The logic of the marketplace and the ethic of co-operation: a case study of a co-operative school (original) (raw)

Co-operative Education and Schools: an old idea for new times

There is a growing Cooperative Education sector in England within the region of 300 schools now describing themselves as Cooperative Schools. The growth of this sector is subject to significant debate – is it a countervailing movement for local democracy or is it simply another chain of schools that will hasten the marketisation of education? This article draws on the relatively limited extant literature on the history of cooperative education since the 1850s to understand the key traditions of 'Co-operative Education'. Then, drawing upon an analysis of Cooperative Schools' websites and meetings, upon interviews with Cooperative College officers, and upon visits and interviews with teachers in two Cooperative Schools, it explores how these traditions are being taken up or resisted in Cooperative Schools in England. The article argues that there is a risk that the autonomy that is at the heart of the Cooperative movement may lay the growing Cooperative Schools sector open to co-option within existing neo-liberal education agendas. The article argues that an important bulwark against this would be for the Cooperative movement to focus its energies in particular on the development of a movement of Cooperative educators, the teachers, parents, students and governors who, through what Woodin calls a 'learnt associational identity', can resist the reduction of education to a marketised private good. This analysis has implications not only within the context of England, but more widely in the international struggle to develop new models of democratic accountability for education in an increasingly marketised environment, and for the potential role of the international cooperative movement within that global struggle.

Democracy and schooling: The paradox of co-operative schools in a neoliberal age?

Journal of Philosophy of Education

From the first co-operative trust school at Reddish Vale in Manchester in 2006, the following decade would witness a remarkable growth of ‘co-operative schools’ in England, which at one point numbered over 850. This paper outlines the key development of democratic education by the co-operative schools network. It explains the approach to democracy and explores the way values were put into practice. At the heart of co-operativism lay a tension between engaging with technical everyday reforms and utopian transformative visions of an educational future. A new arena of debate and practice was established with considerable importance for our understanding of democratic education within the mainstream.

For 'getting it' : an ethnographic study of co-operative schools

2014

The marketisation of the educational sector continues to shape educational provision, policy and practice on a worldwide scale (Apple, 2001; Ball, 2008; Giroux, 2004), ostensibly providing ‘freedom’ through the conflation of consumer ‘choice’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ via the invisible hand of the market. The assumption that competitive markets will produce better schools and outcomes for their students veils the extent to which a large proportion of the world’s population are positioned as marginal actors, unable to ‘compete’ or ‘choose’ as equals, as they engage on a significantly uneven playing field (Mills & McGregor, 2014; Reay, 2012). Historical and global (cf. Fielding & Moss, 2011; Neill, 1990; Wrigley et al., 2012) examples of democratic alternatives to the traditional institution of ‘the school’ have provided rich evidence of the radical possibilities for social change in the form of case studies and academic critique. However, the absence of a cohesive platform which ...

Co-operative Schools: building communities in the 21st century

FORUM, 2012

The recent progress of 'co-operative schools' both confirms and disrupts many assumptions surrounding contemporary compulsory schooling. The term itself refers to an eclectic array of schools, both primary and secondary, of which there were, by June 2012, almost 300 in England that have adopted co-operative values, in terms of governance, pedagogy and curriculum, and come together as a movement. They have emerged from within a fissiparous ecology of education which has given rise to new schools and networks, including academy schools, converter academies, free schools, trust schools and specialised schools. In this article the author argues that these changes have all offered opportunities for co-operative alternatives to be established.

Co-operative academies: a transindividual possibility in individualistic times?

2018

This thesis examines the development of the Co-operative schools project in England, a school transformation initiative of the Co-operative Group and the Co-operative College, UK. Since 2008, the Co-operative schools project has developed a number of Co-operative school models, which are positioned as a ‘values-based alternative’ to the controversial Academies programme. The growth of the Co-operative schools project suggests that there is indeed an appetite for ‘alternative’ and ‘values-based’ education. However, it is not clear what the Co-operative alternative is or how the values and principles of the Co-operative movement translate to achieve educational transformation in schools. Integral to the design of this project was my role as ‘embedded researcher’ at the Co-operative College, enabling a unique perspective on the expanding initiative. Through an immersive and exploratory practice of research and reflection, across multiple sites, this study tracks the way in which the in...

Co-operatives, democracy and education: a critical reflection

A revised version of this paper is now published in: Woodin, T. (2014) Co-operation, Learning and Co-operative Values. Contemporary Issues in Education. Routledge. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415725248/ "Education involves drawing out the powers of individuals to think, imagine, feel and act. In particular it is about the development of the powers of communication, debate, decision and the power to form associations between people to create organisations for the achievement of common projects. How those powers to organise are shaped through social, cultural, economic, political and legal processes, practices and procedures is critical to what kind of society results. In this sense, then, education directly addresses the question of what kind of society people want. We explore the contribution of cooperative ideas and practices to achieve such an idea."

Management in Education pending publication Copy The cooperative good with schools Revised

Education Reform Act initiated changes in the English educational landscape. In its wake there were significant alterations to the nature of schooling; the transfer of budgetary control to schools, the National Curriculum, City Technology Colleges and Grant Maintained Schools. Four years later Ofsted was established. This inevitably led to the erosion of the role of local education authorities. As a Head at the time it seemed like a tsunami, with hindsight these changes look almost pedestrian in the light of more recent educational legislation.

CO-OPERATIVE EDUCATION AGAINST NEOLIBERALISM

Many argue that it is futile to see schools as agents of social reform, much less revolution, rather they are agents of class division in the service of elites (e.g., Marsh 2011 and Blacker 2013). Resistance to class oppression is merely a defensive strategy where the question is, as Willis (1977) might put it, not so much why elites appropriate so much power and wealth but why the rest let them. It is this question that a re-imagination of the strategic power of co-operation addresses because it directly challenges both competition and inequality by returning to the ambivalent role of education and the discourses of freedom, democracy, commerce and work that liberalism and neoliberalism have misappropriated. The argument will take place in 4 steps. First, education as a practice of liberation has to be separated from the process of governing the masses through the discourses, mechanisms and practices of schooling. Second, this separation enables exploring and challenging the hierarchies through which elites dominate and thus opens the possibility for what may be called the society of equals. Thirdly, if the idea of a society of equals can be accepted as grounding democratic freedoms, then the way is cleared for co-operative forms of social organisation in general and education in particular. Finally, generating democratic, co-operative forms of curricular action provides the basis for a public able to critique all social forms - such as political, governmental, economic, cultural - in order to organise and undertake action for mutual benefit.