Conference Agenda

Parent rights and duties in Iceland are defined in laws from 2008 on preschool, compulsory school, and secondary school, and in respective national curriculums. In these documents parents are recognised as main stakeholders in schools and given possibilities to have influence on school policy and practices in compulsory education of children and youth.

The aim of this paper is to explore parent visibility in new official documents on education policy in Iceland; Education Policy 2030 approved by the parliament in March 2021, and its First action plan 2021-2024 published by Ministry of Education and Children in September the same year. The new documents reflect changes in society and school development since 2008 as well as political emphasis and strategies the government wants to move forward.

The research questions posed here is: Are parents present in the new educational policy documents? How is parents’ role defined, as an important one or are parents marginalised?

Theoretical framework includes writings on home-school relations, parent empowerment and parent engagement. There is a confusion in use of the concepts and research has shown that different stakeholder groups understand them in different ways (Goodall and Montgomery, 2014). This confusion can also affect stakeholders’ opinions or interfere with the interpretation of their views. For example, there is a discrepancy in what parents, teachers and school leaders feel about parental engagement, according to Education for All in Iceland: External Audit of the Icelandic System for Inclusive Education (2017).

On the other hand, the paper refers to policy analysis. The OECD has evaluated these policy documents and describes it with positive terms, “Iceland’s Education Policy 2030 is an education strategy document that outlines aims to achieve a dynamic and flexible education system to drive economic and social change. Its vision is ‘to accomplish high-quality education through life’, underpinned by the values of resilience, courage, knowledge and happiness”. The report brings forth comments on how to strengthen the implementation with a clearer strategy and concludes that if that will be done “Iceland will be better positioned to transition from strategy to action, over the course of the next ten years, and accomplish its objectives” (OECD, 2021).

Within many OECD countries the delivery of rural education there are common aspects. Policy is often formulated at a national level without much consideration of local communities or the impact on particular rural areas.

As an EdD researcher I am currently interrogating the relationship between national education policy and how it is enacted in a rural place in Scotland.

The research question that is being explored is:

How is national education policy enacted in rural education and how does the rural place/context influence the policy being created?

During the Ignite Talk I will present the work taking place in the investigation on how national policy is developed in context and involves a study of a small rural school within a shared headship. The investigation is also exploring the views of rural education through the lens of semi structured interviews with national and local policy makers. During the investigation the relationships between the rural school, it’s immediate locality (place), wider locality and national will be explored.

The interaction between a rural school and place in the community is a complex one and Corbett (2015) states that rural schools are embedded in communities and potentially integrated within the community and often the heart of rural communities. Each rural school develops a unique place in the community and the “thisness” of a school (Thompson 2000) and the dimension of rural pedagogy displays the interaction between the journey, the place and impact on practices.

In my research the definition for the small rural schools is schools of under thirty pupils. Through analysis of semi structured interviews with policy makers, one of the emerging themes is context and place. The theme of context and place will be presented and invite discussion of the relevant qualatative data gathered from national poloicy makers, headteachers and the school community of a very small rural school in the west coast of Scotland. Pupils, staff, parents, and community members views on what is a rural school, why the school is important to the place and how the view of how the school provides equity and excellence have been collated. The thesis is auto ethnographic involving my own memories and practice as a rural education policy maker and the importance of place.

The relationship between human beings and their environment (place) is important in trying to understand education policy in the rural place. Working with participants it has been necessary for me as a researcher to understand their interpretation of the world (interpretive). Ethnography is concerned with how people make sense of their everyday world (Cohen et al 2007) and about exploring the shared culture of a group of people. It “is a method of inquiry that works from the actualities of people’s everyday lives and experiences to discover the social as it extends beyond experience” (Smith 2005:10) and takes a cultural lens to the study of people’s lives within their communities (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007; Fetterman 2010). The roots of ethnography are situated in studies of social and cultural events within small communities. Van Maanene (2011) refers to the getting to know people as “part spy, part voyeur, part fan, part member”.

As a researcher I am personally, emotionally, and politically involved in rural education and have personal entanglements which can be a strength for ethnographic methodology (Mills and Morton 2013) however it is important to reflect on this during my analysis of policy. Policy cannot be simply said to be understood and applied. It is important to understand the effect of how professional conversation and professional activity in context (place) themselves form policy (Adams 2011).

This study aims to discuss the implications that the New Public Management agenda in education have had in the construction of the school/community relationship in rural areas. Studies about education in rural contexts have pointed to the centrality of the school/community relationship to understanding the role of education in this contexts (Boix, 2014; Corbett, 2020; Hargreaves et al. 2009), especially in the light of a characterization of these contexts as deficient in the dominant discourse (Hargreaves, 2017; Morales-Romo, 2017). By rethinking the school-community relationship from a territorial perspective it is possible to question the rhetoric of deficiency of rural schools, in particular through research of practices that strengthen the bond of schools with their territories from the perspective of the participants’ agency. From a perspective of potential, the school-community can be fundamental factor for the strengthening of education inclusion, understood as a means to access a more equitable education oriented towards social justice (Ainscow, 2020; Burns and Flynn, 2020).

The New Public Management (NPM) paradigm in education has been attractive for educational systems all over the world because of its promise to face bureaucracy by taking management ideas from the private sector into the public sector, seeking to improve efficiency (Verger & Curran, 2014). Among the consequences of this, it is possible to see changes in financing and management of schools, from centralized to local governments, which leaves these local governments to fend for themselves in the face of changing cultures and economies; however, curriculum remains being under centralized control under the premise of efficiency (Santarrone & Vittor, 2004). In the context of NPM, rural education becomes a special type of challenge for local governments: the small size of these schools means greater associated costs, rural areas may not have access to all necessary resources, and standardized testing may yield lower scores for these students because of their school size. Because of these factors, from the NPM perspective rural schools tend to be thought as deficient (Abarzua Silva, Guerrero Morales & Ramos Roa, unpublished manuscript).

Community participation in schools is generally considered to be fundamental for the improvement of educational processes in students, especially where families are concerned (Garcia et al., 2016; Garreta Bochaca & Llevot Calvet, 2007). This is also the case in rural contexts (Sanahuja Ribes et al., 2019; Nunez et al., 2021). However, the study of community participation in schools remains largely unexplored, becoming an emergent research opportunity. It is recognized that rural schools have a strong relationship with their communities (Boix, 2014), fulfilling a role of local development (Hargreaves et al., 2019), and local cohesion of the community (Nunez et al., 2014). Given this tight relationship, rural schools have different inclusion/exclusion processes than those reported in urban areas (Ortiz, 2016), which have been affected by the changes brought by globalization to rurality. These are the changes that the NPM fails to take into consideration in the management of rural schools.

The research question that motivated this study is: what are the social representations regarding the relationship between rural schools, their educational community and their territory held by relevant stakeholders in rural schools? The research design, conceived as an ethnography, intends to understand these representations from the perspective of the rural communities. We intend to contribute to the literature on rural schools, rethinking the notion of rurality from the perspectives of local actors and building theory from their subjectivities. This evidence that might help inform adequate policies oriented specifically for the realities of rural schools o strengthen community participation and educational inclusion in these contexts, attempting to avoid the deficient view established by NPM.

This paper explores the impact of the Schools (Consultation) (Scotland) Act (2010) on the number of schools closures and the geographic location of small schools in Scotland over the past decade. Using Scottish state schools datasets, we compare and contrast the number of schools and their location in 2013 and 2022. This allows us to highlight that (1) closure has affected both primary and secondary schools and (2) ‘small’ has become a rural feature by 2022.

School closures have always been controversial and the closure process has been widely documented in the world, in particularly in Europe. In a rurality context, small schools are often closed because of their cost due to their low number of pupils or their difficulty to attract and retain staff (Fargas-Malet & Bagley, 2021; Gristy et al., 2020; Kvalsund & Hargreaves, 2009). Some of the consequences of these closures on pupils and communities are well known. For instance, the longer journey to schools they imply impacts pupils’ wellbeing, the sustainability of a community can be jeopardised (Cannella, 2020; Beach et al., 2018; Kvalsund, 2009). In more recent years, this deficit perspective has been challenged and small schools have their own successful features, often associated to their size. Among other things, the literature has highlighted that they can facilitate effective learning opportunities for pupils, the development of innovative delivery by teachers and the inclusion of original curriculum contents (Raggl, 2020; Schafft, 2016; Gristy et al., 2020).

In Scotland, the increasing number of school closures at the turn of 2010s and how these closures were decided raised deep concerns among the public and rural communities (Redford, 2013). Safeguarding rural schools and communities became a key education policy in Scotland by the end of 2000s.

Thus, between 1995 and 2013, 467 schools closed or merged in Scotland with the largest number of closures taking place in 2007, 2010 and 2011. The Act (2010) which details the consultation process which must be followed when a local authority proposes to close a school came into force and was amended in 2012 after consultations (Kidner, 2013). According to latest data, more than 200 schools were closed between 2013 and 2022.

This paper aims to provide a better understanding (1) of the regulatory system implemented to safeguard schools and (2) on the effect of the Act on the closure on rural schools in Scotland over a ten-year period. We will discuss the lessons that can be learnt by Scottish communities and communities elsewhere in Europe from this system.