The context of this project entitled Intercultural Community Evaluation and Planning [ICCEP], is a social, and economic scenario that is increasingly concerned with the integration of migrant students into school communities, where the quality of education is central to economic productivity (Baxter & Hult, 2017) and the emphasis is on decentralising the management of public services away from government to other stakeholders. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, this greater autonomy to develop practices to ensure the integration of migrant students has also been accompanied by increasing requirements for localised planning and quality assurance of activities (Brown et al. 2020). This project aims to explore and offer strategies and supports on how best to put in place the mechanisms that plan, evaluate and support the integration of migration background students into educational communities. Within Europe, various models of evaluation and planning have developed and transformed within a short period while the quest for the best fit continues (Ehren et al. 2012). The cost and complexity of individual schools working in isolation to put in place mechanisms to enhance the life chances of migration background students and in parallel, the need to empower schools to work together in clusters or groups have produced the concept of group or clusters of schools coming together for both developmental and evaluation purposes. This project aims to develop a community-based planning and evaluation system, referred to as ICCEP where schools and other stakeholders collaborative in networks for the improvement of migration background students and a member of the network or an external body act as a facilitator and mediator during the ICCEP process. The term ICCEP means involving all stakeholders in the process of evaluation and planning. In this project, the education governance systems and the underpinning intercultural policies and documents of the participating countries will be reviewed. Teachers’, school leaders’ and other sectoral support agencies survey responses will lead towards developing a conceptual map of ICCEP. and the development of a framework of quality indicators and the detailed mechanism of ICCEP. Through case studies, the consortium will explore what training needs should be provided to upskill the existing competencies of members of the network. For this reason, this project includes developing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and a toolkit of essential resources to plan for and integrate migrant students in communities. It will also involve training on the mechanisms required for ICCEP. The participants in the project are academic staff from Dublin City University, Ireland; the Spanish Inspectorate of Extremadura; Johannes Kepler University, Linz (JKU); Pamukkale University, Turkey (PAU); and the University of Oslo, Norway (UiO). Each partner brings interest, knowledge, experience and infrastructure to the project. Each partner country has an established system of quality assurance and educational governance and has a high proportion of migration background students in their education systems and therefore, they are interested in exploring the scope of ICCEP as it specifically applies to all types of migrant students (refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants) across Europe and developing a framework that offers a complete mechanism for this new model of evaluation along with a comprehensive professional development system for the upstream of stakeholder competencies in ICCEP. Activities and Impact will include: - Development of a multilingual Project Website - Analysis of National and Transnational modes of Network governance as applied to Inter-Cultural Community Evaluation and Planning and first suite of publications - Survey and a second suite of publications on teachers' perceptions of hindering and facilitating F(A)ctors relating to ICCEP - Case Studies and a third suite of publications on ICCEP Practices in Partner Countries - Conceptual Map and fourth open access peer-reviewed paper on ICCEP Conceptual Framework - A framework of ICCEP Indicators - Interim Report - Toolkit (to facilitate ICCEP) - ICCEP MOOC - Training Module for higher education and other training provides to train school leaders, Inspectors, and other sectoral support agencies - Project Evaluation - Final Report The potential long-term benefits of the project are invested in the sustained dissemination of the outputs which will provide on-going access and the availability of publications as well as CPD resources that provide insight into the theory and practice of ICCEP along with opportunities for professional development. The envisaged outcome is that this project will provide a complete mechanism for ICCEP that are aligned with EU governance structures.
The overarching objective of the project related to that of: (1) achieving a greater awareness of the challenges and opportunities for ICCEP; (2) the enhancement of culturally responsive competencies required of schools and communities to enhance the life chances of migration background students. To achieve this objective, the project aimed to develop resources and support strategies needed for ICCEP in order to facilitate the needs of diverse multicultural communities. Despite the longevity of the pandemic and the earthquake in Turkey; far reaching what was intially envisage for the project, this was achieved through: (1) the development of a project web site with narratives, conceptual map, literature review, evidence of impact, and survey and protocols for data collection in the partner languages; (2) the analysis and reporting of National and Transnational Policies and supports for ICCEP practices; (3) the systematic analysis and report of international literature on ICCEP strategies and supports; (4) Survey and report of ICCEP practices in Europe and elsewhere; (5) Case Study and report of ICCEP practices; (6) Development of an ICCEP map; (7) Development of an ICCEP Evaluation Framework; (8) Development of an ICCEP Training Programme; (9) Development of an ICCEP MOOC; Interim and Final Reports; (10) Dissemination of all ICCEP outputs and the dissemination of results to a wide range of stakeholders. A link to all of these concrete outputs, disseminations is available at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NLGGCCRyQRV5H7SmaELFH-YEG4PkHoxj?usp=sharing and the iccep.eu web site.
With the revival of the European economy after the 2008 economic crisis came a realisation that quality education is the quickest means to a better economy (Baxter & Hult, 2017). At the same time, with the rapid increase in migration and wide acceptance of decentralisation, there has also been an emphasis on decentralisation of services and the integration of migrants as productive citizens in the economy. Networked governance has gradually replaced the linear models of top-down control and regulation (Baxter, 2017). As a response to these social and economic drivers, there has risen a need for more rigorous community-based evaluation systems across Europe to counterbalance increased autonomy and assure quality. Consequently, educational governance and evaluation systems have transformed to achieve quality education in the most efficient and effective manner (Brown, 2013). This project entitled Intercultural Comunity Evaluation and Planning (ICCEP) was aligned with European educational governance expectations whose ultimate goal was to offer a community-based evaluation system to enhance the life chances of migrant students where schools work in collaboration for school improvement in relation to migrant students. The project also sought to take account of the dramatically altered social and educational context that has emerged in the post pandemic world. As a result there has been widespread recognition that there is a need for a fundamental reconstruction of our economic and social infrastructure in the future and that education plays a key role in this endeavour (OECD, 2020). There is also an awareness that the type of responses required are multi-faceted and should be led at the individual, local and community levels as well as at national and regional levels. Within these mult-level responses, the need to address the particular requirements of traditionally marginalised groups, such as immigrants and refugees, is gaining widespread traction ( Eurydice, 2020; World Bank, 2020; OECD, 2020). The danger of re-building for the many whilst re-marginalising the few is one that policymakers and practitioners are aware of and concerned about ( Williams, 2020). In this context, the provision of locally embedded, community-supported and rigorously quality assured interventions is more important than ever and the ICCEP project has been uniquely positioned to provide a framework for their development and evaluation. This project focuses on developing a complete framework of ICCEP for education communities. In light of the framework and the emerging education governance roles, a training module, toolkit of resources and MOOC for school leaders and other school support services was developed. Most recent research on school improvement and quality education provision for students stresses networking and collaboration between schools and between school and support governance services (Brown et al., 2020; O’ Hara et al. 2020; Chapman, 2019; Muiji,2017). For every school, there is a threshold level beyond which they cannot improve in isolation but by opening up channels between schools to enhance practices, sharing human and physical resources they achieve what they cannot achieve in isolation (Barber, 2010; O’ Hara et al. 2020). However, there is also a need for a member of the network to take on the governance role of the networked schools to provide facilitated support and to tease out the competitive nature of schools in a network, allowing for genuine collaboration to occur (O’Hara et al. 2020 & Brown et al. 2019). This can be achieved through ICCEP where networked schools set collective priorities for improvement, plan collaborative actions to achieve their goals and decide evaluation criteria with a trained internal or an external actor to facilitate, guide and evaluate the process. There is a need to shift the focus of school evaluation and planning for migration background students from being monocentric to polycentric. Already, in some European countries such as Norway, Denmark & Netherlands, certain aspects of quality (e.g. the provision of quality early childhood care as in the Netherlands) are evaluated collectively as municipalities (Eurydice, 2019). There is a need to develop proper criteria including quality indicators for evaluating networks, a proper mechanism on how to work collectively and training for school leaders and other support providers to enable networked schools to support migrants in their communities (O’Hara et al, 2020). This ICCEP model for the enhancement of migration background students in their communities will be a move away from traditional parallel modes of evaluation and planning. Instead, it will be a community-based system where every stakeholder of the school community will have an essential role.