WELCOME & INTRODUCTION

1. Seminar sponsored by the British Educational Research Association Social Justice Special Interest Group in collaboration with the Society for Educational Studies Disadvantaged and Disabled Learners and Social Justice

2. WELCOME & INTRODUCTION

3. Interagency collaboration, social justice and learners with disabilitiesand difficultiesProfessor Harry DanielsUniversity of Bath

4. DEMOS Paper Personalisation through participation: A new script for public services Charles Leadbeater The dawn of new ‘capabilities’?

5. Personalisation The proposal is that clients become coproducers of services and take a central part in the design and formulation of the particular service that is made available. stark contrast to the services that ‘deliver’ a standardised offer to all clients whatever their needs Leadbeater, 2004

6. CHOICE AND VOICE IN PERSONALISED LEARNING’SPEECH BY DAVID MILIBAND MPMINISTER OF STATE FOR SCHOOL STANDARDSAT A DfES INNOVATION UNIT / DEMOS / OECD CONFERENCE ‘PERSONALISING EDUCATION: THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC SECTOR REFORM’LONDON, 18 MAY 2004 Aneurin Bevan used to say that the freedom to choose was worthless without the power to choose. This is the power of personalised learning. Not a false dichotomy between choice and voice but an acceptance that if we are to truly revolutionise public services then people need to have both. Because students are not merely educational shoppers in the marketplace; they are creators of their own educational experience; and their voice can help shape provision. Both as a means of engaging students in their own learning – the co-producers of education. And as a means of developing their talents – using their voice to help create choices.

7. Social Exclusion • Social exclusion which may be typified as loss of access to the most important life chances that a modern society offers, where those chances connect individuals to the mainstream of life in that society. • New ‘life chances’ = new patterns of exclusion?

8. Changes 1 Interagency Work • Responsive interagency work in these contexts requires a new way of conceptualising collaboration which recognises the construction of constantly changing combinations of people and resources across services, and their distribution over space and time.

9. Many services are shaped by their histories and organised for the convenience of the provider not the client (Cabinet Office, 2001). • Audit Commission report (2002 p.52) suggests that there is a general consensus that agencies need to work more closely together to meet the needs of young people, but different spending priorities, boundaries and cultures make this difficult to achieve in practice • Interagency working of such services tend to 'underlap' rather than overlap and agencies can ignore the complexity their clients present

10. The 2002 Spending Review • prioritises multiagency support in schools and announces a multiagency behaviour strategy which includes the formation of behaviour and education support teams

11. The Green Paper, September 2003:Every Child Matters • integrated teams of health and education professionals, social workers and Connexions advisers based in and around schools and Children's Centres; • sweeping away legal, technical and cultural barriers to information sharing so that, for the first time, there can be effective communication between everyone with a responsibility for children; • establish a clear framework of accountability at a national and local level with the appointment of a Children's Director in every local authority responsible for bringing all children's services together as Children's Trusts;

12. Policy and Inclusion • Current policy on social inclusion is running ahead of conceptualisations of inter-professional collaboration and the learning it requires in a number of fields • Even Personalisation through Participation

13. A view of the problem from a study of Young People Permanently Excluded from School • Sample 193 young people aged 13 to 16 • PEX in 1999/2000 • Across ten local education authorities in England • Sample over representative of females, ethnic • Minorities and young people in care.

14. Key Concerns • Lack of ‘joined up’ working • Insufficient attention to needs led planning • Prevalence of service led formulation of need • Relationship between placement and expectations and aspirations • Social capital • Boundary crossing ‘knotworkers’

15. Working Together • Young people require, but typically are not in receipt of, flexible and responsive interagency service delivery • Professionals need tolearnhow to work collaboratively. • Collaboration between agencies working for social inclusion also now emphasises collaboration with service users. • Promoting deliberative agency

16. Development Mass Production Articulated knowledge Craft Tacit Knowledge

17. Modularisation Mass Customisation Architectural knowledge Linking Process Enhancement Practical Knowledge Mass Production Articulated knowledge Development Craft Tacit Knowledge Renewal

18. Co-configuration Mass Customisation Architectural knowledge Process Enhancement Practical Knowledge Mass Production Articulated knowledge Craft Tacit Knowledge Networking Modularisation Linking Development Renewal

19. Co-configuration includes interdependency between multiple producers in a strategic alliance or other pattern of partnership which collaboratively creates and maintains a complex package which integrates products and services and has a long life cycle.

20. Learning • For co-configuration • In co-configuration • Need to go beyond conventional team work or networking to the practice of knotworking

21. Changes 2 Knotworking • is a rapidly changing, distributed and partially improvised orchestration of collaborative performance • takes place between otherwise loosely connected actors and their work systems to support clients. • various forms of tying and untying of otherwise separate threads of activity takes place. • Co-configuration in responsive and collaborating services requires flexible knotworking • no single actor has the sole, fixed responsibility and control

22. Knotworking • requires participants to have a disposition to recognise and engage with the expertise distributed across rapidly shifting professional groupings.

23. Argument 1Social world structures thinking Any function in the child’s cultural development appears twice or on two planes… It appears first between people as an intermental category, and then within the child as an intramental category

24. Argument 2Scientific and spontaneous concepts Concept Scientific concepts • Impose on child logically defined concepts • Scientific concepts move ‘downwards’ towards greater concreteness • Evolve in highly structured and specialized activity of classroom instruction Mature concepts • Concepts emerge from the child’s own • reflections of everyday experience • Spontaneous concepts move upwards towards greater abstractness • Develops in child’s everyday learningenvironment Spontaneous Concepts Object

25. Argument 3theories of learning • subject (traditionally an individual, more recently possibly also an organization) • acquires some identifiable knowledge or skills in such a way that a corresponding, relatively lasting change in the behaviour of the subject may be observed. • knowledge or skill to be acquired is itself stable and reasonably well defined. • There is a competent ‘teacher’ who knows what is to be learned.

26. People and organizations are all the time learning something that is not stable, not even defined or understood ahead of time. • important transformations -- literally learned as they are being created. • There is no competent teacher.

27. Activity Theory • Theory • Methodology

28. 1. Prime unit of analysis. • collective, artefact-mediated and object-oriented activity system, seen in its network relations to other activity systems

29. Mediating Artefacts: Tools and Signs Object Sense Meaning Subject Outcome Rules Community Division of Labour The structure of a human activity system Engestrom 1987 p. 78

30. Subject: the individual/subgroup chosen as the point of view in the analysis. • Tools: physical or psychological. • Community: individuals/subgroups who share the same general object. • Division of labor: division of tasks between members of the community. • Rules: explicit/implicit regulations, norms, conventions that constrains action/interaction • Object: “the ‘raw material’ or ‘problem space’ at which the activity is directed and which is molded or transformed into outcomes”

31. 2. Multi-voiced ness of activity systems • division of labour in an activity creates different positions for the participants, the participants carry their own diverse histories, • activity system itself carries multiple layers and strands of history engraved in its artefacts, rules and conventions. • multiplied in networks of interacting activity systems. • source of innovation,

32. Two interacting activity systems as minimal model for third generation of activity theory -- Engestrom 1999 Mediating Artefact Mediating Artefact Object 2 Objeect 2 Object 1 Object 1 Rules Community Division of Labour Rules Community Division of Labour Object 3

33. 3. Historicity. • needs to be studied as local history of the activity and its objects, and • as history of the theoretical ideas and tools that have shaped the activity

34. 4. Contradictions as sources of change and development. • historically accumulating structural tensions within and between activity systems

35. Contradictions, tensions, conflicts, breakdowns

36. 5. Expansive (cycles) transformations in activity systems • object and motive of the activity are reconceptualized to embrace a radically wider horizon of possibilities than in the previous mode of the activity

37. Methodology In Activity Theory development is not only an object of study, it is also a general research methodology. The basic research method in Activity Theory is not traditional laboratory experiments but the formative experiment which combines active participation with monitoring of the developmental changes of the study participants. Ethnographic methods that track the history and development of a practice have also become important in recent work.

38. Expansive learning • capacity to interpret and expand the definition of the object of activity and respond in increasingly enriched ways • produces culturally new patterns of activity • expands understanding and changes practice.

39. such learning is evidenced in enhanced analyses of the potential of objects and dispositions of subjects to recognise and engage with distributed expertise in complex work places. • object is the constantly reproduced purpose of a collective activity system that motivates and defines the horizon of possible goals and actions • studying the formation of objects and the learning that takes place in and across complex and rapidly changing activity systems as professionals learn to expand and co-construct the objects of their activities.

40. Change Laboratories Each lasts about two hours. Tensions and dilemmas will be highlighted Alternative ways of working proposed.

42. Work in the Change Laboratory typically starts with the mirror of present problems. • It then moves to trace the roots of current trouble by mirroring experiences from the past and by modeling the past activity system. • The work then proceeds to model the current activity and its inner contradictions, which enables the participants to focus their transformation efforts on essential sources of trouble. • The next step is the envisioning of the future model of the activity, including its concretization by means of identifying 'next-step' partial solutions and tools. • Subsequently, the stepwise implementation of the new vision is planned and monitored in the Change Laboratory.

43. participants envision and draft proposals for concrete changes. • videotaped for analysis. • professionals involvedwill be asked to evaluate the acceptability of this way of working.

44. practitioner will be invited to present an overview of the case -- prepared in a prior meeting. devices and procedures to support the work of these preparatory sessions. include templates of • calendars (to summarise important events in the trajectory), • maps (to depict the key parties involved), and • agreements (to summarise the division of labour amongst the parties). highlight the temporal aspect, the sociospatial aspect, and the relational negotiational aspect of the work

45. the intellectual work and the practical representational work (writing, drawing, etc.) of the participants • move between the spaces of the mirror and the model, • stopping occasionally in the middle. these processes move between three layers of time. the discourse moves between the participantsand their various voices

48. Travellers and additional support for learning policy Gwynedd Lloyd & Gillean McCluskey University of Edinburgh

49. Gender, social class and school exclusions Jean Kane University of Glasgow

50. Nature of the links between certain identities and exclusion from school Relative influence of schools and wider social factors Meaning of social justice in this context Why are boys over-represented in exclusion statistics?