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Question: Chapter 11 School closures as breaches in the fabric of rural welfare: community perspectives from New Zealand

Answer: A primary school lies at the heart of many rural settlements. This centrality is in three senses. First, a school is often the only community building in isolated rural places and, in more populous areas, one of a cluster of essential services that form a village centre; second, they are fundamental in the set of routine practices that comprise community in any setting; and third, and as a consequence, they inflect and make possible many of the other exchanges, encounters and relations that constitute community. They are physically and socially a major part of the ‘social glue’ that keeps the local population in touch and a functioning community. As Woods remarks of both the special and the routine in the everyday lives of schools, ‘fundraising events for schools and school-gate conversations between parents both serve as sites and structures through which community is practised’ (2005, p. 101).
In this chapter, we argue that a rural settlement is just that – a loose cluster of residents and enterprises – but one of the generative components of a rural community is a school. The centrality of school to community life is often highlighted by an outpouring of community sentiment when a school is threatened with closure. In New Zealand, between 2000 and 2005, more than 75 schools were closed, many of them rural schools. In 2000, 32% of the nation's 2,727 schools were located either in settlements with a population of less than 1,000 or in a rural area where there is no settlement. Roughly 10% of all students attended a rural school (ERO, 2001). These rural schools are generally very small, with 43% having rolls of less than 50 students. A trend towards rural school closure and amalgamation which continues in 2009 (Wairarapa Times Age, 2009) is not only a disruption to children's education, but also a threat to the very fabric of community itself. In terms of the theme of this volume, our argument is that as a welfare ‘good’, schools are not only places for children but, especially in rural areas, they also amount to places of association, information and collective memory across the generations.
The trend towards school closure is not unique to New Zealand. Internationally, a modest literature on the fate of small rural schools is emerging. In England, rural school closures peaked in 1983 with 127 closures. Subsequently there was an average closure rate of 30 per year till 1997. Since then government support has encouraged small schools ‘to pilot innovative ways of working collaboratively with others to overcome difficulties due to small size’ (Hargreaves, 2009, p. 119). In the Swedish case, Aberg-Bengtsson (2009) remarked on purportedly inadequate educational standards as being a frequently used argument in favour of closing schools despite ‘small rural schools perform(ing) their obligations at least as well as other schools’ (p. 106). Significantly, both Hargreaves (2009) and Aberg-Bengtsson (2009) remark on the dearth of research on rural schools and their school closure from the perspective of the local community (rather than the school itself). Our chapter seeks to address this gap, building on research undertaken in the Taranaki region of New Zealand. We consider narratives offered by community members in reaction to announcements of closure and contrast these with the language of policy and bureaucracy.
Our chapter explores the contention that threats to a rural school may, in some cases, undermine the viability of the community itself. We examine a programme of school closures in a rural region of New Zealand and investigate the place that schools occupy in the production and reproduction of rural communities. We ask: what is the significance of the school within a rural community, and what arguments are mounted by the state for closing or amalgamating rural schools? We conclude that a fundamental disjuncture is exposed between local people for whom the school is a significant place and for representatives of the state for whom the school is a site within a broader space of educational service delivery. Conflict, we contend, is inevitable when the felt experience of the school-as-place is under-acknowledged by those promoting a rationality focusing on networks and nodes of delivery.

(Source: , 23 Sep 2021)

Source Link: https://doi-org.onlinedatabase.librarynet.com.my/10.1108/S1057-1922(2010)0000015013