Overview

Supervisors: Prof Daniel Muijs (SSESW) and Dr Gavin Duffy (SSESW).

CAST (Co-operative Awards in Science and Technology) PhD Studentship in Place-based Education with Queen’s Communities and Place (QCAP), funded by Department for the Economy (DfE).

Context: Education in Northern Ireland (NI) is marked by inequalities of outcome. Certain groups of young people are more at risk than others of leaving school without adequate qualifications, experiences, and opportunities. Research suggests that these disparities mirror socio-economic factors—particularly wealth, class, ethnicity, gender, and parental qualifications (Early et al, 2022). However, studies across the UK show that there is an additional spatial dimension to this phenomenon in which less favourable education outcomes tend to be concentrated in urban, working-class communities (Kerr & Dyson, 2017). It is clear that to fully understand education inequalities, it is essential to look beyond individual factors and consider the wider socio-spatial contexts in which children are raised and where educational processes occur (Kerr et al, 2014). This has been recognised in policy, with the preference for addressing unfavourable conditions ostensibly shifting towards place-based approaches. The Levelling Up programme, for example, claims to deliver improved outcomes for places through ‘education investment areas’, but is at risk of disregarding the varied needs of local landscapes (Lybeck, 2022). In NI the Fair Start report advocates for a whole-community approach and the development of a place-based ‘reducing educational disadvantage’ programme (Purdy et al, 2021), but has since been scaled back by cuts. In many cases, these types of interventions have been top-down and ‘place-blind’, with limited success (Kerr et al, 2014). Consequently, community organisations have assumed responsibility for improving the local education environment, despite the complexity and scale of the task.

This project will add depth to our understanding of this spatial phenomenon, with a focus on the transformative potential of Critical Educational Landscapes (CELs)—a place-based model of education currently being developed by Queen’s Communities And Places (QCAP) (Robinson, 2023). CELs emphasise community-centred education, actively involving communities in shaping and delivering education that is relevant, inclusive, and empowering. The model encompasses four programmatic areas of intervention: education networks, diverse learning spaces, pathways to employment, and an innovation ecosystem. A key aspect of this involves closer collaboration and co-creation between schools and communities. The student will be embedded within QCAP’s partner organisations—the Market Development Association (MDA) and Greater Shankill Partnership Board (GSPB), with whom they will co-design the project—and their nascent CELs. Using Yin’s case study approach of replication rather than representation, the student’s initial focus will be on the Market, to draw out a range of variables and perspectives that can then be tested with the Shankill. The student will extract much needed data on place-based factors and insights into how communities, through the framework of CELs, can influence educational outcomes beyond traditional school settings.

About QCAP

Serving as a key delivery mechanism for Queen’s University Belfast’s (UK) strategic commitment to social and civic responsibility and economic prosperity, Queen’s Communities and Place (QCAP) is a research initiative based on engagement and partnership between communities, policy makers and academics. Combining academic expertise and experiential knowledge from the community, Queen’s Communities and Place uses a ‘place-based’ approach to co-create new solutions to address persistent physical, economic and social challenges, as well as to strengthen the engagement between Queen’s University and its surrounding communities. QCAP launched in November 2021 with our anchor partner in the Market community in inner south Belfast. We are also working collaboratively with projects and communities in the north, west and east of Belfast across a range of sectors and academic disciplines. We have sought to challenge existing frameworks, with evidence-led, data-driven approaches to build interventions and practices together to identify what might work better here for communities to thrive (Higgins et al, 2023). For further information visit https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/qcap/