School communities and policy responses in England in a time of polycrisis

Schools in England have faced significant challenges in the 2020s, such that we might call this period one of polycrisis, where multiple crises exist at once and interact with one another. The COVID pandemic, an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, and increasing child poverty have come in the wake of a decade of austerity policy and intense education policy change in the 2010s. In this chapter we explore how rising social need in combination with a retreating welfare state have left schools struggling to cope with additional responsibilities including providing for families in poverty. Using data from three research projects, we consider how schools as locally embedded community institutions are best placed to understand families’ needs in a time of crisis, and how in contrast, official policy has no ready means to learn from the views of those on the ground. In turn, the current policy architecture restricts the research questions that can be asked about education to those that policymakers think matters. Here we challenge this presumption and argue that instead, governments must recognise and value the ways schools engage with their communities and fund research that engages meaningfully with the reality of the multiple crises that are affecting the education sector.