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Lisburn and Castlereagh Community Planning – speaking notes (Tony Gallagher, QUB)

Outline of talk:

  • Benefits of education
  • Why the Council should be interested in education
  • Experience of planning I have been involved in
  • Challenges to community planning
  • Possible solutions

Benefits of education

  • what is education for
  • individual benefit - qualifications, experience and attributes to participate as a full citizen and live a fulfilled life
  • economic benefit - increases the skills base of the population, increases human capital, encourages inward investment and boosts the economy
  • social benefit - promotes social cohesion and helps prepare young people to live and work in a divided society
  • US evidence - higher educational qualifications mean:
  • you are more likely to be employed
  • you will have higher average earnings
  • you will be healthier
  • you will live longer
  • you will be less likely to go to jail
  • and you will be more likely to vote and participate as an active citizen
  • UK evidence on the effects of attending a pre-school programme
  • you will show higher achievement at age 16
  • this positive effect will be doubled if you are from a low income household
  • higher quality pre-school programmes lead to better outcomes
  • this effect is also higher for children from low income households

Why the Council should be interested in education:

  • importance of the knowledge economy
  • people as our key natural resource
  • invest in education and skills
  • key to employment and growth
  • mapping out educational provision
  • coordinate, connect, enhance education provision in the Council area for the common good
  • pre-school provision
  • compulsory education: 5 to 16, primary to post-primary
  • post 16
  • grammar and secondary schools
  • further education
  • youth training
  • higher education
  • adult education
  • alternative education
  • education challenges
  • wide variation in outcomes from education - challenge of inequity
  • better information available on the more prestigious routes
  • need stronger focus on tackling the challenge of social disadvantage
  • newcomer children, especially those without English as their first language
  • giving people second chances
  • opportunities for re-training and re-skilling
  • coordinate, connect, enhance education provision in the Council area for the common good
  • support that which is strong and effective
  • help that which is weak and less impactful
  • identify gaps where they exist
  • act as an advocate for education in the whole Council area, particularly in relation to the Education Authority, Department of Education, and Department for Employment and Learning

Examples where I have experienced a degree of planning

  • University engagement with Planning process
  • £350m investment in capital projects over the past ten years
  • £370m investment in capital developments over the next ten years – large proportion already underway
  • Shared education work - working in partnership with other organisations or stakeholders
  • work for the Committee for Education of the NI Assembly on the Department of Education Area Planning process

Challenges of planning

  • nature of consultation and level of genuine participation by citizens and other stakeholders
  • participative methodologies

Challenges:

  • consultation processes not terribly effective
  • happens too late in the day for people to feel they have the chance to make a difference
  • appears that the basic terms for the discussion have already been set and agreed
  • people often feel the consultation is a gesture, but the decisions are already made and will not change
  • difficult to point to examples where consultation has resulted in significant change
  • community engagement can open up a myriad of competing and 'difficult to resolve' claims
  • planning process can take an awful long time
  • can involve the rigid application of rules, without recourse to a higher strategic vision
  • can sometimes have too much of a focus on the here and now, and a parochial emphasis, rather than a wider vision of what might be possible in the longer-term

Possible solutions:

  • participative consultation methods - involve the community in wider conversations about the overall strategic plan
  • Omagh deliberative poll
  • polling, facilitated deliberation, polling - broadens the repertoire of what people will accept and often highlights their core priorities
  • parents less interested in having different sectors
  • parents primarily interested in a reasonable guarantee that their children will get a good quality education
  • PERHAPS the Council could play a lead role in these type of deliberative or participative methods for involving the public in helping to shape the overall strategic plan
  • childrens' voice:
  • Convention on the rights of the child
  • Laura Lundy devised approach to give real voice to young people
  • space and voice - the right to express a view
  • children must be given an opportunity to express a view
  • they should be facilitated in expressing that view
  • influence and audience - the right to have their views given due weight
  • their view must be listened to
  • their view must be acted on, as appropriate
  • shared education work:
  • importance of recognising teachers' expertise and experience
  • allowing them to identify solutions and try them out, even if some failed
  • general points:
  • consultation often appears to be a top-down process, with little capacity to influence change
  • should be a bottom-up, as well as a top-down process, but it should begin right from the start of the planning process, so that it genuinely helps to shape the inform the development of plans, not simply respond to plans that have already been set
  • have a wider strategic plan that sets priorities and goals, which can then be used to inform decisions on specific planning proposals
  • recognise that not everyone is going to like everything that comes along, but an agreed, overall strategic plan might help provide a context that explains why specific initiatives are being pursued, and what the overall priorities for the future are
  • bringing people together in multi-agency initiatives is not easy
  • more than simply putting people into the same room and asking them to sort something out
  • different actors are constrained by different rules, and sometimes different priorities
  • need to learn new ways of working in these contexts

At the end of the day there is an enormous prize here: education is the key to unlocking the future for our children and for future generations. The knowledge economy has to be our primary focus for future prosperity. The Council has an opportunity to be an enabler, a coordinator, and an advocate for all young people in the Council area

  • connecting educational actors that otherwise operate separately
  • identifying gaps in provision and lobbying to have those filled
  • linking education and business for local benefit
  • primarily as the leader of the community, working for the common good of all the citizens