The charity sector and individual donors should be allowed more involvement in Scotland’s schools’ system, a new report recommends.
The report for think tank Reform Scotland by educational consultant Gillian Hunt, An Ecosystem: What we need for effective collaboration in Scotland, says that limits placed on charities working with schools are “inhibiting the development” of pupils.
Among the recommendations from Ms Hunt is that schools nominate a staff member - most likely a member of senior management - who would be “accountable for recording and promoting appropriate third-sector relationships”.
“It’s time to bring down the barriers to third-sector involvement in schools - they help nobody and hamper many,” said Ms Hunt, an educator for over 30 years, as a primary teacher and in roles at the City of Edinburgh Council and the University of Edinburgh.
She said that “the absence of a sharing of skills and expertise, particularly from the charity sector, is inhibiting the development of our young people”.
Ms Hunt added: “It does feel, often, that the source of it is a wish at government level to keep schooling centralised and homogenised.”
Charities ‘can bring ideas’ to Scottish schools
Her report calls for the Scottish government to “commission a national voluntary organisation to map all third-sector organisations currently partnering with local and national authorities”. She estimates that this would cost “less than £100,000 a year once the original data had been collected”.
She advises that this process could also lead to “significant benefit to potential individual donors”, as well as charities. These donors might want to “support a specific activity throughout Scotland” or a particular school or area where they were a pupil.
Ms Hunt said: “It is conceivable that a private donor (or donors) would be prepared to pay some, or even all, of the relevant costs for a pilot scheme.”
Her report recommends the “social prescribing model used in the NHS - schools identify pupil needs and ‘prescribe’ service from the map”. “This could be an alternative education provision
for part of the school week or a full-time alternative, music tuition, sport, a therapeutic or health referral,” it says.
The report adds: “This model relies on funding following the individual.”
The report also recommends that government departments, local authorities, schools and “other relevant state-sector participants” be “required to nominate an existing senior member of their staff to be accountable for recording and promoting appropriate third-sector relationships”.
The report explains: “It is simply proposed that such a responsibility be formalised where it already exists and created where it does not, so that third-sector organisations know whom to contact in the first instance when inquiring about a partnership.”
In a school, this role would be taken on by a member of the senior management team, and the only statutory obligation “would be to ensure the relevant list of partnership arrangements is created, updated quarterly and forwarded on time to the mapping unit”.
One of the case studies in the report focuses on Dunoon Grammar School, which in October won a worldwide education prize for its work on community collaboration.
The report finds that “probably most importantly” headteacher David Mitchell “feels able to be creative, to test things out and to make mistakes” and “has the support of the school staff, his community and Argyll and Bute Council”.
Reform Scotland director Chris Deerin said: “No one has a monopoly on wisdom, and our education system is hardly in such splendid condition that we can afford to turn a blind eye to good and improving ideas, wherever they come from.
“We have regularly come across inspiring and effective education programmes in the third sector and elsewhere that would seem to have much to teach the wider education establishment but that have been lost or ignored due to systemic bias or inertia.”
A spokesperson for the Scottish government said it did “not limit the opportunities for use of third-sector organisations as partners in support of the achievement of learning outcomes for children and young people”.
“Third-sector partners provide vital support to schools in supporting engagement in pupils while using their breadth of experience in developing national guidance - examples of this include promoting school attendance and preventing school exclusions,” they said.
“Our investment in the Scottish Attainment Challenge enables schools and local authorities to engage appropriately with third-sector organisations to help close the poverty-related attainment gap.”
