Raising staff awareness and skills
As a new duty on schools, staff may not have a clear idea of what is included in the concept of community cohesion, and still less idea of the range of aspects of school life that can make a significant contribution. Community cohesion work will be more effective if briefing and training covers the whole workforce. School leaders will need to consider how and when to communicate information to staff about how the school approaches community cohesion, and identify the skills needs of staff. Audits, discussions and evaluation procedures can involve wider groups of staff, and the findings can be written in a form that serves to raise awareness of the schools approach to promoting community cohesion.
- Many schools use briefing papers to circulate key information to all staff, often electronically. Initial pages from the Guidance or this resource may be useful for this.
- A flexible PowerPoint® presentation has been provided introducing some of the basic definitions and requirements. Schools may wish to use a selection of these slides and amend them as necessary for a wide variety of audiences and levels of knowledge, e.g. senior teams, working parties, staff, governors.
- The discussion exercise 'Promoting Community Cohesion in Our School' is designed to involve groups of staff in structured discussion of cohesion. This can be used in staff meetings or on non-contact days as a pre-cursor to auditing or action planning
- Local collaboration with other schools is especially relevant when developing staff awareness and engagement in cohesion work. A joint training session could initiate cooperation over local projects.
- The Audit tables are designed for groups of staff to consider together, and could be used in meetings or training. Wider involvement in completing the audit process will improve the quality of information yielded and also serve as a useful mechanism to help more staff to realise the wide scope of work on community cohesion.
- Exploring the basic definition of community cohesion and linking it to aspects of school life could make a useful activity for any group of staff and could form a workshop for staff training.
Schools and community cohesion (PowerPoint®
presentation)
Teaching, learning and curriculum audit
Equity and excellence audit
Community engagement and extended services
audit
Promoting community cohesion in our school: a discussion
exercise
Page updated: 26 May 2008
