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

Abstract

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. K E Y W O R D Sco-operative, co-operative schools, democracy, movement, school From the first co-operative trust school at Reddish Vale in Manchester in 2006, the following decade witnessed a remarkable growth of 'co-operative schools' in England, which at one point numbered over 850. These mainstream state schools were established with the support of the Co-operative College and the Co-operative Group, based upon legal models that stipulated the defence of co-operative values that included not only democracy but also solidarity, equity, equality, self-help and self-responsibility. Co-operative schools mainly came together in either co-operative trusts and, less often, academies (see Schools Co-operative Society, 2018). 1 Schools attempted to infuse co-operative values into the ethos, curriculum, organisation and governance. Staff, pupils, parents, communities and, potentially, alumni were represented on a multi-stakeholder forum that fed into governance and leadership bodies. Rather than the imposition of an academy model, co-operative schools retained their autonomy and independence and soThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Institutionalizing Co-operative Education in Universities - the Case of the Co-op Network Studies Program in Finland

“…However, in the latter half of the 20 th century co-operatives started to fare less well with tightening competition and with the state assuming some roles formerly provided by co-operatives, which also led to the waning of cooperative education (Woodin, 2014). Since the turn of the millennium, the number of institutions offering co-operative education has again been on the rise in many countries (Shaw, 2013;Woodin & Gristy, 2022). However, the status of co-operative education is nowhere near where it was during its golden years in the former half of 19-hundreds (Shaw, 2013).…”