Every year, thousands of young people in Europe leave education prematurely, with significant individual, social and economic consequences. Despite recent improvements in overall rates of early school leaving in Europe, substantial disparities remain within and across countries, with children living in poverty, those with migrant backgrounds, and those from Roma or Traveller communities facing additional barriers to education. Following a multiple case study methodology this paper identifies learning environments that successfully reduce underachievement and early school leaving, and analyses the common elements that underpin their effectiveness. Observations, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups were conducted in 20 settings across 11 European countries involving around 800 participants, including students aged 6-15 years, school staff, families, and community stakeholders. The analysis reveals six key dimensions: engaging and inclusive classroom practices; positive staff-student relationships; positive peer relationships; supportive leadership; availability of guidance and counselling, especially for students at risk of marginalisation; and a holistic approach prioritising community involvement. These findings are discussed in relation to social capital theory and broader perspectives on educational inequality and institutional conditions, with implications for educators, policymakers, and school leaders seeking to address underachievement and promote equitable learning environments.

This chapter examines the evolution and effectiveness of multi-agency working in supporting children and young people with disabilities over the past four decades. Focusing primarily on the educational sector, it critiques policy developments from the Warnock Report to the era of Education, Health and Care Plans. The analysis challenges traditional conceptions of multi-agency collaboration, which often prioritise systemic and communicative efficiency over the complex dynamics of professional roles and relationships. Emphasising the need for a relational and flexible approach, the authors argue for a shift towards recognising and incorporating the diverse knowledges and changing needs of families. The concept of ‘privilege-cognisant’ professionals is introduced to advocate for a more adaptive and inclusive service provision that supports the active becoming of children and families, despite the challenges posed by austerity and conflicting interests.

Education is a key driver of resilience against the backdrop of increasing uncertainty provoked by enduring forms of social injustice. Yet, for many children living in poverty, school is a site in which economic inequalities are reproduced and children experience further exclusion and stigma. Nearly a quarter of families in Europe are at risk of poverty. In the UK, nine in every class of thirty children are living in poverty. Poverty has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, further entrenching inequalities in educational attainment. The Cost of the School Day project, developed by two charities, the Child Poverty Action Group and Children NorthEast, aimed to understand the barriers and challenges faced by poor children during the school day in the UK and use this evidence to help schools reduce costs and remove stigmatising practices to bring about a fair education for children. Starting with the assumption that activity is collective and governed by particular rules and divisions of labour, this paper analyses how partnerships within the project worked and ultimately led to change by looking at evidence produced in school reports, thereby improving the lives of children, young people and their families and enabling them to thrive and succeed.

Across England, schools are working innovatively with other organisations to provide wide-ranging support to, and with, their local communities. In recent years, children's zone-style initiatives have been among the most extensive developments of these kinds. These comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) are place-based strategies, working in highly marginalised neighbourhood contexts. They seek to develop a continuous 'pipeline' of holistic support for children and families, throughout their schooling, and in their school, family, and community contexts. Typically, zones also build on the legacy of England's previous extended schools initiatives, and on contemporary developments from the United States including the Harlem Children's Zone. This chapter defines and contextualises CCIs and discusses challenges and opportunities arising from one such initiative – Newcastle's West End Children's Community (WECC). This involves an alliance of schools, community members, local charities, cultural and health organisations, the local authority, and a university. It is a loose area-based network formed organically. Data are presented from an embedded, co-produced, action-research project which informs the Community's ongoing development. Our analysis is primarily at the meso-level with regard to both the macro and micro. The WECC primarily offers universal and selected strategies. The concepts of relational agency and expertise, and assets-based development, are used to explore the partnerships, strategies, and actions, emerging through CCIs. This chapter concludes that children's zones raise fundamental questions about whether or not schools and their partners can play a transformative role in developing innovative responses to mitigating the impacts of social and economic inequality, the importance of a transparent and effective governance structure, the involvement of additional partners, the adoption of strategic indicators, and how policy can support all these.

Poverty impacts negatively on children’s health and future life chances. Access to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is based on clinical need rather than the ability to pay but horizontal inequities in access exist. Children North East, a charity supporting children experiencing poverty, are working with partners to reduce the impacts of poverty on NHS access. This collaborative study aimed to understand barriers to healthcare access faced by families living on low incomes to validate and support further development of a Poverty Proofing© healthcare tool. Twenty-four parents and eight Voluntary Community Social Enterprise sector staff participated in qualitative interviews or focus groups. Data were analysed thematically, and three main themes were identified as impacting access to healthcare: hidden costs, securing appointments and developing relationships with healthcare providers. We conclude that low-income families experience both financial and other barriers to accessing NHS healthcare and that these barriers are exacerbated for low-income families living in remote/rural areas.

To gain a deeper understanding of the ways institutions work in partnership in research in times of adversity, this paper analyses what happened when people from two very different organizations, a university and a children’s charity, worked together on the VOICES research project during Covid-19. VOICES looked at how nearly 2000 children and young people in North East England were experiencing the pandemic. It was ambitious in its range of research methods (drawings, writing, focus groups and comics). We set out to co-produce all aspects of the research across the two organizations, and to find ways to work in partnership with children and young people. Universities have not always been successful in researching with NGOs as equal partners. The cross-agency University-NGO team surmounted methodological difficulties in the unprecedented social upheaval of the pandemic to talk to almost 2000 children. This paper analyses team actions and practices that enabled effective partnership despite the uncertainties. Research questions considered: 1) What team actions helped the project to go well; 2) What were difficulties in how the research team worked together? Were they overcome and if so how? Data included meeting notes and research team interviews. Analysis found a number of elements that characterized the effective ways that the team worked together including: trust building, being listened to, transparency in decision-making and creating a space together. Difficulties included recruiting schools and youth organizations during Covid-19, research team staffing problems, and adapting research methods to Covid-19 restrictions the team. Using ideas from socio-cultural historical activity theory we explore the development of common knowledge and relational agency between team members and to analyze how relational expertise enabled problem solving and expansive learning so that we had agile responses to the challenges.

This paper analyses a participatory method to involve young people with disabilities in research by using reflecting teams. In the course of the longitudinal project "Cooperation for Inclusion in Educational Transitions" on the transition from school to work of young people with disabilities, we examined ways to increase the participation of these people in the design and content of reflecting team sessions. In this regard, the reflecting team, more often used in a counseling context, was adapted to provide a special form of group discussion for participatory research with young people with different disabilities. The paper describes and discusses the adaptations that were made in the reflecting team research process. These adaptations included giving these young people, rather than a researcher, a role as moderator, inviting increased visualization within the reflecting process, and using an outsider-witness approach. Finally, we discuss the potential of the reflecting team for our participatory research with young people with disabilities.

One of the big issues that we are all facing in our lives and (to greater or lesser extent) in our research, is that of sustainable futures: how can we ensure that we are creating a world where everyone is empowered to ‘make informed decisions in favour of environmental integrity, economic viability and a just society for present and future generations’ (UNESCO 2021, p.1)? In relation to education, questions arise around what sustainable education means, and how sustainability relates to research methods in education. UNESCO’s sustainable development goals relate explicitly to the provision of ‘inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning education for all’ (United Nations 2015, p.18), and implicitly link to education in terms of the contribution that education can make in our progress towards all 17 sustainable development goals. Sustainable education, then, is both about ensuring our education is inclusive, equitable, and high-quality, and about learning how we can live in an environmentally and economically sustainable and socially just way, so we can create sustainable futures for forthcoming generations. Turning to research methods in education, these relate to sustainability in terms of the methods we use to research sustainable education, and to research education that helps make progress towards the SDGs, but also in terms of how we can ensure that our methods themselves have environmental integrity and are socially just. Last year’s double Special Issue in the International Journal of Research & Method in Education, on Racially-Just Methodologies (Rizvi 2022a, 2022b), brought to the fore conversations around racial and social justice in our methods. These conversations are continuing and are opening up discussions about what is valued as method and methodologies, and whose traditions are drawn upon in our approaches to research. Another strand to the conversation around sustainable research methods, however, also includes that of environmental sustainability. Below, we consider how one aspect of environmental sustainability that of international travel relates to building research relationships and sharing of ideas and ways of thinking, and as such might help us step beyond traditional colonial approaches to educational research methods. Aswemove into apost-covidworld,manyof us are enjoying the return to in-person interaction, but also valuing the flexibility that a more digitally-focused world brings. On the face of it, our increasing digital literacy (which the covid pandemic necessitated) has meant that we now have more flexibility in interactingwithothers fromaround theworld, andweareno longer reliant on international travel to meet with others. Researchers and academics were forced to become more digitally-literate as a profession during the pandemic (e.g. Keen et al. 2022; Roberts et al. 2021). This has meant that we have expanded our repertoire of what is ‘normal’ in terms of interaction with others. Meeting colleagues and research participants online is now commonplace, as is remote working. We have become used to working collaboratively with others in online fora and travel is no longer seen as necessary in research collaboration. We do not have to fly across the world to meet with our fellow researchers, when interaction by video chat andworking simultaneously on online documents is now so commonplace.Weexploreddigitalmethods and ‘E-research’ in our 2015 special issue, but the context ofwhat is possible and widely-used has moved on since then. As new technologies are developed, new possibilities for research and research collaboration open up, and newways of usingmore established technologies are also considered.

This chapter discusses the different types of researcher/participant relationship described in the case study chapters, alongside the extent to which the projects were (and could be) pre-defined in terms of structure and expected outcomes. The case studies ranged from secondary data analysis methods with no researcher/participant contact, those with structured one-off interviews, those with more ongoing, but still researcher-led, relationships between researcher and participant, to more ethnographic and participatory research where relationships were negotiated between researcher and participant and, in some cases, led by the participants. This chapter highlights that researcher/participant relationships lie parallel to the structure of the project and the extent to which the outcomes are pre-defined. Despite the range of types of relationship, however, all the case studies highlighted the value of trust in those relationships, for participants to feel happy to share the details of their personal lives beyond that which is usually visible in the formal education setting of school. Edwards' (2017a) concepts of relational agency, relational expertise and common knowledge are used to help explain why these relationships matter in research on out-of-school learning – to understand activities that we do not know about, which take places in spaces that we are unfamiliar with.

The chapter will explore a collaborative theory of change approach that the authors used to evaluate three projects. The three projects worked with young people out of school in different ways to enable the young people to become agents of change in tackling the causes of alcohol misuse in their local Scottish communities. A theory of change approach provides a way of conceptualising programmes from inception, through to implementation and the evaluation of outcomes, in order to develop an understanding of how they work, for whom and in what circumstances. Using a collaborative model of this approach challenged prevailing notions of evaluation being the job of the evaluator and situated evaluation as a shared endeavour with the project staff. We outline the key attributes of such a collaborative model of theory of change and reflect on how this model can contribute to the evaluation of out-of-school activity.

This chapter describes methodologies used in the project ‘Out-of-school activities and the education gap’. The project explored how the out-of-school environment affects children, whether it impacts on primary school attainment and whether it reinforces existing socioeconomic differences. A mixed-methods approach combined three areas of research: statistical analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) linked to the National Pupil Database (NPD); a qualitative study through interviews with key stakeholders in 10 schools in London and the North East and the articulation of theories of change for how out-of-school activities may affect attainment. Patterns in how children spend their time, and whether and how this affects attainment, were investigated by analysis of the MCS linked to the NPD. Qualitative research with parents, teachers, pupils and activity providers from schools in London and the North-East afforded an in-depth understanding of drivers and barriers influencing how children spend their time and pathways by which activities may affect children's learning and development. The qualitative research also provided a narrative intersectional analysis of responses in terms of class, gender, ethnicity, religion and disability. Mixing quantitative and qualitative research was made difficult by the volume of data and the time needed to analyse and report each area separately, the different nature of data in the three areas of research and the timing of each phase of data collection. However, meaningful combining of methods occurred at the level of research questions and contributed to a more critical analysis of children's out-of-school activities than had been possible before.

Research conducted over the last two decades supports the development of a collaborative model of working – a Children’s CommunityChildren's communities – that can respond to educational disadvantage. By working in partnership to provide support and opportunities for children and families ‘from cradle to career’ and across all aspects of their lives (e.g. education, health, employment), organisations aim to create a ‘tipping point’ at which the effects of poverty can be challenged effectively and outcomes for children are improved. Building on the concept of a ‘Zone’, several Children’s Communities are currently being developed across the UK. One such Children’s CommunityChildren's communities, in the inner west area of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in Northern England, has been led by a partnership (Trust) of 8 primary schools, and researchers from a local university. They have worked with local government, health services, local charities and the cultural sector to form a steering group which is driving the partnership to develop a vision for all children in the area, a robust long-term strategy for tackling disadvantage, and an effective set of actions. The development of this partnership has taken a long time and required an enhanced capacity for building relational power. During the process, conflicts of interest and cultural mismatches have been exposed, and accountability and autonomy questioned. The day to day demands of maintaining the collaboration have been considerable but developing relationships of trust and focusing on the wider vision have enabled the partnership to overcome some challenges, while others have proved more deep-seated and difficult to resolve. This chapter draws on the development of this collaborative model as a case study within which to highlight the learning that has emerged from working in partnership. It describes our progress as a partnership, the challenges that we have faced, and the solutions we have implemented, and analyses the risks inherent in the partnership that we were confronted with throughout the process.

This chapter explores how the case studies were ‘messy’ research. Because we were researching in contexts with many unknowns, the research process was unpredictable. ‘Tidying up’ the research in advance and working within clearly defined parameters was not usually possible. Across the case studies, mess occurred at different points and in different ways in the research process. For some projects, the design itself was subject to uncertainty and change; sometimes what had been planned was not possible; sometimes what had been planned was not the best course of action as the project progressed; and sometimes the design itself was emergent, requiring creativity and flexibility to meet the project outcomes. Some projects faced messiness when trying to combine methods and data. Others encountered messiness when collecting data, deciding what counted as data, and interpreting data. The real-world nature of our research and our need to be responsive to dynamic and often unknown out-of-school contexts meant that our methods could not fit into the neatly structured shorthand that is often used to think about (and teach about) methods. As researchers, we were constantly dealing with fluid and changing identities, as our relationships with participants and spaces developed during the project. This also means that tidying up our research could be counter-productive. The chapter concludes that making sense of mess in research can reveal understandings that are sometimes hidden. Mess and complexity, then, is something to be held on to, celebrated and engaged with, rather than tidied away.

This chapter explores community organising through the first four years of the Citizens alliance in North East England and the role of the civic university in the alliance. The university provided principal funding, strategic leadership (students and staff leading a number of action groups) and research particularly on poverty, mental health and Islamophobia. There have been many successful actions in achieving real living wage, addressing hate crime, and improving mental health provision although of course structural poverty and racism have not been solved. Citizens requires training, is a particular approach but through co-production many staff and students have played active indeed leading roles. Citizens has provided university students and researchers with a powerful form of action learning and a vehicle for relationship building across the institution. This continued during Covid-19 lockdown due to existing relationships and use of technology. This move towards a politics and social contract that prioritises social justice though community organising is now critical.

This chapter include signposting and a summary of the chapters in this section of the book.

The final chapter returns to some key questions in the light of these empirical accounts of social renewal. What role can civil society play in response to neoliberalism and austerity, and should this be a source of hope or despair? What can we learn about the role of academia and the civic university in helping communities to thrive in turbulent times? Finally, what will emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic? Civil society’s actions are important building blocks for recovery, hope and renewal, but much depends on which framing narrative will emerge and dominate after the crisis.