trust is not positioned in relation to national government in the same way as an LA. Nonetheless, it is possible to see how in its application to become an academy sponsor, its vision of the Weston Academy as embedded within a wider strategy for sustainable community development could have been articulated, and support to develop and scrutinise this vision, and to monitor the academy’s progress in relation to this vision, could have been initiated centrally. Indeed, as we saw, the Trust lacks expertise in education, and may have welcomed the opportunity for dialogue that could have allowed it to draw on educational expertise from a source in addition to the academy’s own leadership team. In both initiatives, the opportunity to share the risks and uncertainties inherent in their plans with national government through a process of dialogue and scrutiny would almost certainly have been preferable to the tensions, fire-fighting and early derailment of long-term plans that resulted from trying to meet narrow short-term improvement goals. It may also have enabled the leaders of each initiative to secure wider or more active buy-in from 179

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other services and stakeholders if they could have seen how the risks inherent in their involvement could be accommodated in how they were then held to account. Overall, the points to be made are that even within the context of unfavourable accountability arrangements, there are local actors who are willing to commit to complex, risky, long-term strategies to improve children’s outcomes – not least in and through education. The development of area-based strategies outside education suggests that more favourable dialogical accountability arrangements are possible. If they are possible in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the DCLG, they should, in principle, be no less possible for the Department for Education to initiate. Even more appropriately, they should be possible within some cross-departmental structure along the lines of the former Social Exclusion Unit (2004), which could reflect the multidimensional approaches of ABIs themselves. As well as supporting new-style ABIs, this might also support efforts to develop coherent multi-scale strategies to tackle disadvantage.

Leadership and partnership arrangements In Chapter Four, we saw that in earlier, nationally developed ABIs, central government tended to determine where responsibility for an ABI’s leadership would lie, the sorts of partnership arrangements (and possible partners) required and the structures through which the partnership would operate. By contrast, in the sorts of new-style ABIs we have envisaged, the situation is much more fluid. In the development of new-style ABIs, leadership might come from a range of sources, which include, but are by no means restricted to, those traditionally associated with leading local initiatives. It could, for instance, come from an academy sponsor, LA or a school or group of schools that have realised the limits of their own internal improvement strategies. Equally, leadership might arise from some other source that is locally influential, for instance, a third sector organisation. Much will depend upon the local context and the relationships already established within this. Whoever positions themselves to take a leading role, it will almost certainly be an organisation or an existing partnership that: is well-established locally; is committed to improving outcomes and to doing so through partnership and on an area basis; and has sufficient influence and resources to act as a catalysing force. The strength of the wider partnerships and networks that they are able to forge will then be crucial to enable the sorts of dialogue outlined earlier to take place, and for new-style ABIs to harness the 180

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resources needed to act strategically, in response to the local factors and processes that help to create and sustain poor outcomes. The governance literature points to the idea of ‘network governance’ as central to such arrangements; as Ball and Junemann (2012, p 6 [citations omitted]) explain: [Network governance] refers to self-organising interorganisational networks characterised by interdependence, resource exchange, rules of the game and significant autonomy from the state. Through all this, more and more public services provision is being delivered through a mix of ‘strategic alliances, joint networking arrangements, networks and partnerships and many other forms of collaboration across sectoral and organisational boundaries’ based upon ‘relations involving mutuality and interdependence as opposed to hierarchy and independence’ … the argument is that these network based forms of co-ordination are displacing both hierarchies and markets as the dominant mode of interaction within public services and policy. There are two issues to be unpacked here with regard to the development of new-style ABIs. One is about creating a shared vision and common set of values that all the partners associated with the ABI can buy into and that can create a framework of principles to guide their involvement. The other is organisational and about creating the structures that can facilitate such developments. The first of these points, about vision and values, takes us back to issues we raised in Chapter Seven about the need to think beyond institutional and service boundaries when seeking to understand and respond to local issues. Stoker (2006, p 41) argues that to achieve this, rather than simply learning: to manage through networks, to be open to learning in different ways, and to draw in resources from a range of sources … [partners] need a vision of an alternative paradigm, an overarching framework in which to put their new practices. He suggests that this alternative paradigm should be concerned with ‘public value management’ and have:

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the achievement of public value as its core objective. Public value is more than a summation of the individual preferences of the users or producers of public services. The judgment of what is public value is collectively built through deliberation involving elected and appointed government officials and key stakeholders. The achievement of public value, in turn, depends on actions chosen in a reflexive manner from a range of intervention options that rely extensively on building and maintaining networks of provision.… For the public value management paradigm, the understanding of the public interest, the nature of the public service ethos, the role of managers, and the contribution of democratic processes stand in contrast to traditional public administration and new public management. (Stoker, 2006, p 42) Within a new style of ABI, establishing and maintaining such values will be an evolving process. There will be a broad set of values that can be articulated at the outset, for instance, a commitment to acting in the educational interests of all the children and young people in a place, and to considering issues of recognition and not just redistribution. These values are, as Edwards (2009) puts it, the ‘glue’ that can bind stakeholders from different backgrounds and organisations. The development of an ecological analysis can further define and deepen shared values by serving as the basis out of which a unifying strategy can be developed. To give a concrete, if only indicative, example, in one of the initiatives we explored as part of our national survey of emerging area approaches (Dyson et al, 2012), drawing together information from different local stakeholders had revealed a clash in the operational priorities of frontline police officers – whose performance was monitored partly by the number of incidents logged – and other front-line services who were seeking to reduce police intervention in the lives of vulnerable young people. Through a process of dialogue between partners, the Chief Constable became involved, which led to an agreement that all services would act to support young people, and, as such, the police would focus on activities to reduce youth offending and not pursue targets contrary to other services’ activities. This also committed all the partner services to thinking more holistically about children’s needs in their own strategic and operational planning. Through such developments, a framework of principles for participating in the partnership has started both to be articulated and then reinforced through action.

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It is equally important that there are operational structures in place to support partnerships and networks. In particular, the structures need to be flexible enough to respond to whatever issues are raised by a local ecological analysis rather than shaping any action to existing service practices and priorities. This does not mean, of course, that new structures cannot capitalise upon existing arrangements. For instance, Ranson (2011) presents a possible model that builds on LAs’ previous experiments with cluster and locality governance to establish ‘a coherent system of school/community governance’. He suggests multiple stages in this, proposing that LAs will initially work with schools and communities to develop cooperative governance practices at a cluster level. Then: When a cluster is ready to strengthen its collaborative practice they will constitute a federation board that integrates the governing bodies of local schools and centres. The board’s membership will include representatives of each school as well as the primary care trust. The work of the board will be supported by a community Advisory Council of parents and community interests that will deliberate the learning needs of the community and … scrutinize the work of the board. Each school will form an executive sub-committee of the cluster board. (Ranson, 2011, p 410) He proposes a further layer of governance in the form of a partnership board, which sits between clusters and the LA, at a level he terms ‘the locality’. The purpose of this board is to ‘develop the practices of partnership and interagency coordination planning and distribution’ (Ranson, 2011, p 410). It would coordinate, manage and develop strategic plans in relation to the range of agencies from the public and voluntary sector that might be involved in supporting an extended service agenda. Underpinning this multilayered governance model, the LA’s role would be ‘to build coalitions that create the climate for and thus legitimate change’ (Ranson, 2011, p 411). Of course, this is just one possible model – which may be appropriate and achievable in some instances, but not in others – and different governance arrangements will have different strengths and weaknesses. However, we can propose some basic principles that seem to be fundamental to the development of local governance structures for new-style education-focused ABIs:

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1. Wherever the leadership comes from locally, we would suggest that schools need to have a central, if not necessarily leading, role. This is because without the involvement of schools, the ability to influence poor educational outcomes will be limited. This means that some way will need to be found to accommodate schools within the governance arrangements for an education-focused ABI. There are, as Ranson indicates, many foundations that might be built upon in this respect. Where schools have an active commitment to addressing issues ‘beyond the school gates’, it may be possible to build outwards from existing school governance structures as means of securing their involvement. For example, area-based school federations might offer a basis for developing an ABI. In the case of ‘hard’ federations, there will already be an underpinning statutory agreement committing federated schools to establishing a single governing body, integrated management and joint budgetary decision-making. Schools that hold trust status and have secured the active involvement of a wide range of local partners in their governance arrangements are another, and we also know of instances where schools have established social enterprises and not-for-profit limited companies as vehicles for wider partnership-working. Equally, it may also be possible to build on LA structures that have been developed to support ward, district or locality working, and, in some places, the relationships and structures established through previous sub-LA initiatives, such as EIPs, may endure in some form. The central point to be made here is that new structures and partnerships are inevitably fragile, and if it is possible to build on existing foundations, this may provide a strong basis for new-style ABIs to emerge. 2. It is necessary to distinguish between partners who need to be directly involved in an ABI’s development and partners who may be involved on the periphery. An education-focused ABI will have a core focus on the education outcomes of children and young people in an area, and there will be a range of stakeholders for whom this is a primary concern and who, therefore, need to be involved in driving the ABI’s development. But it is also likely to be the case that other partners are brought into this group as it seeks to develop a viable theory of change. This may be necessary to respond to the factors and processes identified through an ecological analysis of the situation in which they are trying to intervene. 3. We suggest that an ABI is best placed to operate at a level somewhere between individual schools and their partners, and the LA. The area on which it focuses need not be precisely bounded, and can move over time as local circumstances or strategy dictate. What is 184

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important is that the area is meaningful in terms of how disadvantage is experienced locally and how people live locally. Operating at a sub-LA level positions an ABI to be sufficiently ‘close to the ground’ to engage with local knowledge and lived experiences, but also broad enough to act as an arena for partnership-working in which services and agencies can justify some intensification of resources and in which greater efficiencies might be achieved. 4. When different stakeholders and organisations start to work together to develop new area-based approaches, they must be prepared to work beyond their established boundaries. This requires particular types of knowledge and skill, and safe opportunities must be created that allow for these to be developed. For instance, it takes one set of skills to be head teacher of a school focused only on raising attainment, and another set to do that while working productively with health, housing, social care, police and residents. 5. We believe that LAs have an important role to play in supporting locally developed ABIs. They can help broker relationships between services and agencies, and act as a coordinating point between multiple partnership structures where they are pursuing overlapping agendas. For instance, it may be that an education-focused ABI is concerned to address high levels of school absenteeism as a result of ill health, and that, strategically, the best way to act on this agenda is to coordinate with the health and well-being board that operates in the ABI’s target area. LAs may also be best placed to coordinate the development of an ecological analysis, partly because of their access to a wide range of stakeholders and data, and partly because they have technical expertise in data generation and management, and are in a position to disseminate this across multiple agencies and partnerships. In addition, LAs may be particularly well placed to play a valuable scrutiny role (and particularly so when ABIs draw on LA services) and facilitate dialogue about an ABI’s strategic and operational plans at national level, and also, in their role as a local democratic institution, with local residents. 6. It is essential that local people are involved in the development of ABIs, and the basis for their involvement must be carefully considered. While citizen involvement is widely presented as a ‘good’ thing, it needs to be managed in a way that enables meaningful participation. As Ray et al (cited in Foot, 2009, p 12) suggest: the relative value of informed or ‘grass roots’ participants depended on the objective of the engagement: if the point is to gather knowledge then the views of authentic or grass 185

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roots community members are of value, but if the point is to ‘get things done’ then better informed participants are required. Local knowledge needs, at least, to be included within ecological analyses of local issues, and dialogical accountability needs to extend to a grass-roots level; it cannot simply be between the leaders of an initiative and central government. Feedback loops need to be created that allow the ABI’s intended beneficiaries to contribute to its development, drawing on their experience of its impacts and of evolving local dynamics. In conclusion, what we hope we have indicated in this chapter is that it is possible to develop an alternative basis for the governance of locally developed ABIs – one that has a shared analysis of the local situation and a series of core principles at its heart, and in which dialogue is central to accountability. While there are many complex and challenging issues that will need to be resolved if this is to be realised – some that are dependent on the creation of supportive national arrangements, and some that need to be worked out locally – developments outside education indicate that it could be possible. We agree with Mongon (2013) that what is needed now are ‘spaces for disciplined experiment’, where national government can work with the leaders of locally developing initiatives to explore more fully how alternative governance and accountability arrangements might be developed, allowing for different relationships between local stakeholders, and between local and national concerns. In places like Stockborough, where, we would argue, there is a pressing need for a strategic area-based approach, this might be the catalyst that is needed to enable local actors to take risks, and to work in partnership to tackle the local processes that create and perpetuate poor outcomes.

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Children and places in hard times: some concluding thoughts At the core of this book is an assumption that place matters in relation to educational disadvantage – but that why it matters, and what kinds of action it calls for, can be understood in very different ways. On one understanding, place matters because disadvantaged people appear in higher concentrations in some places than in others. Where these concentrations are highest, educational outcomes overall are poor, schools and other educational institutions typically struggle to cope with the challenges they face, and other services typically struggle to support both educators and learners as well as they might hope. Not surprisingly, policymakers looking at this situation have often tried to do something different in such places. By targeting additional resources at them, encouraging local innovation, requiring new forms of provision or imposing distinctive accountabilities, policymakers have tried to solve or ameliorate the problems of disadvantaged places in the expectation that this will somehow play a part in promoting greater educational and social equality. As we have seen, the achievements of education-focused areabased initiatives (ABIs) of this kind have been somewhat limited. As with similar ABIs with a regeneration or other non-educational focus, they have had some modest successes, but these have tended to be short-lived and have stopped well short of bringing about major transformations in the lives of disadvantaged people or the characteristics of disadvantaged places. What, in Chapter One, we called their ‘minimal’ conceptualisations – of how disadvantage is produced in particular places and the kinds of actions that might be needed to tackle this – ensure that their impacts can only be of a strictly limited kind. However, we have also seen that there are other, more ‘maximal’, conceptualisations emerging locally, on the ground. These seek to understand places in terms of the complex social and economic processes that work within and through them to create and perpetuate disadvantage. They see disadvantage as produced and reproduced differently in different places, but also see each place as subject to processes that come from beyond its boundaries and operate on a 187

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national and global scale. Crucially, they see interventions to tackle disadvantage as needing to work not simply on its manifestations – on poor attainment outcomes, attendance or staying-on rates, for instance – but also on those underlying processes. ABIs, in this sense, need to be based on an analysis of underlying processes, to develop long-term strategies for intervening in those processes and to be nested within other strategies, many of which will be at national policy level, that are capable of intervening beyond the area. On the basis of this analysis, we have suggested that a new style of locally developed ABIs, founded on more ‘maximal’ conceptualisations, may yet have a role to play in efforts to break the link between education, disadvantage and place. While some critics have argued that ABIs’ modest outcomes in the past have effectively exposed them as failed initiatives, we have pointed to the emergence of different ‘generations’ of ABIs, and have argued that it is a mistake to write off the potential of all area initiatives on the basis of the limitations of what was simply a first generation. We have pointed to a second generation of initiatives that were more thoroughly embedded in wider policy efforts to tackle disadvantage, and then to a newly emerging third generation that looks more promising still. These new types of ABIs are less beholden to the short-termism and shifting priorities of central government, have made real efforts to understand the places they serve, and seem to be developing promising long-term and wideranging strategies to tackle the causes, as well as the manifestations, of educational disadvantage. It is too early to be able to demonstrate that these initiatives have had significant impacts, and the examples we present have experienced many difficulties. Nonetheless, we have sought to draw out from them principles and practices that might usefully inform the further development of a ‘new generation’ of ABIs elsewhere. We have suggested (in Chapter Six) that it is possible to formulate a rationale for intervention in highly disadvantaged places on the basis that ABIs can be risk-reducing and resilience-building endeavours, intervening in the local ecologies of places and people, nested within more wideranging policy efforts and bringing about new and more democratic sets of relationships between professionals and the local residents that they seek to benefit. We have shown (in Chapter Seven) how such ABIs might set about undertaking analyses of local dynamics, and have argued that they need to bring to bear multiple disciplinary lenses in understanding their areas. We have argued (in Chapter Eight) that these ABIs will need to be evaluated and monitored in ways that take due account of the context-specific and long-term nature of their work, 188

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and have set out some practical ways in which this might be done. Finally (in Chapter Nine), we have set out the kinds of governance arrangements that would allow these ABIs to function with a necessary degree of autonomy while giving an appropriate range of stakeholders a say in their development. We can even take these arguments a little further. At various points in this book, we have raised the issue of the purposes to be served by ABIs. In Chapter One, for instance, we drew on Lupton’s work (in Dyson and Kerr, 2011) to set out five ‘propositions’ about how different understandings of the relationship between education, disadvantage and place might lead to different ABI designs. In Chapter Two, we further suggested that ABIs might orient themselves towards agendas of ‘redistribution’ or of ‘recognition’. Having reviewed the limitations of ‘minimal’ conceptualisations of ABIs and the possibilities of more ‘maximal’ conceptualisations, we would now suggest that it makes sense to see different purposes of this kind as being equally essential rather than optional. ABIs, we suggest, do not have to choose between reducing inequalities in outcomes and enhancing people’s sense of being valued, nor between supporting schools to deal with their disadvantaged populations and tackling disadvantages beyond the school. Rather, they have to find ways of doing all of these things, balancing the competing priorities they generate and creating synergies between apparently contradictory directions of travel. These are, we suggested in Chapter One, matters for local deliberation rather than for external prescription. In our view, the developers of ABIs will encounter many fundamental questions about what we called ‘purpose and power’. We believe the rationale we have developed here, the analytical methodology and the suggestions for governance provide a helpful framework within which those questions can be resolved. However, there is no way round the need for local stakeholders to determine their futures in the light of a deep understanding of local circumstances. Nor is there any avoiding the tricky politics of bringing those stakeholders together with a view to deliberation and collective action. Not surprisingly, given this analysis, there are some things that we have deliberately not done. There is a movement currently in England and elsewhere to base all efforts to tackle educational disadvantage on high-quality evidence, on the assumption that this will identify with a high degree of certainty those strategies that are likely to have greatest impact (see, eg, Gorard and See, 2013; Higgins et al, 2013). We have considerable sympathy with this approach insofar as it means that ‘home-made’ interventions are replaced by evidence-based ones, 189

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where these are available and appropriate. However, we have made no attempt here to list a set of preferred interventions that ABIs might use to intervene in their target areas in relation to particular factors or processes. This stems from our understanding of new-style ABIs as highly context-specific efforts to intervene in local ecologies. What matters is that interventions are based on a deep understanding of places and form part of a strategy for making a difference to them. In some cases, in order to address particular needs, interventions developed outside the area and tested experimentally will be entirely appropriate – and should, we would argue, be used. In many cases, however, the available interventions will be inappropriate to the local context, or will work differently there, or ready-made interventions that match the ABI’s purposes will simply not exist. As we saw in Chapter Eight, what matters is not so much what ‘works’ in general terms, but what works for whom in what circumstances and in what respects. As we also saw in Chapter Eight, however, that is not a reason for failing to seek robust evidence as to what works in context and developing area initiatives in the light of that evidence. For similar reasons, we have not offered an operational blueprint of what a new generation of ABIs might look like. It is not just the specific interventions that must fit local circumstances, but the configuration of partners, the identification of resources and the governance and accountability arrangements. Later in this chapter, we give some examples of how all of this might work in particular situations, but our view is that what is possible and desirable in one place may well not be so in another. We might add that what is possible and desirable at one time may not be so at another, and it is to the very particular challenges of the current situation in England that we now turn.

Challenges and possibilities in the current context In 1973, a report from the National Children’s Bureau (NCB) documented the devastating impact of poverty on the lives of Britain’s children, not least those living in highly disadvantaged areas (Wedge and Prosser, 1973). Revisiting the same issue some 40 years later, the NCB concludes that things have not improved and may, if anything, have grown worse, not least for children living in highly disadvantaged areas (National Children’s Bureau, 2013). This is despite the commitment of successive governments to tackling child poverty, despite multiple policy initiatives and, above all, despite a plethora of ABIs aimed at improving children’s lives. The message we take from this is that the social and economic processes that produce and reproduce disadvantage 190

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are so powerful and so deep-rooted that they overwhelm not just ABIs, but the range of other policy initiatives that governments have put in place. This situation has been exacerbated by the post-2008 international economic crisis, and by the policy responses that have sought to manage it. The crisis has been met by changes in the welfare system and significant cuts to precisely the kinds of public services on which the most disadvantaged people in the most disadvantaged areas rely. Not surprisingly, most predictions suggest that child poverty is set to increase in the medium term, and, presumably, the disadvantages associated with poverty will increase likewise (Brewer et al, 2011). Moreover, many of the initiatives to tackle disadvantage during the New Labour years – including ABIs – relied on the availability of extra funding that the government could direct towards those it saw as in greatest need. Not only has much of this funding disappeared, but the Coalition government currently in office appears ideologically opposed to tackling disadvantage through central initiatives and centrally directed funding. As a result, the legacy of New Labour initiatives has shrunk rapidly. Our own work in schools, for instance, shows that even before the impacts of funding and service cutbacks have reached their peak, the capacity of schools to develop provision for disadvantaged learners, or to form collaborative networks with other schools and services, is beginning to be severely eroded (Carpenter et al, 2013). We take two messages from this. One is a reinforcement of the position we have taken throughout this book: whatever else ABIs may be able to achieve, they are not capable of solving the problems of poverty and disadvantage on their own. The second message is that any attempt to develop ABIs in the short and medium term is likely to face major challenges. On the one hand, it is likely to be increasingly difficult to bring partners together at a time when services are experiencing significant cutbacks, and when central initiatives and the funding that goes with them have largely disappeared. On the other, even where ABIs are established, the odds against which they are fighting are likely to be significantly increased, and evidence for their impacts is likely to be hard to find. While it is important to acknowledge this somewhat gloomy picture, it is also important to say that it is not quite complete. In Chapter Six, we argued against a deterministic view of how disadvantage arises and suggested that there are spaces for important interventions to be made, even if those interventions are unable to transform underlying social and economic processes. In the same way, we argue that the politics of disadvantage are not quite so deterministic as some would argue. 191

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As many critics have pointed out over recent years, policy initiatives to tackle educational disadvantage have tended to be located within an overarching neoliberal policy ideology (see, among others, Gunter et al, 2010; Lipman, 2011; Ball, 2012). This has meant that quite apart from the question of whether such initiatives have been taken in good faith, they have had to fight against a context in which education has been seen primarily as serving the needs of national economic growth, competition between institutions (and, indeed, between learners) has been encouraged and the emergence of elites has, at the very least, been tolerated. It is hardly surprising, then, that the NCB can find no improvement in the condition of the poorest children in the poorest areas, and that the educational challenges facing such children remain substantial. If this were all that could be said about the politics of disadvantage, the outlook would, indeed, be gloomy. However, we suggested in Chapter Six that even within the context of ‘normal politics’ and even when politics are conducted within a broadly neoliberal framework, policymakers and practitioners can and do take actions that make a real difference to disadvantaged people and places. In that chapter, we cited a recent review of New Labour’s policy record between 1997 and 2010, and it worth restating its conclusions. Without effecting any substantial social transformations, the review argues, Labour governments ‘spent a lot and achieved a lot’. In particular, although the gaps between those doing well and those doing poorly remained substantial, ‘Outcomes improved and gaps closed on virtually all the socioeconomic indicators Labour targeted, such as poverty for children and pensioners and school attainment’ (Lupton et al, 2013b, p 7, emphasis in original). The implication would seem to be that policy does, indeed, make a difference, despite the ideological constraints that restrict the policy repertoire. Even within a neoliberal agenda, then, there is space – and, arguably, a pressing need – to tackle issues around disadvantage. While some circumstances and some kinds of governments undoubtedly make these spaces tighter, the kinds of governments that come to power in the UK and in many similar liberal democracies cannot, in electoral, social or economic terms, simply do nothing, much less control policy and its implementation to such an extent that action to tackle disadvantage becomes impossible at any level. Even the current Coalition in this country expresses a commitment to ‘supporting the most disadvantaged individuals and families in the UK’ (HM Government, 2012, p 1), while, as we saw in Chapter Nine, its withdrawal from many forms of central intervention have created spaces in which local stakeholders can 192

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operate in pursuit of agendas that may be less than perfectly aligned with those of the centre. This undoubtedly creates a complex situation, filled with contradictions. At the time of writing, the Coalition government is busily reducing local authorities’ (LAs’) capacity to shape the education system to local needs, diverting funding towards high-performing schools, eroding the services on which vulnerable children depend and imposing a narrowly academic curriculum that seems likely to alienate further those who are already least engaged with schooling. At the same time, however, it has, as we have seen, devised a ‘Pupil Premium’, which targets relatively large amounts of funding at economically deprived pupils and that places local leaders – in this case, head teachers – in a position to determine its use (Carpenter et al, 2013). While there are doubts as to whether the Pupil Premium compensates all schools for the other sources of funding that they have recently lost, it nonetheless indicates that issues of disadvantage have not slipped entirely from the policy agenda and creates opportunities for locally customised responses. Our position, therefore, remains one, in Grace’s (1994) words, of ‘complex hope’. The complexity comes from an acknowledgement that the social, economic and political forces arrayed against ABIs are substantial at all times, and close to overwhelming at the current time. The hope comes from a belief that there are, nonetheless, spaces for action within which ABIs can operate, and that if they do so, they have the potential to make a difference to people’s lives. We wish to conclude this book, therefore, by exploring precisely what this action might look like.

A strategy for hard times In Chapter Five, we described two locally developed initiatives that, we suggested, prefigured a new generation of ABIs. Both of those initiatives arose towards the end of the New Labour period, and benefited from relatively abundant funding and from a relatively benign policy context. But what might this ‘new generation’ look like in the current context? In the case of one of these initiatives, the Weston Academy, an answer is beginning to emerge. The Weston Housing Trust, which sponsors the academy, has begun to develop its own local chain of academies and has joined an initiative to develop a series of what, for the time being, are called ‘children’s communities’. This initiative, a joint venture by the national and international charity Save the Children and ourselves, seeks to combine what we know about ABIs from 193

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experience in England with what can be learned from a high-profile US example, the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York (Dyson et al, 2012; Dyson and Kerr, 2013). Some characteristics of the nascent children’s communities are entirely familiar from the history of ABIs – notably, the focus on a more-or-less tightly bounded geographical area within which there are concentrations of people facing marked disadvantages, and the assembly of a range of partners to try to tackle those disadvantages. However, there are other characteristics that are different from those of most ABIs, and that have emerged partly in response to the lessons learned from the past and partly in response to the new circumstances in which the initiatives will have to operate. Children’s communities, for instance, are expected to take a more holistic view of their task than many ABIs have tended to do. Their focus is on improving outcomes for children and young people, but on a wide range of outcomes rather than on tackling one or other perceived problem, such as high levels of placement in care, low educational attainment or high levels of obesity. Moreover, they are expected to develop strategies that are holistic in the sense that they operate both across childhood and adolescent years, and across all relevant aspects of children’s lives. This holistic approach is an acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of outcomes and of the processes producing outcomes that we have identified throughout this book, and that, as we argued in Chapter Six, should be a key part of the rationale for ABIs. In practical terms, this means that children’s communities will not be content with narrowly focused single-strand interventions in, say, the performance of schools or the quality of parenting. Neither will they restrict themselves to work at one point in children’s lives, for instance, in the early years or at the point of transition from school. The Harlem Children’s Zone itself conceptualises this approach in terms of a ‘pipeline’ of high-quality, highly supported educational experiences from the early years to college, supported itself by effective interventions in family, social welfare and health problems, and, in turn, supported by community development programmes. In order for this to be more than a scattergun approach to multiple presenting problems, children’s communities are expected to be more strategic in their approach than many ABIs have been. They are carrying out analyses of the local dynamics in their target areas along the lines outlined in Chapter Seven. Indeed, the outline theory of change presented in Chapter Eight (see, especially, Figure 8.1) is drawn from one of these initiatives, and shows how they are tracking back from the presenting problems in their target areas to what they understand to be their underlying causes – in the case of Figure 8.1, 194

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from a familiar litany of low attainment, high youth unemployment and anti-social behaviour, through problems in family functioning and community cultures, to the underlying economic problems of the area. It also shows how strategic responses are being built on these analyses, and how these are beginning to be organised into coherent strands of action with clear long-term purposes. Delivering these strands of action requires forms of partnership that are familiar from previous ABIs and from the legacy of partnershipworking left by the New Labour years. However, the governance and resourcing of these partnerships is distinctive. In contrast to most previous ABIs, these initiatives are driven and resourced locally rather than by central government. This means that a variety of governance arrangements have emerged, depending on local configurations of partnerships and local leadership resources. The Weston initiative is being driven primarily by the Weston Housing Trust, but with support from the LA and with an emerging decision-making structure aimed at ensuring that although Weston is the catalyst for action, it is not the sole owner of the initiative. A second children’s community is also being led by a social housing provider, and it is targeting its strategy on serving an estate where it is the principal landlord. Elsewhere, in a third community, the driving force is a secondary school that has had a major commitment to working with the communities it serves for over a decade. During that time, it has developed partnerships with other schools, a further education college and a range of community services, most recently, through New Labour’s extended schools and services initiatives. The cluster of schools and their partners established, then, is now serving as the decision-making forum for the children’s community. Again, the LA is closely involved, and, again, the arrangement ensures that although there is a lead organisation, that organisation is not the exclusive owner of the initiative. A similar set of arrangements exists in a fourth children’s community, which centres on a secondary academy. However, since the academy was opened only a few years ago, there is no prior history of collaboration and no pre-existing collaborative structure. The academy, therefore, has established a not-for-profit company, jointly owned by all the partners, as the vehicle for developing the children’s community. The absence of central government from these arrangements has implications for how these nascent children’s communities are resourced. Unlike many previous ABIs, they do not depend on government grants. Instead, they depend on the partners using their existing resources to support the work of the community. They do this by convincing those partners, on the one hand, that the children’s community will 195

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enable them to achieve their own aims more effectively and efficiently, and, on the other, that the children’s community embodies a form of public value (as we described it in the previous chapter) that, in itself, forms an incentive for public and voluntary services to work together. This is a hard sell – but, even in straitened times, not an impossible one. For instance, the extended services cluster described earlier has opted to remain together and to pool resources, despite the funding that had previously supported its work being dispersed into individual school budgets. Likewise, LAs are important partners in each of these initiatives, and while there are undoubtedly concerns, in some cases, that the children’s community might become a ‘cuckoo in the nest’ that could cut across existing activity, there is also a sense that overstretched and under-resourced LAs cannot carry out their roles unless they find arm’s-length vehicles such as these to act on their behalf. One other feature of the resourcing of these children’s communities is distinctive. Although charities and philanthropists have long played a small part in supporting provision for disadvantaged children, this has tended to be within a strong framework of state-led provision and has been very much secondary to state funding. It may be significant, therefore, that it is a charity rather than the state that is in the national lead on the children’s community initiative. It is too early to say how long this state of affairs will last or how important charitable and philanthropic funding will ultimately prove to be. However, it is notable that the Harlem Children’s Zone itself is heavily funded from such sources, and it may be that as public funding diminishes, other sources become more important. If that is the case, the problems of short-termism and of being tied to shifting government priorities that have beset ABIs for many years may recede – though this is not, of course, to say that different problems associated with the new funding arrangements will not arise to take their place. The absence of central government and the position of local government as partner rather than government agent also have implications for how the children’s communities define their areas. They are under no obligation to draw arbitrary lines on maps to match administrative boundaries or give priority to areas defined other than by the children’s communities themselves. They are, therefore, free to define their target areas based on the dynamics of the places they serve and the possibilities of marshalling interventions in those places. As we have seen, for one of the lead housing providers, its target area is defined in terms of an estate it manages, where there is a set of interlinked issues, and where the provider can take a lead in ensuring that those issues are addressed. For the other housing provider, Weston 196

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Housing Trust, the area is defined in relation to the neighbourhoods from which Weston Academy recruits most of its students and where the Trust has many of its properties. The community developed from an extended services cluster works with its partners in an area that is bounded physically by major roads and by a river, where there is a shared economic and social history, and where the partnership is able to marshal significant resources. The community developing from a not-for-profit company led by a new academy is working with the inner-city suburb where the academy is located and where there is a history of collaborative interventions. In each case, there is some debate about whether the definition of the area is the most appropriate one, but in each case also, decisions about these matters rest entirely with the children’s communities themselves, and can be amended if the boundaries that are drawn seem not to work for some reason. Boundaries can, furthermore, operate flexibly as required, in relation to particular factors or processes. There are other respects in which these nascent children’s communities suggest a new style of ABI that are different from previous, more ‘traditional’, generations. They are, for instance, participating in an evaluation of the kind outlined in Chapter Eight. Without the benefits – but also constraints – of government funding, the priorities for evaluation change. They no longer need to demonstrate outcomes in line with government priorities within two or three years. However, they do need to know on an ongoing basis whether the changes that are occurring in their areas are in line with those predicted by their theories of change. They need this information not to satisfy government paymasters, but for their own sake, for the sake of their partner organisations and for the sake of any external funders they might secure. The monitoring and evaluation pressures on them are different from those of most other ABIs, though they are substantial nonetheless. Finally, the children’s communities are experimenting with the democratising of their work, not simply in terms of participation in formal decision-making, but in terms of taking due account (as we suggested in Chapter Two) of the importance of recognition alongside redistribution, and of moving away from the deficit-laden discourses that have accompanied so many interventions in areas of concentrated disadvantage. This is, it has to be said, one of the least-developed aspects of their work, but there are encouraging signs. For instance, the not-for-profit company led by the new academy has avoided rushing into setting up new forms of provision, and has instead spent the first year of its existence engaging in a series of activities to elicit 197

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residents’ views about the area, using the different forms of contact with residents that the partners have access to. In the same way, the social housing providers tend to have a somewhat different set of relationships with residents than schools do with children and their families. While the relationship can sometimes be challenging, there is a sense that residents are customers and that the place where they live belongs to them. Therefore, they bring strategies for community engagement that are different and, on the face of it, more powerful than those used in most education-focused ABIs.

A promising future? Taking all of these characteristics into account, it seems to us that these new forms of ABI are not just different from earlier generations, but are, in terms of their initial conceptualisation at least, better. We say this on the basis of the distinction we drew in Chapter One between what we called ‘minimal’ and ‘maximal’ conceptualisations. Historically, most ABIs – and, particularly, most education-focused ABIs – have suffered, as we have seen, from unduly limited understandings of the processes at work in the places they serve, of how disadvantage arises from those processes and of the kinds of actions that might be necessary to change them. The children’s communities we have described earlier, by contrast, have begun to develop a rich understanding of their target areas, are committed to a wide-ranging, long-term and strategic response to disadvantage, and are beginning to put the governance strategies in place to manage those responses. Notably, this includes considering the sorts of professional development opportunities that key partners in the communities will need in order to work beyond their traditional service or institutional boundaries. It may well be, therefore, that insofar as ABIs have a future, it is in a ‘maximal’ form of the kind we have outlined here. We would not, of course, wish to minimise the formidable challenges facing the children’s communities, nor to claim that they constitute the only way in which area-based efforts to tackle disadvantage can be taken forward. On the contrary, it is striking how many other area initiatives are now beginning to emerge. Some of these are continuations of collaborations that were established during the New Labour years but have found a way to survive. Some are driven by LAs looking to unite schools and their partners into some common purpose. Some, again, are driven from beyond education, for instance, by health providers who understand that health outcomes for children and young people

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are bound up with other outcomes, and that the kinds of holistic approaches we outlined earlier offer a promising way forward. We draw two conclusions from all of this. One is that the notion of ‘public value’ perhaps remains more deeply ingrained in the culture of the public sector in this country than is sometimes acknowledged, despite attempts by successive governments to marketise, privatise and commercialise. The other is that as central government withdraws from direct involvement in area initiatives, it creates a space in which greater rather than less activity flourishes. In an ideal world, we would want central government to continue to do the things that can only be done at the centre, by way of pursuing economic, fiscal, educational and other policies that tackle disadvantage and minimise inequalities. However, whether such policies materialise or not, there remains much that can be done locally – and, we would argue, can only be done locally. This book has argued that even in the current context, it is possible to make a real difference to disadvantage through area initiatives. For this to happen, however, we will need to reimagine what the ABIs of the future might be and what they might achieve.

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219

Index

Index

A ability streaming 56–57 ABIs (area-based initiatives) area as basis for initiatives, reasoning for 12–15, 20–24, 69, 118–121 definition 2–3, 10–11 evolution of 11, 109, 128–129, 187–188 first generation: traditional ABIs 2–3, 11, 65–66, 71–72, 109 second generation: integration within wider policies 8, 67–69, 74–78, 87, 109 third generation: locally developed and owned 104–106, 109, 187–188, 193–196 (see also newstyle ABIs) minimal vs maximal conceptualisations 28–29, 105, 187–188, 198–199 perceptions of as ineffective 78–83 causes design issues 83, 85–86 executional difficulties 95–96 focusing on short-term improvements 95, 96, 100, 148, 163 inappropriate expectations 15–16, 84–85, 110–112 misconception of places as containers for poor outcomes 21–22 misunderstanding of causes of disadvantage 22–23, 43, 84–87 potential negative consequences 23, 25–26, 102–103 resource limitations 84 positive outcomes of 4, 81–82, 87, 134–135, 192 recommendations accountability and monitoring principles 163–164, 179–180

amelioration of structural problems, as aim 8–9, 111–112, 127, 191–192 causes of disadvantage, assessment of 23, 43–44, 89, 117–118, 187–188 evaluation principles 157–158 governance and organisation principles 165–166, 183–186 risk-protection-resilience framework 112–115, 127 academies autonomy from local authorities 17, 89, 168–169, 170, 193 criticisms of 171–174 establishment of 17, 91–92, 169 manipulation of admissions processes by 41–42 numbers of in Greater Manchester 39 Weston Academy case study 90–97, 104–108, 174, 179, 193–194, 196–197 Academies Commission 40–41, 42 accountability and monitoring of ABIs see also evaluation of ABIs dialogical approaches 174–175, 177–180 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) 175–177, 179 Ofsted 95, 96, 100, 148, 163 recommended principles for 163–164 Whole Place Community Budgets (WPCBs) 175, 178–180 action zones 66 admissions processes, manipulation of by schools 41–42, 51 adult education 72, 73–74, 75, 94–95 support for immigrant parents 55, 56 Ainscow, M. 22, 168

221

Education, disadvantage and place analysis see accountability and monitoring of ABIs; ecological analysis; evaluation of ABIs Anyon, J. 25–26, 43 Arnold, R. 169 Asian neighbourhoods educational outcomes in 33 in Stockborough case study 49–50, 52–54, 56–58 aspirations 94, 119–120, 124, 143 attendance, and pupil commuting times 58 austerity, impact on child poverty 191 autonomy of schools, increase in 17, 89, 168–169, 170, 193

B Ball, M. 181 Ballas, D. 122–123 Barker, B. 173–174 Bartley, M. 113, 114–115 Batty, E. 66, 81 Behaviour Improvement Programme (BIP) 72 Blair, Tony 1, 67 Blamey, A. 155, 161–162 BME (black and minority ethnic) neighbourhoods educational outcomes in 33 in Stockborough case study 49–51, 52–54, 56–58, 59 in Weston Academy case study 95 Bourdieu, P. 36 Boyd, W.L. 24, 28 Bradley, D. 85 Brain, K. 148 Bright, N.G. 120 Bronfenbrenner, U. 116, 121 Bryk, A.S. 33 Bunar, N. 166 Butler, T. 33

C Cambridgeshire, rural education in 6–7, 73–74 case studies Harlem Children’s Zone 159–163, 193–194, 196 Heybury 90, 97–108, 179 Stockborough 47–64

efforts to tackle disadvantage 59–60 ‘mixed economy’ of schools and school sorting 51–55, 59–60 primary schools in 54, 55–57 profile of town 47–51 recommendations 61–64 secondary schools in 51–54, 57–59 Weston Academy 90–97, 104–108, 174, 179, 193–194, 196–197 catchment areas, removal of 38–39 see also schools: fragmentation of central government and ABIs absence of involvement 195, 196, 199 central government led 2–3, 11, 65–66, 71–72, 109 central-local collaboration 178–180 centrally driven, locally implemented 167–170, 175–177 Central High School (Stockborough case study) 52–53, 57–58 Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning 115–116 charter schools see free schools, academies Chatterton, P. 85 Chicago schools, study of 33 child poverty 190–191 childcare in schools 76 Children Act 2004: 168 children’s communities 193–198 Children’s Fund 69 City Challenge 8, 72, 82, 85–86 City Learning Centres 72 Clark, Greg 171 Coalition government austerity policy 191 education policy 170–174, 193 laissez faire approach of 15, 16, 17 Cochrane, A. 79 ‘cold climate’ for policy 18–19, 191–194 communication skills (ecological analysis example) 141–142 community involvement in ABIs see local involvement in ABIs Community Learning Centres (CLCs), in Heybury case study 98–100, 101–103, 104, 105 commuting times for pupils 58 conceptual lenses for analysis 132–140

222

Index Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government see Coalition government context-mechanism-outcome pattern configurations (CMOCs) 153–155 continuing education 72, 73–74, 75, 94–95 cooperative working and networks 165–170, 180–186, 195–199 cost-benefit analysis of ABIs 134–135, 178 Crouch, C. 166, 172 Crowson, R.L. 24 Cummings, C. 135

D Dargan, L. 65 Dean, C. 168 decentralisation fragmentation of school system 38–42, 51–54, 61–62, 91, 171–174 locally developed and owned ABIs, shift towards 104–106, 109, 187–188, 193–196 school autonomy, shift towards 17, 89, 168–169, 170, 193 Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), survey on education and deprivation 31–32 Department for Communities and Local Government 16–17, 178 deprivation, definition 9 dialogical approaches to accountability 174–175, 177–180 disadvantage causes of, need to focus on 23, 43–44, 89, 117–118, 187–188 economic and educational disadvantage, correlation between 6, 31–32, 111 exceptions 32–33, 37, 111, 112–114 interactions between factors 115–118 recent increase in 190–191 spatial inequalities in education 31–38 structural inequalities and ABIs 8–9, 15–16, 84–87, 110–112, 127–128, 190–193 distal factors 137

Dorling, D. 80, 110 Dyson, A. 85–86

E EAL (English as an Additional Language) support 55, 60–61, 62 early years education see also Sure Start attainment statistics for disadvantaged areas 32 communication skills (ecological analysis example) 141–142 economic benefits of 134 importance of 116 Eastern European immigrants, in Stockborough case study 50, 59 ecological analysis conceptual lenses for analysis 132–140 methodology and technical issues 140–145 purposes of 138–140 ecological approaches to intervention 115–121, 127–129 interactions between factors, recognition of 115–118 professionals, role of 125–127, 128 targeting and spatial levels 122–124 ecological understanding of people 116–118, 120–121, 128 of place 118–125, 128, 131–132 economic and educational disadvantage, correlation between 6, 31–32, 111 exceptions 32–33, 37, 111, 112–114 economic liberalism and ABIs 18–20, 191, 192 economics as conceptual lens 134–135 Education Act 2006: 91 Education Action Zones (EAZs) 71, 81 Education Improvement Partnerships (EIPs) 169 Education Priority Areas (EPAs) 6, 11, 70–71, 74, 84 educational outcomes in 33 Edwards, A. 182 Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education Project (EPPSE 3-14) 113–114, 116

223

Education, disadvantage and place effectiveness of ABIs see impacts of ABIs 11+ exams, preparation support for 53, 57–58 elementary schools see primary education employment and education aspirations and 94, 119–120, 124, 143 placing onus on schools for employment levels 60–61, 100 tailoring of curriculum to local opportunities 62, 93, 94, 100–101, 143 work experience provision 93 English as an Additional Language (EAL) support 55, 60–61, 62 enterprise-oriented schools 41, 44 ethnic minority communities educational outcomes in 33 in Stockborough case study 49–51, 52–54, 56–58, 59 in Weston Academy case study 95 European immigrants, in Stockborough case study 50, 59 evaluation of ABIs see also accountability and monitoring of ABIs challenges 78–79, 148–153 Harlem Children’s Zone case study 159–163 realist evaluations 152–155 recommended principles for 157–158 requirement for 147 theory of change evaluations 155–157 Every child matters agenda 67, 68, 76–77 evolution of ABIs 11, 109, 128–129, 187–188 first generation: traditional ABIs 2–3, 11, 65–66, 71–72, 109 second generation: integration within wider policies 8, 67–69, 74–78, 87, 109 third generation: locally developed and owned 104–106, 109, 187– 188, 193–196 (see also new-style ABIs) exams, preparation support for 53, 57–58

Excellence in Cities (EiC) initiative 71–72, 81–82 experimental approaches to evaluation 151–152 extended services adult education 72, 73–74, 75, 94–95 affordability 102–103 coordination between schools, emergence of 89 Extended Schools and Services initiatives 7, 73 Full Service Extended Schools (FSES) 73, 75–76, 81, 83, 135 in Heybury case study 98, 101–103 village colleges 73–76 in Weston Academy case study 92–93, 94–95

F federal government see central government Foot, J. 144, 168 Foundation Stage (Early Years Foundation Stage – EYFS) see early years education fragmentation of school systems 38–42, 51–54, 61–62, 91, 171–174 Frazer, N. 37 free schools 171–172, 173 Full Service Extended Schools (FSES) 73, 75–76, 81, 83, 135 Fuller, C. 1819 funding of ABIs 177, 195–196

G Galster, G. 21 Garbarino, G. 137 GCSEs, attainment in disadvantaged areas 32, 33 Geddes, M. 18–19 gender and educational priorities 53 gentrification 23, 25–26, 102–103 geographical segregation 40, 47–51, 80, 97, 110–111 geography as conceptual lens 132– 133 Gifted and Talented initiative 72 girls, in Muslim communities 53 Glen, J. 40

224

Index globalisation, as generator of disadvantage 34 Gove, Michael 38, 172 governance and organisation of ABIs central government led (traditional) 2–3, 11, 65–66, 71–72, 109 central-local collaboration 178–180 centrally driven, locally implemented 167–170, 175–177 cooperative working and networks 165–170, 180–186, 195–199 evolution of see evolution of ABIs local involvement Harlem Children’s Zone case study 159–163, 193–194, 196 Heybury Local Authority case study 90, 97–108, 179 local residents, need for involvement of 125–127, 144–145, 185–186 locally developed and owned ABIs 104–106, 109, 187–188, 193–196 (see also new-style ABIs) public–private partnerships 101–103, 176–177 schools, role of 168–170, 184 suitability of 118–121 village colleges example 6–7, 73–74 Weston Housing Trust case study 90–97, 104–108, 174, 179, 193–194, 196–197 by professionals 125–127, 144–145 recommended principles for 165–166, 183–186 governance and organisation of schools see schools Grace, G.E. 138 grammar schools (selective high schools) entrance exams, preparation support for 53, 57–58 in Stockborough 51, 53 Green, R. 23

H ‘hard times’ for policy 18–19, 191–194 Harlem Children’s Zone 159–163, 193–194, 196 Hatcher, R. 36–37, 172–173 Heckman, J.J. 134

Heybury case study 90, 97–108, 179 hierarchical school systems 51–52, 59, 61–62 high schools see secondary education Highlands High School (Stockborough case study) 52–53, 58–59 history as conceptual lens 135 horizontal relationships 166, 175 House Of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, review of Local Enterprise Partnerships 175–177 house prices, impact of schools on 40 housing trusts, as leaders of ABIs 195, 196 see also Weston Academy Hubbard, P. 24

I immigrants in Stockborough case study 49–50, 52–54, 56–58 support for 55, 56–57, 60–61, 62 in Weston Academy case study 95 impacts of ABIs perceptions of as ineffective 78–83 causes design issues 83, 85–86 executional difficulties 95–96 focusing on short-term improvements 95, 96, 100, 148, 163 inappropriate expectations 15–16, 84–85, 110–112 misconception of places as containers for poor outcomes 21–22 misunderstanding of causes of disadvantage 22–23, 43, 84–87 potential negative consequences 23, 25–26, 102–103 resource limitations 84 positive outcomes of 4, 81–82, 87, 134–135, 192 independent schools, as partner organisations 95 inequalities see also disadvantage place and 31–38 structural inequalities and ABIs 8–9, 15–16, 84–87, 110–112, 127–128, 190–193

225

Education, disadvantage and place inspection bodies, impact on ABI objectives 95, 96, 100, 148, 163 institutional relationships 166, 175 international examples of ABIs 7 see also Harlem Children’s Zone

J joined-up working 167–170 Junemann, C. 181 junior high schools see secondary education

K Kelly, Ruth 7, 169 Kintrea, K. 34, 84

L Labour government see New Labour Lauder, H. 133 Learning Mentors initiative 72 Learning Support Units 72 Lee, C.D. 117 Levin, B. 41 Lewis, J. 67–68 Liberal Democrat–Conservative coalition government see Coalition government Lipman, Pauline 110–111 Local Area Agreements (LAAs) 59–60, 167 local authorities see also local involvement in ABIs removal of control over schools 17, 89, 168–169, 170, 193 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) 175–177, 179 local involvement in ABIs case studies Harlem Children’s Zone 159–163, 193–194, 196 Heybury Local Authority 90, 97–108, 179 village colleges 6–7, 73–74 Weston Housing Trust 90–97, 104–108, 193–194 central-local collaboration 178–180 centrally driven, locally implemented 167–170, 175–177 local residents, need for involvement of 125–127, 144–145, 185–186

locally developed and owned ABIs 104–106, 109, 187–188, 193–196 (see also new-style ABIs) public–private partnerships 101– 103, 176–177 schools, role of 168–170, 184 suitability of 118–121 Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) 167 localism see decentralisation Localism Act 2011: 16–17, 171 locally developed and owned ABIs 104–106, 109, 187–188, 193–196 see also new-style ABIs London Challenge initiative 72 Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs) 48 Lupton, R. on design of ABIs 26 on evolution of ABIs 66 on impact of place on learners 35, 37 on interaction of material and social aspects of place 21 on place and effects on individual learners 35, 37 on targeting and ABIs 14 on today’s policy ‘cold climate’ 18

M Mac an Ghaill, M. 37 Mackenzie, M. 155, 161–162 Manchester, academies in 39 marketisation of school system 38–40, 51–52, 91 see also schools: fragmentation of Massey, D. 122 Masten, A.S. 139 Mathews, P. 68 middle schools see secondary education minimal vs maximal conceptualisations of ABIs 28–29, 105, 187–188, 198–199 minority neighbourhoods educational outcomes in 33 in Stockborough case study 49–51, 52–54, 56–58, 59 in Weston Academy case study 95 ‘mixed economies’ of schools see schools: fragmentation of Mongon, D. 186

226

Index monitoring see accountability and monitoring of ABIs Moorside High School (Stockborough case study) 52, 58 Morris, Henry 6–7, 73–74 mosque women’s group (Stockborough case study) 53, 62 Muijs, D. 17–18 multiplier effects see disadvantage: interactions Muslim neighbourhoods, in Stockborough case study 49–50, 52–54, 56–58

N National Audit Office, and Whole Place Community Budgets 178 National Children’s Bureau (NCB), report on child poverty 190–191 national government see central government National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal 67–69, 74–75, 85, 87, 167 NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) 60 neighbourhood effects 12–13 neighbourhood-oriented schools 41, 44 neighbourhoods, definition of 21 see also place neoliberalism and ABIs 18–20, 191, 192 network governance 181–186 New Deal for Communities (NDC) 7, 66, 67, 81, 84 New Labour government and ABIs integration of within wider policies 8, 67–69, 74–78, 87 joined-up working in 167–170 legacy of 16, 112, 118, 191, 192 neoliberalism and 18–19 stand-alone ABIs 65–66, 70–72 new-style ABIs 3, 11 children’s communities 193–198 emergence of 104–106, 109, 187–188, 193–196 Harlem Children’s Zone 159–163, 193–194, 196 Heybury case study 90, 97–108, 179

minimal vs maximal conceptualisations 28–29, 105, 187–188, 198–199 recommendations accountability and monitoring principles 163–164, 179–180 amelioration of structural problems, as aim 8–9, 111–112, 127, 191–192 causes of disadvantage, assessment of 23, 43–44, 89, 117–118, 187–188 evaluation principles 157–158 governance and organisation principles 165–166, 183–186 risk-protection-resilience framework 112–115, 127 Weston Academy case study 90–97, 104–108, 174, 179, 193–194, 196–197 non-selective schools, manipulation of admissions processes 41–42 nursery schools see early years education

O objectives of ABIs recommended: amelioration of structural problems 8–9, 111–112, 127, 191–192 short-term, tendency to focus on 95, 96, 100, 148, 163 Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education – education inspectorate) focus on short-term improvements 95, 96, 100, 148, 163 report on education and disadvantage 8 organisation and governance of ABIs see governance and organisation of ABIs outcomes of ABIs see impacts of ABIs

P parents impact on outcomes 113–114 priorities of 52–53, 54, 56 support for 55, 56

227

Education, disadvantage and place Parkview primary school (Stockborough case study) 54, 56–57 Pawson, R. 79, 153–154 people vs place based disadvantages 12 place as basis for initiatives 12–15, 20–24, 69, 118–121 ecological understanding of 118–125, 128, 131–132 misconception of as container for poor outcomes 21–22 school systems and fragmentation of school systems 38–42, 51–54, 61–62, 91, 171–174 removal of control from local authorities 17, 89, 168–169, 170, 193 social nature of 12–13 spatial inequalities in education 31–38 Plowden Report 6, 70 polarisation see segregation Polesel, J. 37 police force, clashing priorities example 182 policy action teams (PATs) 17, 74–75, 167 policy science as conceptual lens 135–136 poverty and disadvantage causes of, need to focus on 23, 43–44, 89, 117–118, 187–188 economic and educational disadvantage, correlation between 6, 31–32, 111 exceptions 32–33, 37, 111, 112–114 interactions between factors 115–118 recent increase in 190–191 spatial inequalities in education 31–38 structural inequalities and ABIs 8–9, 15–16, 84–87, 110–112, 127–128, 190–193 power 26–28 pre-schools see early years education primary education Plowden Report 70 in Stockborough 54, 55–57

Pritchard, J. 110 private-public partnerships for ABIs 101–103, 176–177 private schools, as partner organisations 95 processes and place 22 professionals, role of in ABIs 125–127, 128, 144–145 progressive universalism 69 property prices, impact of schools on 40 protective factors against poor outcomes 113, 114 see also risk-protection-resilience framework proximal factors 137 psychology as conceptual lens 136–137 Public Service Agreements 167 public value management 181–182, 199 Pupil Premium initiative 14, 154, 193 purpose and power 26–28

Q Queens Road primary school (Stockborough case study) 53, 54, 55–56, 57

R Raffo, C. 139 Ranson, S. 166, 172, 183 realist evaluations 152–155 redistribution definition 26 as goal of ABIs 44, 125 recognition and 44–45, 63, 125–127, 197 Rees, G. 86 Reid, I. 148 relational power 27–28, 127 research studies see also case studies Chicago schools 33 deprivation and educational attainment 31–32, 33 property prices, impact of schools on 40 resilience of individuals 113–114, 116 risk and protective factors, impact of 115–116

228

Index value systems in disadvantaged neighbourhoods 34–35 wage inequality 119 residential sorting 40, 47–51, 80, 97, 110–111 resilience 112–118, 137 resistant aspiration 120, 124 responsibilisation of the poor 18–19 ‘responsibility as security’ versus ‘responsibility as excitement’ 35 Riddell, R. 36 risk factors for poor outcomes 113, 137 risk-protection-resilience framework 112–118 Roberts, N. 174–175 Robinson, F. 125–126 ‘roll-out neoliberalism’ 18–19 Rowley, H.E.K. 107 rural education 6–7, 73–74

S safety, parental concerns about 54 Sanchez-Jankowski, M. 34–35, 41 scale 24–26, 122–123 school sorting 38–42, 51–54, 58–59, 97 schools see also early years education; primary education; secondary education ABIs, role of in 168–170, 184 fragmentation of 38–42, 51–54, 61–62, 91, 171–174 impact on local areas 40–41, 73–74 local authorities, removal of control from 17, 89, 168–169, 170, 193 Schools Analysis and Research Division (DCSF) 31–32 Schools Plus initiative 8, 73, 74–75 secondary education academies 17, 91–92, 169, 171–174 admissions processes, manipulation of by schools 41–42, 51 attainment in disadvantaged areas 32, 33 fragmentation of 38–42, 51–54, 61–62, 171–174 Heybury case study 90, 97–108, 179 local authorities, removal of control from 17, 89, 168–169, 170, 193 selective schools 51, 53, 57–58

sixth form education, in case studies 57–58, 95 Stockborough case study 51–54, 57–59 Weston Academy case study 90–97, 104–108, 174, 179, 193–194, 196–197 segregation residential sorting 40, 47–51, 80, 97, 110–111 school sorting 38–42, 51–54, 58–59, 97 selective high schools entrance exams, preparation support for 53, 57–58 in Stockborough 51, 53 Shaw, K. 125–126 short-term focus and ABI effectiveness 95, 96, 100, 148, 163 Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) 80 Siraj-Blatchford, I. 114 sixth form education in Stockborough case study 57–58 in Weston Academy case study 95 Smith, G.R. 3–4, 84 Social Exclusion Unit 1, 3, 32 social housing providers, as leaders of ABIs 195, 196 see also Weston Academy socio-economic and educational disadvantage, correlation between 6, 31–32, 111 exceptions 32–33, 37, 111, 112–114 sociology as conceptual lens 133–134 spatial inequalities in education 31–38 spatial levels 24–25, 122–123 ‘special measures’, definition 55 speech language and communication skills (SLCS) 141–142 Spicker, P. 12 staff attitudes, and school improvements 58, 95, 99–100 stakeholders in ABIs 27–28 stand-alone (traditional) ABIs 2–3, 11, 65–66, 71–72, 109 standards see Ofsted Stockborough case study 47–64 efforts to tackle disadvantage 59–60 ‘mixed economy’ of schools and school sorting in 51–55, 59–60 primary schools in 54, 55–57

229

Education, disadvantage and place profile of town 47–51 recommendations 61–64 secondary schools in 51–54, 57–59 Stockborough Schools Equity Research Network 144 Stoker, G. 181–182 streaming of pupils 56–57 Street Crime Initiative 72 structural inequalities and ABIs 8–9, 15–16, 84–87, 110–112, 127–128, 190–193 studies see case studies; research studies Sure Start evaluation of 80–81, 82–83, 149 evolution of 66–67, 68, 69 as traditional ABI 11

T targeted funding see Pupil Premium targeting of ABIs 13–15, 122–124 place as basis for initiatives 12–15, 20–24, 69, 118–121 Taylor, C. 24, 28 teacher attitudes, and school improvements 58, 95, 99–100 Teese, R. 37 theories of change 93–94, 155–157 Third Way 68, 69 see also New Labour government Tilley, N. 79, 153–154 traditional (government-led) ABIs 2–3, 11, 65–66, 71–72, 109 Tunstall, R. 14 tutoring 53

V values and identity in disadvantaged places 35–37 values and vision of ABIs 181–183 Van Marissing, J.P. 166 vertical horizontal relationships 166, 175 village colleges 6–7, 73–74 vocational education, in Stockborough case study 57, 58 see also employment and education

W Wacquant, L. 34 Warren, M.R. 27–28 Webber, R. 33 Weston Academy case study 90–97, 104–108, 174, 179, 193–194, 196–197 Wheeler, B. 33 White, A. 23 Whole Place Community Budgets (WPCBs) 175, 178–180 Wilson government, and ABIs 65–66 workplace-preparedness see employment and education

Y Yates, M. 139

U unilateral power 27 United States Harlem Children’s Zone 159–163, 193–194, 196 inner-city schools in 25, 33 urban education initiatives City Challenge 8, 72, 82, 85–86 Excellence in Cities (EiC) 71–72, 81–82 Harlem Children’s Zone 159–163, 193–194, 196 Urban Programme (1960s) 65–66

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“An illuminating and original contribution that presents ways of intervening successfully to improve the opportunities and lives of the disadvantaged” Michael Bradford, University of Manchester

In England, as in countries across the world, shrinking public funding, growing localism, and increased school autonomy make tackling the link between education, disadvantage and place more important than ever. Challenging current thinking, this important book is the first to focus on the role of area-based initiatives in this struggle. It brings together a wide range of evidence to review the effectiveness of past initiatives, identify promising recent developments, and outline innovative ways forward for the future. It shows how local policymakers and practitioners can actively respond to the complexities of place and is aimed at all those actively seeking to tackle disadvantage, including policymakers, practitioners, academics and students, across education and the social sciences.

KIRSTIN KERR is a Lecturer in Education and researcher in the Centre for Equity in Education at The University of Manchester. ALAN DYSON is Professor of Education and Co-Director of the Centre for Equity in Education at The University of Manchester. CARLO RAFFO is Professor of Urban Education at The University of Manchester.

EDUCATION / SOCIAL STUDIES

ISBN 978-1-44731-120-1

www.policypress.co.uk policypress

EDUCATION, DISADVANTAGE AND PLACE • Kirstin Kerr Alan Dyson Carlo Raffo

“A path-breaking book that provides strategies and lessons learned for professionals and concerned citizens worldwide” Hal A. Lawson PhD, University at Albany, SUNY

EDUCATION, DISADVANTAGE AND PLACE Making the local matter

Kirstin Kerr Alan Dyson Carlo Raffo

9 781447 311201

@policypress

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