‘Becoming co-operative’ – challenges and insights: repositioning school engagement as a collective endeavour

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a school’s decision to become co-operative affects its engagement relationships with students and parents. The findings stem from a wider study exploring approaches to engagement in a recently converted co-operative academy, a large secondary school in a northern English city. The article surfaces the possibilities and tensions that occur as the school seeks to reposition itself in the English education marketplace, with a co-operative model that explicitly sets out to promote mutualisation, not privatisation; ‘we’ rather than ‘me’. The process of becoming co-operative is examined by exploring the underlying purposes of the school’s engagement with students and parents and the relationships that emerge as a result. The study surfaces the issues faced as a co-operative school seeks to enact thicker, ‘collective forms’ of democratic engagement against a backdrop of English education policy based on individualistic notions of democracy as freedom of choice. The findings point to the need for a different policy understanding of school engagement, an understanding that suggests engagement is about the process of developing more equitable, collaborative relationships with stakeholders and rests on the repositioning of students, parents and community members – from ‘choosers’ and ‘consumers’ to a collective public in education.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-operative schools
• student engagement
• parent engagement
• democracy
• governance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Deborah Ralls is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Manchester with particular interests in social justice issues in education and the potential to develop more equitable relationships between schools and their students, parents and community members. She is currently at the start of a three-year international research project, Redefining Education for a Social Solidarity Urban Economy: Becoming Relational, which explores the way in which four different cities (Barcelona, Berlin, New York and Rio de Janeiro) engage with their locality through various relational mechanisms and infrastructures, such as governance, curriculum and pedagogy. The research focuses on how education interventions could build stronger relationships with urban communities and help to lay the foundations for more inclusive social solidarity economies. She has published articles in the Journal of Co-operative Studies (2016) and Forum for Promoting 3–19 Comprehensive Education (2016). Prior to beginning her research career, Deborah worked as a teacher and teacher educator in both further and higher education, developing and teaching literacy, ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) and postgraduate certificate in education programmes as well as managing an alternative education provision for 13–19-year-olds.