Conference Agenda

This symposium addresses ways of developing education systems that support the progress of all children and young people. Building on an on-going ten-year research programme (Chapman and Ainscow, 2021), it will present and reflect on emerging findings from Every Dundee Matters (EDLM), a research-practice partnership attempting to build a city-wide Networked Learning System (Madrid Miranda and Chapman 2021) designed to promote equity. The strategy, which involves all the nurseries and schools, began in 2021 and is in the third year of its implementation.

EDLM is driven by the principle of equity, defined as: ‘A process of improving the presence, participation and progress of all children and young people in nurseries and schools by identifying and addressing contextual barriers’. This requires rethinking roles and relationships amongst stakeholders and researchers.

The symposium will address the following research questions:

• What factors influence the implementation of the strategy?

• What evidence is there of impact on the presence, participation and progress of learners?

• What are the implications for policy and practice more widely?

In contributing to the ICSEI conference focus on the impact of research/policy/practice partnerships on improving the effectiveness of education systems.

This paper will provide an overview of the EDLM strategy. It will explain the guiding vision, which is of a high performing education system that is at the forefront of developments to find more effective ways of ensuring the education of all children and young people, particularly those who are most vulnerable to underachievement, marginalisation or exclusion.

Set within an education system that is relatively centralised, the strategy sets out to build a Networked Learning System that increases collective agency regarding decisions about priorities for improvement. With this in mind, the methodology used is ‘design-based implementation research’ (Fishman et al., 2013). This is guided by four principles: a focus on problems of practice from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives; a commitment to collaborative design; a concern with developing theory and knowledge related to both classroom learning and implementation through systematic inquiry; and a concern with developing capacity for sustaining change in systems.

The starting point for strengthening the capacity of schools is with the sharing of ideas, knowledge and practices through collaboration amongst staff. This is intended to encourage new thinking and experimentation with alternative ways of working. This is based on research which shows that this can be stimulated through an engagement with the views of different stakeholders, bringing together the expertise of practitioners, the insights of pupils and families, and knowledge from academic research in ways that challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, not least in respect to the progress of vulnerable groups of learners (Ainscow, Chapman & Hadfield, 2020).

The early phase of EDLM took place during a period of unprecedented challenges, as schools and nurseries struggled to cope with the continuing impact of the Covid pandemic. Despite this unfavourable context, the following design features were introduced, including:

• Across the education system there is widespread awareness of Every Dundee Learner Matters and what it has set out to achieve;

• The introduction of the 3Ps (paresence, participation and progress) as the foci for enhancing educational equity;

• all schools and nurseries have established one or more school inquiry groups;

• these groups have used collaborative action research to identify and address barriers to the presence, participation and progress of some of their pupils;

• all schools and nurseries are members of a school improvement partnership set up to share expertise, experiences and encourage innovations;

• education officers and members of the university research team have worked together to support these school-led improvement efforts

and

• a programme of leadership/learning seminars has taken place to provide support and advice for key people in the field.

The evidence collected so far suggests that these developments are already having an impact on the presence, participation and progress of pupils. There is, however, lots more do in order to ensure that an education system that does well for many Dundee learners can do well for them all.

The EDLM strategy is built on a series of ten design features based on earlier research on system change (Ainscow, Chapman & Hadfield, 2020). This paper will present a summary of the findings regarding the implementation and impact of these features. It will also explain and reflect on the complexities of the roles of the University research team in carrying out its contributions to the initiative. In particular, it will consider the challenges created by a methodology that combines activities linked to both development and research, with the expectations that these two will feed off each other during their implementation, and are adjusted accordingly, as needed.

As developers, the University team is involved in activities to support the vision for change at the district level by meeting with a strategy group that involves headteachers and other senior staff to discuss progress, priorities and next steps. This also involves building capacity within establishments by supporting headteachers and teacher leaders in conducting collaborative action research activity and sharing their findings to other school staff, support services and community members.

At the same time, the university team supports the professional development of local authority staff as they adjust their contributions to improvement efforts that are led by schools. In addition, they have sought to ‘interrupt’ the structure of interactions within the system, by creating new school partnerships, and coordinating cross-school collaborative activities in an effort to move knowledge around.

In carrying out this complex set of activities, the work of the researchers is informed by relevant evidence. This is gathered through their involvement in planning meetings and events for school leaders. In this context, the research team use a range of methods to generate artifacts with the potential to inform insights and refine the strategy. For example, one technique involved schools designing posters that summarised their progress during the first year of the project. Addressing a common set of research questions, this involved members of the research team in supporting the planning of the posters within each school. The posters were then shared at a conference for school leaders and other stakeholders. Apart from encouraging a process of reflection within individual schools, this provided an efficient and engaging means of sharing experiences and practical suggestions across the city.

The evidence from on-going monitoring of the implementation of the strategy is triangulated with data regarding impact, which is generated through more formal means. These include an engagement with statistical evidence provided through the on-going procedures of the local authority and data generated through a programme of focus group interviews. Further evidence on the relationship between implementation and impact of the system change strategy uses Social Network Analysis in order to map headteacher and senior leader relationships and track the development and pattern of interactions over time (Borgatti et al, 2018). All this evidence is then used to create case study accounts of developments in particular schools.

Going to scale with respect to local systems change means that many actors have to be involved. This requires EDLM to be driven collectively by school leaders and local authority officers. The strategy involves practitioners at all levels of the education system - including early years, primary and secondary education taking shared responsibility for improving the quality of education across the city.

An engagement with a variety of evidence generated by teachers, supported by professional judgment and mutual observations and, crucially, engagement with the views of students, is a key factor in making this happen. In addition, schools work in improvement partnerships, using peer inquiry visits to stimulate the sharing of practices and mutual professional learning.

These interrelated approaches are based on evidence from international research regarding strategies for fostering forms of teaching that are effective in engaging all members of a class (Avalos, 2011). This suggests that developments of practice, particularly amongst more experienced teachers, are unlikely to occur without some exposure to what teaching actually looks like when it is being done differently with impact, and opportunities to discuss these differences with colleagues.

This points to the possibility of ‘joint practice development’, which Fielding et al. (2005) define as learning new ways of working through mutual engagement that opens up and shares practices with others. Joint practice development, they suggest, involves interaction and mutual development related to practice; recognises that each partner in the interaction has something to offer; and is research-informed, often involving collaborative inquiry. Through such collaborative activities, teachers develop ways of talking that enable them to articulate details about their practices. In this way, they are able to share ideas about their ways of working with colleagues. This also assists individuals to reflect on their own ways of working, as well as the thinking behind their actions. In effect, developing evidence-informed communities of practice where collaboration and engagement in improvement arrangements by participants fosters identification with goals and acquisition of related knowledge and skills (e.g.: Sim, 2006; Wenger and Lave 2001)

This paper will include a series of accounts of practice by school leaders that illustrate the nature of these activities, including reflections on their impact on thinking and practices within schools. It will also consider the challenges involved with regards to implementation of these approaches within the busy schedules of schools.

As a system-wide strategy, another key element of EDLM involves the development of leadership capacity in the middle tier, a role that in Scotland is that of local authorities. This involves a significant change in practices, summed up by the following mantra suggested by an education officer during an earlier project: ‘The job of schools is to improve themselves; our job is to make sure it happens’. The paper will, therefore, also provide an account from senior education officers regarding the challenges they are facing in putting this thinking into action.