Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone (2000), explored how individuals in the
United States had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends,
neighbours, and each other. He associated this with a loss of social capital - what
connects us as communities.
This Counterblast argues that schools have a crucial role in promoting community
cohesion, but they are 'bowling alone', with other policies militating against
cohesive communities; and that the guidance on community cohesion deals with
too narrow a range of factors. The second half provides pointers on how schools
can best fulfil the duty.
From September 2007, all maintained schools in England have a duty to promote
community cohesion, with this being inspected from September 2008. The Local
Government Association state that 'community cohesion lies at the heart of what
makes a safe and strong community..... (and) building cohesive communities brings
huge benefits by creating a society in which people from different ethnic, cultural
and religious backgrounds can live and work together in an atmosphere of mutual
respect and understanding.'
This duty reflects a wider policy agenda in which local government is expected to
promote community cohesion through services such as health, housing and
policing. This followed the Cantle and Ouseley reports after the 2001
disturbances notably in Oldham and Bradford which were seen to be the result of
a lack of integration between those of different cultures. The subsequent debate
has been overshadowed by the fall out from 9/11 and concern about local
communities becoming more ethnically mixed.
The term 'community' is more complex than it seems, with DCSF guidance
suggesting that schools consider four dimensions:
the school community;
the community within which the school is located:
the UK community;
the global community.
Schools both are communities, and can help to define communities, without
necessarily reflecting their locality. So promoting community cohesion relates not
only to the school community, but to the locality and to national and global
communities.
Putnam distinguishes two main components of social capital: bonding and bridging. Bonding refers to social networks within homogeneous
groups and bridging those between groups.
Without bridging capital, 'bonding' groups tend to become inward-looking, and
defensive, especially when they perceive themselves as disenfranchised. Bridging
capital, through organisations such as choirs and sports clubs, is essential to
community cohesion, providing benefits for both individuals and society. So the
main task is not just to build bonding capital but, more importantly, to create
opportunities for bridging between groups.
What splits and binds communities?
The LGA encourages schools to:
use the curriculum to promote shared values;
ensure that those from different backgrounds have similar life opportunities;
provide a base for wider community participation and opportunities for people
to mix, so promoting cross-cultural contact, through mixed intakes, school
twinning and community-wide extracurricular activities.
Such aims may seem worthy and uncontestable. However, the emphasis on
shared values is questionable, the policy impact on life opportunities very mixed
and cross-cultural contact too narrowly conceived, but two crucial aspects - class
and age - are hardly mentioned.
Shared values?
The appeal to shared values is based on two misconceptions. The first is that
universal values apply at anything other than a general level. The search for
universal values reflects a conception of liberal democracy which shies away from
difference. However, in a pluralist society, elements of difference are entirely
legitimate.
One can make a distinction between primary and secondary values. The former
are those essential to human thriving, the latter those which reflect the diversity of
human aspiration and preference.
Primary values set the necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for all good
lives; and as such may be seen as universal. Examples might include a respect for
human rights or for the rule of law. However, secondary values vary according to
culture or individual preference. Think for example of the very different value which
may be legitimately placed on modesty, thrift or ambition. While complete
agreement on primary values and how they operate in practice is unlikely, this
distinction enables a respectful debate on areas of agreement and of difference.
The second misconception is that value-statements reflect deep belief. The term
‘values’ can be used to discover, and create, consensus. However, such
consensus is often artificial or superficial, hiding rather than accepting difference.
The test of a person's or group's values is always practical, rather than theoretical.
Actions indicate priorities more than words. Trust grows over time through
exchanges where the expectations held of others are validated in action. Shared
action and endeavour is a stronger bonding and bridging agent than an appeal to
shared values.
Similar life opportunities?
The argument based on similar life opportunities is worthy, but rings somewhat
hollow where disproportionate numbers of young people from schools serving
privileged areas progress to higher education and to more prestigious and
better-paid employment.
Large, much needed sums of money have been invested in disadvantaged
areas - for instance through Sure Start and the Academies programme. However
welcome, this is undermined by policy trends enabling those already educationally
advantaged to give their children enhanced life opportunities. To focus only on
community cohesion within schools overlooks the structural factors militating
against disadvantaged students gaining access to the institutions where life
opportunities can best be enhanced.
Cross-cultural contact?
We are usually more comfortable living alongside those who share our cultural
beliefs and aspirations. Those without power usually have least choice in this; and
often the least opportunity to build bridges across cultures. Bonding capital helps
groups cohere internally; but bridging capital provides the glue across cultural
divides. So, the argument for cross-cultural contact is stronger, as it emphasises
the need to know about, and accept, those not sharing one's secondary values.
Fear and anxiety are the great inhibitors of dialogue. Isolation and defensiveness,
often based on fear of the unknown, the Other, and difference tend to stop groups
looking outwards. The Parekh report distinguishes between closed and open
views of the Other, with the latter helping to break down stereotypes.
Community cohesion requires exploration, and acceptance, of similarity and
difference simultaneously, as two sides of the same coin, to promote open and
flexible views of those who are different.
Why the emphasis on ethnicity and faith?
Oldham and Bradford are cities with a wide range of cultural and socio-economic
diversity. Both Ouseley and Cantle argued that schools which had become
ethnically homogeneous were part of the problem. In both cities, the monocultural,
self-segregating schools were those with a small number of Muslim students.
However, the media coverage highlighted that most of the protagonists in the
disturbances as young men of Asian heritage, whether British-born or not, mostly
Muslims and feeling disenfranchised. The media focus on ethnicity and, in some
respects, faith is still visible in the guidance on community cohesion.
Ethnicity is seen as less problematic when not evident by visible markers such as
skin-colour or hair style. The same is true of religious faith. Almost all schools have
students affiliated to a range of faith communities and to none. However, those who
are most assertive are likely to be seen as 'difficult', whether militant atheists,
Muslims keen to demonstrate their faith, or Christians who proselytise
enthusiastically.
Schools tend to see affiliation to a faith community, or to none, as a matter of
personal choice and in the private domain. Yet religion is a central part of many
people's identity and informs how they understand the world.
The lack of recognition for this, outside faith schools, and curricular areas such as
R.E., especially in secondary schools, encourages a sense of exclusion. When
linked to schools trying to ban religious symbols, it may result in those who assert
their religious identity publicly being blamed for undermining community cohesion.
When allied to a more overt discourse of Islamophobia, this has led some young
Muslims to express their identity as Muslims more assertively. Community
cohesion must involve accepting difference, rather than expecting minorities, of
whatever type, to conform.
The evidence nationally indicates that poverty is correlated much more strongly
with low attainment than are gender and ethnicity. But school improvement
initiatives emphasise these two far more. And social class is largely absent in the
debate about community cohesion, although it affects all school communities and
localities.
This is, in part, because of a determination that poverty should not be an excuse
for low aspiration or attainment. In part, it is because efforts to regenerate
disadvantaged communities and reducing child poverty and overcoming its
educational effects have proved so difficult. However, it is also because those most
able to exercise choice can perpetuate the cycle of advantage and disadvantage,
by getting their children into high-attaining schools. It is no co-incidence that the
vast majority of 'National Challenge' schools - secondary schools under threat
because of low exam results - serve disadvantaged communities.
Why not class and age?
No less absent is the reference to the culture associated with age. Since school
communities are largely defined by age, it may seem strange to highlight this. Yet,
age is a major factor in defining different tastes in lifestyle, culture and interests,
such as music or fashion, whether for old people or adolescents. Anti-social
behaviour is strongly linked with particular age-groups.
Age is one factor which can split all communities. Bonding capital within age groups
is abundant; but in most communities there are few opportunities for bridging
between age groups, except where voluntary organisations are active. Community
cohesion needs those of different ages to engage with, and understand, each
other.
At one level, this may involve carol-singing for older local people; or hearing what
life was like when they were young. And the tradition of schools being bases for
community education is one to be sustained and extended.
However, community cohesion requires adults and young people to work together
much more. So, schools may be one of the few places able to encourage
inter-generational contact; but this will require innovative and radical thinking.
Maybe, we need adults working alongside young people as learners as well as
teachers; adolescents mentoring or teaching younger children; and children
teaching skills such as those related to ICT to adults.
Who, after all, starting from scratch, would assume that a class formed entirely of
fourteen-year olds is the best group in which to learn or to teach?
The consequences of emphasising ethnicity and faith,
rather than class and age
All schools have a duty to promote community cohesion. However, the focus on
ethnicity and faith (at least where this is obvious), and the silence on class and age,
can easily make this seem a challenge primarily for urban, multi-ethnic localities.
This has the potential to present diversity of faith and culture as a problem, which
is 'out there', theirs not ours. Moreover, the implicit assumption is that community
cohesion entails assimilation. This tends to emphasise the desirability of similarity
with difference seen as a problem rather than something to be celebrated.
This emphasis encourages schools to address the internal, bonding aspects of
community cohesion and the more superficial aspects of bridging; rather than
question fundamental assumptions. But policies which overlook class tend, by
encouraging individual choice, to split local communities; and, ultimately, ensure
that structures continue to recycle patterns of life opportunity. Those which ignore
age perpetuate a them-and-us attitude which inhibits the chance to bridge the
generational divide.
How do other policies affect community cohesion?
The assumption that community cohesion can be achieved within schools is, to
some extent, true. However, this section explores how policy external to schools,
whether at Government or local authority level, affects their ability to do so. This is
not to adopt a party political stance, or explore the detail of specific policies, but to
consider the general thrust of policy trends, and conflicts and fault-lines between
policy aspirations.
We hear much about 'joined-up thinking'. Yet, there is an inevitable tension
between, and sometimes within, policies. For instance, the focus in the 'standards
agenda' on attainment scores may conflict with including all young people or with
offering the support implied in Every Child Matters.
One underlying theme of policy across many areas of government - such as health
and housing as well as education - is that of choice. A second is that providers
should be more accountable to service-users. Questioning these may seem like
coming out in favour of sin. I am against neither choice nor accountability.
However, their consequences, especially in the current policy context, are far from
neutral. Choice is more available to some people than others, whether because of
factors such as money or transport or greater awareness of choice. Those least
able to exercise choice tend to be least mobile geographically and socially.
Accountability based on crude attainment scores leads to competition which makes
success even harder for the most disadvantaged schools.
Admissions policies
The LGA recognises admission policies as crucial in achieving the mixed intake
which helps community cohesion. This is especially difficult in urban areas.
Middle-class parents often move to ensure that their children attend a particular
school. Where those who have choice do not want the local school, they are far
more able to find another.
All very well for those with choice, but the result is too often schools with too
narrow a range of background, aspiration and attainment. Linking choice to
accountability based on simple attainment measures at the individual school level
results in undue competition between individual schools. This tends towards
cultural and social homogeneity, or de facto self-segregation.
Schools have an in-built incentive to attract the highest attaining pupils, and
parents to get their children into schools outside their locality to improve their
children's life chances. Macdonald's recent suggestion that groups of schools,
rather than individual schools, to be held accountable, especially in urban areas,
would help reduce the competition for children most likely to attain good results; or
the exclusion of those least likely to damage the school's league table position.
Grammar and faith schools
One rationale for grammar schools is that they improve the life chances of children
from disadvantaged backgrounds by taking those selected into a culture of high
attainment and aspiration. Yet, middle-class families are already heavily
over-represented and - not least following the credit crunch - queuing up to gain
admission.
Such trends are often, in practice, exacerbated by the existence of faith schools,
especially in urban areas, but this issue is less clear-cut. This not just one of
whether the state should fund specific faith groups, or none at all. It is overlaid with
more complex issues where faith schools come to be seen as enclaves of the
middle class. Where they are seen to be 'better', in academic rather than religious
terms, parents who can do so are likely to apply, and even to adopt a new religious
affiliation if need be.
Roman Catholic and Anglican schools have a long history of educating children
from disadvantaged backgrounds; and of doing so very successfully. Catholic
schools not only met the religious needs of Irish immigrants in the nineteenth
century; but protected them from the discrimination and culture of low aspirations
so destructive of community cohesion.
There are strong arguments and views both for and against faith schools, as
suggested by surveys of parents but the current dominance of these Churches in
receiving public funding is inequitable. This fuels the demand for schools based on
separation by religion, which provides strong bonding, but very little bridging,
capital.
Cantle recommended that all faith schools should have to admit at least 25% of
pupils from outside the sponsoring faith community. Implementing this would have
made socially and culturally mixed intakes more likely. But it met with fierce
opposition from the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. Parents
have a right for their children to be educated in accordance with their faith. But faith
schools,if publicly funded,need to be open to those outside any one faith
community.
The challenge for schools
Community cohesion, at a local level, is easiest where school communities reflect
the social and cultural range within their own locality. Most primary schools and
many secondary schools in towns and rural areas do but, especially in urban areas,
secondary schools serve communities very different from the make-up of the
locality. Policies based on choice and competition exacerbate this.
These policy tensions mean that the most intractable difficulties facing schools are
structural. But how can schools promote community cohesion, especially across,
rather than within, cultures?
The Community Cohesion Education Standards for Schools set out four strategic
aims:
close the attainment and achievement gap;
develop common values of citizenship based on dialogue, mutual
respect and acceptance of diversity;
contribute to building good community relations and challenge all
types of discrimination and inequality; and
remove the barriers to access, participation, progression,
attainment and achievement.'
The resultant trend towards schools becoming more homogeneous, especially in
terms of class, encourages an inward-looking mentality. However, the needs of
localities, and the national and global dimensions of community cohesion, require
opportunities for bridging to those who are different.
So what can schools do?
This section outlines some principles for schools in promoting community cohesion.
Ten more specific recommendations are given after the conclusion. These are
based on a view that there are lessons to be learned from primary schools. In part,
this relates to external factors, with their size resulting in a closer link with the
locality. However, more important is the approach to sameness and difference.
A first principle is that every school should be prepared to address explicitly,
and to celebrate, not just accept, both sameness and diversity. This may
involve considering primary and secondary values. Otherwise, this tends to
disenfranchise those who are different, and least powerful. Putting the onus on
individuals emphasises their difference, which is especially hard in a culture where
identity is so closely linked to belonging.
So questions of faith need to be raised explicitly, not just in RE or collective
worship, but throughout the curriculum. This helps show that religion has been, and
continues to be, especially in other countries, an essential part of how the world is
understood. While this may be harder in terms of social class, national and global
issues often involve questions of power differentials, social justice and
interdependence.
Recognising and respecting sameness and difference requires more consideration
of complex, often moral, issues which require continual debate, rather than definite
answers. Yet, this is in tension with the demands of an agenda which values
conformity and right answers.
A second principle is to try and promote contact and shared endeavour across
cultural divides. This is more easily achieved within a school community where
different cultures, in the broadest sense, co-exist. This does not just imply learning
about the customs of other religious groups, locally, through visits to different
places of worship; or, nationally, through study of other countries and faiths. It
involves understanding other people's mind sets and abilities, whether by linking up
with a school in a different area, or country, or courses where students from
independent and state schools work together, or by mixed groups within the school.
There may be structural and practical difficulties for an apprentice plumber to work
with those in private schools, or for Oxbridge candidates to work in the local FE
college. But if we are serious about community cohesion such contact needs to
happen more often, and not just superficially.
A third principle is that to provide opportunities for co-operation as well as
competition. As Williams writes 'any one who has ever been involved in the
intensive work, of say, drama in a school will know something of how excellence is
guaranteed by the sense of mutual accountability that characterises such work,
rather than by any appeal to instincts of rivalry.' He cites school plays, but this is
true of any collaborative activity like an orchestra or a sports team.
The personalised learning agenda is dangerous if this is interpreted to mean
individualised. So, young people need to work in groups which cross the
boundaries of familiarity, whether in encouraging young children to work outside
their friendship groups, or adolescents to work, at least part of the time, in mixed
ability groupings. Or even in multi-age groups. This is, after all, what happens in the
workplace.
A fourth principle is to listen out for those with the most silent voices. While
schools need to draw on people and ideas available locally, governing bodies and
parents' association only rarely reflect the whole school community, let alone
locality. And in setting up extended schools, different groups will usually want
different things. This entails listening carefully to, and encouraging, those least able
to make their voices heard, whether because of cultural or linguistic reticence. It
may involve making provision, like halal meals or a homework club, where there
may be little or no community or parental pressure; or, more problematically,
resisting such pressure where other needs are greatest.
Community cohesion involves decision-makers advocating when necessary for
those with least voice and least power.
Conclusion
Schools have a crucial role in promoting community cohesion but policy trends
make this especially difficult. It seems as if many schools, especially in
disadvantaged communities, are left 'bowling alone.' By separating many schools
from their localities, the emphasis on choice and competition based on crude
accountability measures tends towards schools becoming focussed on their
own needs; and far less on those of a wider community.
Combined with a narrow focus on ethnicity and faith, this enables those in
comfortable, apparently cohesive school communities to see the key challenges as
'out there' and to ignore the greater ones of bridging across different groups. When
class and age are recognised as faultlines in all communities, this becomes an
issue for all schools, with young people helped to recognise the reality of sameness
and difference, at local, national and global levels.
Most schools see the duty to promote community cohesion as referring primarily to
their own community. Schools need to address diversity of ethnicity, faith and class,
nationally and internationally, even where these are not obviously important in their
own school community. Indeed, the more this is so, the more important it is to help
young people to understand, and reflect on, what is unfamiliar.
This needs to be at both an abstract level, through discussion, and a practical one,
through shared endeavour. The bonding aspects of community cohesion are
important, but even more so is to find ways of bridging across cultures.
This is why the duty to promote community cohesion requires all schools, and
policy-makers, to look at solutions which challenge some of our most basic
assumptions.
Ten recommendations for schools
Examine the admissions policy to see whether children in the immediate locality
are disadvantaged and whether there is a good reason for this.
Look to twin with schools with a different ethnic mix - but with a view to specific
projects which focus on joint work rather than ethnicity and culture.
Discuss and exemplify both sameness and difference throughout school life.
Be prepared explicitly to present religious faith as central to many people's
identity and motivation for action and as something which it is normal to
practice, publicly or privately, or not.
Encourage children to consider how power affects relationships and how people
interact, locally, nationally and globally.
Provide, and look out for, opportunities for learning in groups of different ages,
including adults and much younger or older children.
Do a lot of work in mixed groups, drawing on different types of ability and
experience.
Find ways of encouraging local people into the school and children to go out into
the locality, especially places where they might not otherwise visit.
Audit the curriculum to look for hidden discrimination and opportunities for the
contributions of those of different backgrounds to be celebrated and encouraged.
Listen most carefully for the voice of individuals and groups who are most silent.
Dr Tony Eaude was headteacher of a multi-cultural Church-Aided first
school from 1989-1998 before completing a doctorate.
Details of his current work as an independent research consultant can be seen
on www.edperspectives.org.uk. Among his areas of interest and expertise are
action-research, minority ethnic achievement and young children's learning,
especially their spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. He has
published widely for academic and teacher audiences, and is a NET Leading
Thinker. He can be contacted on
