Beyond School Gates:
Children’s Contribution to Community Integration
“Beyond School Gates shines a light on all the amazing contributions that children make to our communities. If we want to make communities work for all children and families, we need to listen to young people’s voices.”
Project Overview
‘Beyond School Gates’ provides new insights into the ways children contribute to their communities, including how children bring members of their communities together, and the issues that matter most to them. We charted the precise routes for facilitating a sense of home and belonging in three towns in the North West of England: Bolton, Blackburn with Darwen, and Preston.
Our team conducted a three-year study that involved:
Gathering children’s creative work on journeys through their communities from five schools in our target areas and co-creating an animation based on key themes developed from this artwork and over 50 in-depth interviews with the children.
Surveying over 600 children and their parents/carers about their and feelings about diversity and integration, and where and how they form peer friendships in their communities.
Interviewing 57 local policymakers and stakeholders to probe how they conceptualise and support children in the context of local council initiatives, community groups and schools.
“I’d be more likely to share my story because then I could make more friends.”
Who We Are?
We are an interdisciplinary team of academic researchers from six universities across the UK. We applied our diverse expertise to answer the following question: How do children contribute to local community cohesion?
Middlesex University
University of Kent
University of Exeter
Queen’s University Belfast
University of Newcastle
London School of Economics
and Political Science
University of Kent
Helen King
University of Newcastle
Magdalena Dujczynski