BEACONS - OECD Pilot

The Story so Far

Background & Vision: BEACONS – Bringing Education Alive for Communities on a National Scale was born at the Symposium Towards a More Creative Education System at the Burren College of Art (BCA) in September 2018. BEACONS was the brainchild of the then head of the Teaching Council, Tomás Ó Rouairc, and was originally entitled the Wild Atlantic Way of Education.

The vision was of a network of places around the country radiating from a mother hub that would crack open the possibility of local conversations for parents, teachers, students and others and would generate waves of ongoing conversation such that we would never again speak of a 20-year old curriculum. It would embrace the power of the Irish landscape and provide an ethos devoid of high-profile politics, gender or religion.

The Stakeholders would come together in a safe way to harness and extend authentic education through a variety of mediums and for a variety of learners and educators. It would provide leadership and a cascading of values and actions. BEACONS would have clear branding and quality assurance and provide a signpost to where the learning/conversational experience was available – for parents, teachers and students or combinations of these – thus propagating the conversation process.

The process: In its original manifestation BEACONS brought together students, teachers and parents from all the primary and second-level schools in an area over a day and a half to discuss education in general or specific issues in education such as inclusion, integration, disadvantage, school planning etc. With the intervention of Covid conversations migrated online with both the limitations and opportunities afforded by IT.

The process entailed creative facilitation, deep listening, sharing good stories, discussing priorities and taking action.

Typically, it asked questions such as:

What is it that you would like others to understand better about your experience of education?

What examples can we share of good education and how to spread good practice?

What is most useful for us to discuss more?

Based on our conversations what can we do in our school – and what messages do we most want people to hear at a national level?

The Prototypes: The inaugural BEACONS event launched in Ennistymon in May 2019. This was followed in 2019/20 by Baltinglass, The Norther East Inner City of Dublin, Ennis (Inclusive education), Portlaoise (integrating migrant children) and DEIS schools in Dublin 10 held online.

A review event was held in Ennistymon in response to the student challenge of whether the process would bring about change. A learning day was held in the Teaching Council in December 2019. While organising events presented challenges of organisation, teacher substitution, enrolling parents, teachers and students the events were hugely engaging and alive with students from a young age demonstrating a capacity to speak directly of their experience and aspirations.

Scales were lifted from eyes as students began to realize how much their teachers cared. The solidarity of school communities, particularly in deprived areas, was demonstrated. While some themes were particular to local school community contexts there were also recurring themes such as overwhelm from administration and initiative overload, a desire for an education that was more relevant to the real world, a call for more engagement with the environment and the community, the need for more joined-up support services centered on the school (particularly in deprived communities) – a call for an education that was more human.

Scaling to the Next Level: Encouraged by the success of the prototype experience the Teaching Council approached the EU to support a pilot project that would explore how to enhance local-school community engagement in education policy development. More specifically it was designed to explore how such a model might facilitate and enhance the capacity of school communities:

(i) to have inclusive conversations on issues of common interest, make sense of national policies in their context and turn their shared understanding into agree actions and

(ii) to contribute meaningfully to national policy development processes.

The EU together with the OECD supported the launch of a small pilot project across Ireland which was undertaken in 2022/23 by BCA with evaluation by the Centre for Effective Services (CES).

Six events – online and in-person – were organised in the Portlaoise Education Centre (Looking at our Schools – LAOS), and online event with Kerry ETB (Your Voice in Education), Youghal (Reflecting together – Ukrainian Students), an Irish language conversation in Iorras Aithneach (Cluster Schools working together) and returning to the Portlaoise Education Centre for an engagement on the Department of Education Statement of Strategy with a similar conversation in schools in South West Dublin rounding out the pilot.

OECD Roadmap: In October 2023 the OECD launched a Report building on the lessons from the pilot project and recommending a roadmap for scaling and optimising the school community engagement model. The proposed roadmap entails – investing in capacity building, launching a supportive communications strategy, ensuring sufficient resourcing and embedding the school community engagement in the Irish education system.