Conference Agenda

Schools in England have faced significant challenges in the 2020s, caused by the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and an ongoing cost-of-living crisis due to inflation and rising food and fuel prices, which has increased child poverty significantly (CPAG, 2024). These challenges followed a decade of austerity policy with reduced spending on welfare and the reduction of state services (Berman & Hovland, 2024; O'Hara, 2015), alongside a period of intense policy change in primary education (Bradbury, 2018) and a teacher retention and recruitment crisis (Perryman & Calvert, 2020). This combination of issues can be described as a ‘polycrisis’, that is a situation where multiple crises exist at once and interact with one another. This paper uses England as an case study to think about how education systems and policy making should operate during times of multiple intersecting crises.

The presentation explores how, from 2020 onwards, rising social need in combination with a retreating welfare state in England have left schools struggling to cope with additional responsibilities including providing food and clothing for families in poverty (Lucas et al., 2023). Using data from three research projects conducted from 2020 onwards (explained below), we consider how schools as locally embedded community institutions are best placed to understand families’ needs in a time of crisis. By contrast, official policy has no ready means to listen to or learn from the views of those on the ground. Without such knowledge, policy responses to crises are built on shaky foundations. The current policy architecture in turn restricts the research questions that can be asked about education to those that policymakers think matters. We challenge this presumption and argue that instead, governments must recognise and value the ways schools engage with their communities, and fund research that engages meaningfully with the reality of the multiple crises that are affecting the education sector, starting from the bottom up.

The presentation will set out how we understand the polycrisis in education in England, and the evidence for this description, before explaining how the literature on previous crises can help us to understand the current situation. This choice of literature builds on our previous work, conducted during the Covid crisis, where we emphasised the need to learn from the literature on sudden school closures due to natural disasters, rather than rely on ideas about ‘lost learning’ over the summer holidays (Harmey & Moss, 2021; Moss et al., 2020). We then present our data from the three projects.

We conceptualise the polycrisis in England as a multilayered, multifaceted assemblage of different crises, which interact with each other, often reinforcing one another. An alternative term is ‘permacrisis’, which emphasizes the continuous nature of these crises; given the climate crisis in particular, this term could be seen as more accurate. However, we use the term polycrisis here to examine the specifics of the crises affecting schools in England at a particular time, that is the early 2020s, rather than as a state of permanent crisis. There is also a distinction between polycrisis as felt by the whole sector, and one-off crises which schools may experience, such as the death of a student or teacher, unwarranted media attention, or a school fire. The polycrisis in education continues but can be regarded as forming a specific set of conditions for schools which, we argue, challenge the status quo within policy making.

Schools, such as ours, located on the West coast of Canada, exist in the vortex of interrelated crises, including (but not limited to) the impact of settler colonization, the environmental degradation of these lands, and social inequities. In our province, it is painfully apparent that we are no longer living within the earth’s carrying capacity. Increasingly we are experiencing the effect of global warming, including catastrophic flooding, fires, and heat domes. All this is occurring on Indigenous lands that, for the most part, were never surrendered. The horrors of colonial violence, including Indian Residential Schools, only recently became tangible for many Canadians when the remains of 215 bodies were found buried in a school yard. As awareness increases, so does colonial backlash with residential school denialism and anti-Indigenous racism on the rise, risking further damage to the fragile work of Truth and Reconciliation (TRC, 215). These interrelated and compounding issues can be understood as a poly-crisis that “significantly degrade humanity's prospects” (Lawrence, 2024, p.1).

As educators, we are witnessing an increase in anxiety, instability, and disconnect in children and families. At the same time, we are painfully aware that the land where we live is not thriving either. The forest behind our school is overrun by invasive plants and is commonly used as a garbage dump. The nearby stream often runs dry and no longer hosts salmon. During this time of polycrisis, we question the purpose of educational research and wonder how we can be of service to communities, both human and more-than human. As intersecting crises often require novel approaches (Lawrence, 2024), we have shifted from more traditional forms of qualitative research to focus on collaborative, community-based, and action-oriented methods.

Our work is guided by Indigenous Elders, and informed by Indigenous (Donald, 2012; 2021) and posthuman environmental scholarship (Alaimo, 2010). We (settler-scholars) work across the usual binaries to disrupt anthropocentric assumptions, embrace relational ontologies, and work in wholistic ways to advance multispecies wellness. We didn’t begin with a hypothesis or even a question, but rather a vision from Elder Rick Bailey from Katzie First Nation to teach children to care for salmon like family. Guided by the forest and the students, our focus over the past four years has shifted from caring for salmon, to listening for the songs of the forest, to making drums, to saving tadpoles, to producing a film festival to create awareness about global warming.

This research, a form of the scholarship of application involving the enactment of knowledge to solve societal problems (Ream, et al., 2015), responds to the following overarching question: How do we reconfigure community relations to be more cohesive, respectful and reciprocal and learn to live well together? We learned that developing strong kinship ties was paramount to nurturing responsibility and advancing collective wellness. Elder Rick’s teaching that his people come from the salmon and his invitation to be part of this family was incredibly impactful. The children adopted identities as salmon boys and girls that were enduring and served to presence salmon and their needs daily within the lives of children, who developed rituals of advocacy. Responding to kin from a place of love and appreciation for their “superpowers” and teachings also strengthened mutually sustaining connections, flattening the usual anthropocentric ordering of beings. Their respect for the rights of salmon transferred to tadpoles, when their pond was threatened by unseasonably warm weather, and the children worked tirelessly to help them. Overall, these kinship relationships, brought great joy, validated for the children that they were part of something greater than themselves, contributing to wholisitc wellness.

Communities residing in priority attention neighborhoods consistently face situations of poverty, social exclusion, school failure, unemployment, insecurity, and limited access to basic health services and infrastructure (Nicoletti et al., 2022; Roy et al., 2024). These conditions, often accompanied by episodes of extreme violence, have a lasting impact on collective well-being, social cohesion, and educational trajectories (Ivey et al., 2025; Fry et al., 2018). Despite the proliferation of programs and initiatives targeting these contexts, many interventions have been implemented without sufficient scientific backing, occasionally resulting in limited outcomes, community frustration, and a sense of abandonment associated with the perception that “there is nothing to be done here.” In this regard, it becomes crucial to advance the systematization of evidence to identify which interventions have proven successful in transforming highly vulnerable neighborhoods (Nanayakkara et al., 2025).

This contribution is framed within the Dialogic Community Inclusion Project (PCID, by its acronym in Spanish), aimed at the social transformation of a specific neighborhood marked by significant social inequality, a territory historically characterized by the concentration of structural disparities. The project is grounded in research on inclusion and dialogic learning, and is articulated through the Dialogic Inclusion Contract (CID), a procedure that establishes shared commitments among the scientific community, local government (through public services), educational centers, social organizations, neighborhood associations, and residents. The CID fosters processes of egalitarian dialogue and co-creation, integrating scientific knowledge with the experiences of local actors as a basis for collective action (Flecha et al., 2014; Girbés et al., 2018; Valls & Padrós, 2011).

From this perspective, transformation is not conceived as a vertically imposed process, but rather as a community-driven initiative, where the voices of the neighborhood and active community participation are essential for the definition, adaptation, and implementation of highly effective interventions (Zhang et al., 2026). In this context, the concept of “successful actions” gains particular relevance, understood as interventions supported by scientific evidence that have demonstrated a positive impact on improving living conditions and promoting social inclusion in vulnerable contexts (Flecha et al., 2014).

This paper presents a systematic review of the scientific literature aimed at identifying these successful actions and the elements explaining their impact, in order to provide an evidence-based framework for their transfer to real community processes. The review was conducted using the Web of Science and Scopus databases, considering studies published from 2010 onwards in English and Spanish. Selected studies address interventions developed in disadvantaged urban areas and cover fields such as policing, health, violence prevention, employment, housing, and community leadership.

The guiding research question is: Which community interventions or successful actions in vulnerable contexts have demonstrated reproducible results and are potentially transferable?

Beyond the academic synthesis, the review aims to serve as a tool for dialogue within the CID, allowing the various stakeholders involved to assess which interventions have the strongest empirical support, under what conditions they work, and how they can be adapted to the local context. In this way, educational research positions itself as a driver of collective action, strengthening relationships between schools and communities; and contributing to evidence-based responses that promote coexistence, inclusion, and social resilience in highly vulnerable urban contexts.