Shared Education in contested spaces: How collaborative networks improve communities and schools

The idea of the nation-state included an assumption that the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991) of the nation encompassed a culturally distinct community, with its own history and traditions. Nation-states are in fact, heterogeneous, due to the historical mismatch between borders and peoples, or economic or other forms of migration: the ‘imagined community’ of the nation-state typically reflects the ‘imagining’ of the dominant community. When the relationship between communities in these contexts are characterised by asymmetric power then the interfaces between the communities can create ‘contested spaces’. These ‘contested spaces’ have a number of functions: they demarcate communities and become places where conflict can break out as people defend ethnic boundaries, and they can also act as a means for maintaining separate identities, particularly for minority communities (Minority Rights Group 1994). Contested spaces need not be geographically coterminous, but can be represented by institutional boundaries which keep people apart by organising them into separate areas of service provision, such as cultural activities or schools. They can be malign, as sites of conflict, or benign, as lines of demarcation. However, even when they are benign they can act to create silos which, by maintaining intra-group integrity and intergroup separation, render it difficult to change or improve intergroup relations: Roche (2009: 36) defines this circumstance as ‘bounded contentment’, the risk of which is possibly most pronounced when the contested spaces are created by institutional boundaries. There are numerous ‘contested spaces’ in Northern Ireland, only some of which are contexts of direct conflict between the Protestant and Catholic communities (Leonard 2006; Morrissey and Gaffikin 2006; Graham 2006; Gaffikin et al. 2008; Duffy and Gallagher 2015). In most cases the ‘contested spaces’ evoke ‘bounded contentment’ as they do little to challenge the verities of religious division or provide society with effective means of dealing with diversity.

Northern Ireland is a society divided by religious, national and political identities. These divisions are reflected in education as there are parallel school systems for Protestant and Catholic communities, tempered by the presence of a small religiously integrated sector of schools. School uniforms act as visible markers of difference, making it relatively easy to identify a student’s religion simply by recognising the school uniform. Separate schools act as institutional barriers between young people and, as such, provide an example of ‘contested space’. At the outbreak of political violence at the end of the 1960s, many argued that separate denominational schools had reinforced the divisions in society. Others argued that the cause of divisions lay elsewhere, particularly in the unequal relationship between the Protestant majority and Catholic minority (Heskin 1980; Fraser 1974; Gallagher 2004). Despite extensive debate there was little consensus on this issue and educators put in place a range of interventions, charged as they were with preparing young people to live and work in a divided society.

After a quarter century of political violence, followed by almost two decades of relative peace, over the past 10 years a new education initiative has developed aimed at changing the ‘contested space’ between separate schools into ‘shared space’. ‘Shared Education’ sees schools as part of a network, rather than as a system of autonomous units, and seeks to encourage positive interdependence between schools by promoting systemic collaboration in which students and teachers move between schools to take and give classes. In this way, Shared Education seeks to establish a different pattern of relationships between schools, students, teachers and parents so that separate schools start to connect communities, rather than act as institutional barriers between them.

The paper has three main sections. First we examine previous educational initiatives aimed at promoting reconciliation and tolerance, before outlining the development of the Shared Education model. Second, we discuss the theoretical framework which underpins Shared Education and introduce a ‘sharing continuum’—a policy tool we developed to support the mainstreaming of Shared Education. And third, in order to provide an illustration of the work undertaken through Shared Education, we provide an in-depth case study of one Shared Education initiative in a largely segregated urban area.

Northern Ireland continues to operate a system of academic selection, with academically selective grammar schools and non-selective secondary schools for students aged 11–18 years. Most grammar schools enjoy a higher degree of financial and administrative autonomy compared to other schools and most are also de facto denominational in terms of their student and teacher composition. In spite of the divided nature of the school system, it should be noted that there are few, if any, religious tests operated by schools for admissions. Crossover in school attendance—Protestant students attending ‘Catholic’ schools, or Catholic students attending ‘Protestant’ schools—is possible, if uncommon.

As noted above, various interventions were tried in schools to promote reconciliation or equality, including common curriculum programs, student contact initiatives, the development of new integrated schools and equal treatment for the different school sectors (Arlow 2004; Gallagher 2010; Smith and Robinson 1992, 1996; Matchett 2004; Richardson 1990; Education and Training Inspectorate 2000; Richardson and Gallagher 2010; Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights 1987, 1990; Osborne et al. 1993, Gallagher et al. 1994). Gallagher (2004) argued that while each of these initiatives had had some impact, there was little evidence any had produced systemic change. Shared Education evolved as an attempt to devise a new initiative that might be more likely to drive systemic change (Gallagher 2016).

Shared Education essentially involves Protestant, Catholic and integrated schools working collaboratively, to promote sustained and regular contact between students and teachers. This collaboration is focused on high value, core curricular subjects. It will expand opportunity for students and promote school improvement, as well as build connections across the sectarian divide and promote social cohesion. It recognises the different contexts and circumstances of communities within Northern Ireland and so encourages locally tailored programs of between-school collaboration and places high value on the empowerment of teachers as co-creators of collaborative partnerships and practice.

In 2007 the Sharing Education Program (SEP) was established at the School of Education Queen’s University Belfast. An implementation team was set up to encourage and support schools across Northern Ireland to establish collaborative partnerships and the work developed over three phases. The first phase, between 2007 and 2010, involved twelve post primary school partnerships, comprising of 3500 students from 65 schools. The second phase, between 2010 and 2013, involved 12 new school partnerships, totalling 72 schools and approximately 5000 students engaged in shared learning. The third phase, between 2013 to the present involves the continuing support of existing partnerships from the second phase and other related partnerships. In this phase there were 16 partnerships which involved approximately 4000 students (Duffy and Gallagher 2014, 2015; Gallagher et al. 2010; FGS McClure Watters 2010; see also Donnelly and Gallagher 2008; Daniels et al. 2009; Gallagher and Carlisle 2009; Knox 2010; Borooah and Knox 2013, 2015; Hughes et al. 2012, 2013).

The SEP implementation team was also focused, from the start, on policy impact, and so developed an active strategy for engaging with the main political parties, briefing members of the NI Assembly Education Committee and disseminating evidence of good practice from the work of the Shared Education partnerships. This pro-active engagement process attracted broad political support for Shared Education, evidenced by its adoption in political manifestos leading up to the 2010 Westminster and 2011 Assembly elections, and its adoption in policy and legislation. During the 2011–2016 mandate of the NI Assembly, the SEP implementation team continued to work with political parties to assist in their understanding of Shared Education and provide information regarding the formulation of policy and legislation that would support Shared Education. The evolving significance of Shared Education as a key element in education policy was evidenced by a growing number of Assembly Questions on issues related to Shared Education, examination of the potential of Shared Education by the Assembly Education Committee, (NI Assembly 2014a) and a number of formal debates in the Assembly on the role of Shared Education, (NI Assembly 2010, 2014b). Further discussion on the development of policy on shared education is addressed in the final section of this paper.

The sharing continuum

Based on the experience of working with collaborative networks of schools in Northern Ireland between 2007 and 2013 the SEP Implementation team developed a conceptual model, or ‘sharing continuum’, (see Fig. 1) (Duffy et al. 2012; Duffy 2014) the aim of which was to provide:

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1. 1.

   A typology of the different types of collaborative arrangements which had developed through SEP in Northern Ireland, and an assessment of their relative effectiveness and sustainability.

    
2. 2.

   A policy tool which could be used to locate and evaluate the progress of emerging and new partnerships.

    

In addition to the experience of the first phase of SEP (Duffy and Gallagher 2014), the ‘sharing continuum’ also drew from existing research on collaborative effectiveness in educational contexts, most notably Katz et al. (2008), Katz and Earl (2010) and Woods et al. (2006). In this way it sought to provide a ‘road-map’ whereby school partnerships could develop more advanced and effective arrangements, and work towards a context in which shared learning and broader collaboration was normalised, and hence sustainable. The sharing continuum could be used to locate the position of a school partnership at a particular point in time, help provide guidance on its direction of travel towards enhanced collaboration, and contribute to the evaluation of change within and between schools. The Department of Education for Northern Ireland adopted the sharing continuum in this way (DENI 2014: 57–58) as part of a business case for a new Shared Education Signature Project (SESP) (discussed below), a mainstreamed program which currently supports hundreds of new Shared Education partnerships. The sharing continuum was adapted by the Department of Education into a self-assessment tool for schools applying for SESP: a requirement for this program was that schools were already involved in a collaborative relationship with at least one other school, so, in their applications, schools had to locate their current activity on the sharing continuum and identify targets for progress over time (DENI 2014: 18).

The sharing continuum was not conceived as a deterministic model, nor was it assumed that the development of collaboration would proceed in a simple linear fashion. As a typology and policy tool it reflected the fact that different school partnerships begin at different places, are constrained or enabled by different circumstances, and move at different speeds. Furthermore, it allows for the possibility of rapid transit across stages, where circumstances and ambition allow– in other words, the sharing continuum was intended to inform and guide, not determine.

The sharing continuum identifies six broad stages of collaboration between schools, each of which will be considered below:

Schools in isolation

Schools where there is little or no collaboration with other schools.

Organic and emergent collaboration

Limited contact between schools marking the beginning of collaboration. Organic partnerships come from the schools, whereas emergent partnership is motivated or enacted by an external agency.

Less sustainable and irregular collaboration

Infrequent but increasing contact between schools: some shared learning may occur between students, but is likely to be programmatic, with delineated periods of contact such as joint school trips or cross-school visits. This level of collaboration is limited in terms of sustainability.

Sustained and regular collaboration

Increasingly regular and well-co-ordinated collaboration, involving staff and students, over an extended period of time; shared learning between students is regular, timetabled and embedded within the curriculum; schools begin to form partnership infrastructure and professional relationships strengthen.

Culture of collegiality

Schools have been involved in sustained collaborative activities and are developing strong institutional relationships characterised by high status curricular shared learning between students and increased collaborative activities between teachers and leaders. Management and co-ordination of collaboration is distributed across staff. Both professional and personal relationships emerge between educators. A strong partnership infrastructure is evident and the practice of collaboration begins to normalise. New knowledge and shared resources are created.

Symbiotic partnership

Schools develop a kind of organisational symbiosis in that collaboration has normalised: it is based on common need, involves significant shared learning, and is valued by staff and Governors. Professional and personal relationships are evident. Schools have reached a point where they pool resources in terms of expertise, finances, teachers, and facilities. While the schools remain distinct and maintain their separate identities, collaboration has becomes a vehicle to deliver education more effectively. The sharing continuum posits a logical relationship between collaborative effectiveness and the potential for impact, that is, the more effective the mechanisms of partnership, the more likely those schools will be able to deliver both social and educational outcomes. In the following section we present a Shared Education partnership case study, demonstrating the relationship between effective partnership and impact, but before doing so it is worth considering an issue which emerged as a consequence of the growing focus on sharing as a policy option.

Within Northern Ireland, discussion on the trajectory of school partnerships opened up a debate on their future status and whether they would, or should seek, to become integrated schools. This option exists because parents can vote to transform an existing Protestant or Catholic school into an integrated school, subject to final Ministerial approval. In addition to gaining a majority vote among parents, the school must attract at least 10 % from the minority community in its first intake and increase minority enrolment to at least 30 % of the total, over time. Some argued that shared education initiatives should only be supported if the collaborating schools set themselves on a path that would lead to them becoming integrated schools. The basis for this view was that religiously integrated schools provided the most effective basis for promoting social cohesion and that school collaboration made, at best, only a limited contribution. Gallagher and Duffy (2016) argued that this view was incorrect because it was based on the singular application of a principle of tolerance. If, however, this is set alongside a principle of recognition, they argued, then it becomes clear that no single structural model of schooling unambiguously guarantees either a malign or benign impact on intergroup relations. Furthermore, the focus on single schools takes away from the wider range of positive consequences of sharing, including the more effective use of resources, the contribution to school improvement, and its impact on communities. On this basis Gallagher and Duffy (2016) argued that schools engaged in collaboration should not be obliged to accept a prescribed future, but rather should make their own decisions, in their own time, on how far they want to take their collaboration. It seems likely that some will, in time, explore the option of an integrated school or schools, but it seems equally likely that some will find a modus vivendi of collaboration that maximises the wide range of benefits, while allowing them to maintain their distinctive identities and ethos.

The following section presents a 3 year case study of a Shared Education partnership which sought to transform contested space. Our data, largely qualitative, were collected between April 2011 and June 2014. We begin by introducing the schools, the remit of their partnership and the challenges they faced. We then outline the methodology of our study, and provide an analysis of the evidence on the social and educational impact of the partnership.

In each of the case studies the authors carried out ethnographic observations in schools, classrooms and other venues. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were held in each of the schools with school leaders, teachers, partnership co-ordinators, students and parents. Although there were no focus group or individual interviews with students in the primary schools, during observation exercises it was possible to capture and record informal or unstructured conversations between the researcher and students (Fontana and Frey 2005). In post-primary schools, students were interviewed in focus groups: the initial focus groups used within-school groups of students, but later involved students from two schools. For the most part, school observations took place in years one and two, while interviews and focus groups took place in years two and three.

In the next section we will examine the educational impact of Shared Education using three exemplars: first, we will consider students’ perspectives on shared learning; second, we will look at the impact of collaboration on teachers and leaders; and, third, we will consider a specific example which demonstrates a positive improvement outcome for two schools which was enabled as a consequence of the relationship they had developed through collaboration.

As is the case in many divided societies, schools in Northern Ireland have been expected, for decades to carry the burden of preparing young people to live and work in a divided society, and contribute to promoting reconciliation and over-coming division. For over 30 years this was pursued through short-term contact initiatives, the development of common curriculums and textbooks, the establishment of religiously integrated schools, and equal treatment for minority schools. The emerging peace process provided an opportunity for an evaluation of these initiatives, and the main conclusion was that their systemic impact had been limited. The new model of Shared Education outlined in this paper was developed to address many of the limitations of previous approaches by embedding collaboration at the heart of schools’ priorities, providing regular and sustained contact, and locating social cohesion goals alongside educational and economic priorities. This model encourages and supports schools to work together in collaborative networks as a way of bridging the institutional boundaries which have, in the past, divided schools, and turned what had been ‘contested space’ into shared and connected space within the education system. The case study partnership presented in this paper provides an example of the transformative potential of this approach: the schools have developed bridging mechanisms, and their connections are increasingly elaborate, innovative and robust. It is perhaps also important that connections address issues not only of importance in educational terms, but also that reflect community priorities.

When we consider this case study in the light of the sharing continuum, and the characteristics of effective collaboration as outlined by Katz et al. (2008) and others, the evidence shows that a culture of collegiality is developing between the schools. The partnership has an infrastructure which has both leader involvement and endorsement; shared learning between students is regular and sustained; teachers are planning together, co-teaching, creating new resources, and developing new practices; and the experience of shared learning and collaboration between staff appears to be normalising. While the main focus of the partnership involves the delivery of a social needs program, there is evidence of collaborative transfer to areas beyond the prescribed remit of the partnership, as in the example of school improvement where post primary schools have explored science, provision, special education needs and strategies to improve middle management.

The paper also considers evidence on the social impact of school collaboration. Sustained and regular contact between students and between educators has encouraged the development of multiple layers of relationships (Moolenaar et al. 2012), including professional and personal relationships. The design of the partnership has also strengthened relationships between schools and statutory/voluntary bodies within the community.

In little over a decade, the language and practice of Shared Education is now commonplace in Northern Ireland and is being mainstreamed in government policy and practice. The 2011–2015 Program for Government included formal commitments to Shared Education goals (NI Executive 2011) and established a Ministerial Advisory Group which recommended the further development of Shared Education (Connolly et al. 2013). The Shared Education Signature Project (SESP) is government funded and managed by the Education Authority to support shared learning and school collaboration between 2015 and 2019: at the time of writing over 120 partnerships have applied for support from SESP and it is envisaged that this number will more than triple within a few years. A further tranche of funding will be provided through the European Union Peace IV initiative, this time aimed at supporting schools that do not already have collaborative relationships. The Shared Campuses initiative has been agreed between the political parties in Northern Ireland to support capital developments in which separate schools will re-locate to a single campus, share core facilities and promote shared learning amongst their students.

There have also been legislative developments. The Education Act (Northern Ireland) (2014) placed a duty on the Education Authority to ‘encourage, facilitate and promote Shared Education’, while a similar responsibility has been allocated to the Department of Education through the Shared Education Bill (2016). The 2016 law also provides a legal definition of Shared Education.

The case study schools discussed above still collaborate. The two primary schools, and the three post primary schools, were successful in separate bids to SESP. Their students and teachers continue to learn together, and from each other. In addition, the case study schools have applied to the Shared Campus fund with the aim of establishing an information technology hub to work across all the schools in the city of Derry/Londonderry. Shared Education is becoming enshrined in policy and legislation and for these schools it is becoming part of what they ordinarily do. Shared Education is moving beyond the status of a project and continues to shape the future direction of education in Northern Ireland.

As Shared Education continues to roll out across Northern Ireland, the diversity of partnerships does raise its own challenges. The success of SEP to date has been based on a bottom-up approach which empowered teachers and encouraged innovation, which is largely why the different partnerships involved, across the three phases of SEP, have varied so much. This seems to be important, however, not least because the circumstances of, and opportunities for schools varies considerably. Now that the main shared education programs are funded, supported and managed by government and public bodies, there is always the risk that its creative and innovative edge may become somewhat muted. If this leads to a disempowerment of teachers, a characteristic that is perhaps unfortunately not uncommon on top-down government initiatives, then an important source of energy behind shared education work may be weakened. That said, such effects may be an inevitable consequence of mainstreaming.

Shared education faces other challenges: we have noted above the debate which emerged on whether shared education initiatives between schools should be predicated on their commitment to work, explicitly, towards the development of religiously integrated schools. Some of the critics of shared education have suggested that it may be little more than a fig leaf, a gesture towards social cohesion which can be supported by the Churches and the political parties in Northern Ireland, but doesn’t actually require them to make any significant changes to the institutional mechanisms that have reflected or reinforced community division for decades, if not centuries (Hansson et al. 2013). The evidence considered here, and in the wider literature on shared education, would suggest this concern is probably misplaced.

As the experience of shared education expands, so too the evidence base on its effects, and our understanding of the processes of sharing, also expand. Hughes and Loader (2015: 1142), for example, have argued that the impact of Shared Education might be stymied by foregrounding educational priorities over reconciliation priorities and that the full potential of Shared Education can only be realised when schools engage directly and quickly with issues of group difference. As the case study above suggests, however, it is questionable whether schools would have engaged in the process of collaboration at all if it had adopted a unitary, or even primary, focus on reconciliation right from the start. The evidence of Hughes and Loader (2015) does, however, serve as a timely reminder that the long-term goal of promoting social cohesion should not be allowed to disappear. This issue arises in another way due to an emerging international interest in the shared education model. The current authors are engaged in two international projects where the model has been adopted and adapted: in Israel the model has been used to support collaborative engagement between Jewish and Arab schools within the context of the Shared Life initiative pursued by the Centre for Education Technology (Payes 2015), and here the primary focus is very much on social cohesion. The second project operates within the very different context of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) where relationships between traditional public and charter schools have been, at best, difficult. The authors are currently exploring the relationship between co-locations in which traditional public schools have been obliged to share facilities with charter schools. Both these contexts, the divided society of Israel, and the ‘shared’ co-locations of Los Angeles schools, provide different types of contested space, and both want to explore also whether that contested space can be turned to more positive affect.