Civil society organizations influence on education policy development through direct work with schools and teachers

• In Event: Networking for sustained education reform: lessons from the network of education policy centers

Proposal

The paper will focus on NEPC's BRAVEdu project to showcase our strategy for influencing policy through direct work with schools and teachers. The BRAVEdu project, “Breaking the Poverty Taboo: Roles and Responsibilities of Education has its premises in the fact that poverty and social exclusion limit opportunities of individuals to achieve their full potential by affecting their wellbeing and lowering educational outcomes. The PISA 2015 reports and results confirm that students’ socioeconomic status (SES) has a significant bearing on performance, with those coming from low-SES households much more likely to be low achievers. The 2015 PISA results reveal that there is progress across Europe in reaching the EU benchmark of less than 15 % of low achievers in PISA. Estonia is preforming especially well and in science the percentage of low achievers is the lowest in Europe, at 8.8%. The overall objective of BRAVEdu proposal is to strengthen the capacity of schools in participating countries Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia to support disadvantage learners from low SES in active participation in school life and in achieving better learning outcomes through exploring and analysing policies and practices implemented in Estonia that enabled it to severely reduce the effect of low SES on student achievement and drawing lessons from it. Importantly the project in each country pairs up a CSO with a school as a partner thus allowing for greater participation and ownership of schools and teachers in both the implementation of activities and the development of the project outputs. The project outputs are twofold on one hand a policy report was developed as well as a handbook for schools and teachers on dealing with economic inequalities in schools. However the strategy was not only to advocate to policy makers in NEPC member countries but through work with teachers influence the schools to change practices. So the both bottom up and top down approaches were used. The paper will also briefly present the Handbook and how it is connected to Estonian polices that were described in the policy analytical report.
UNICEF study (2014). Social Monitor Regional Report Social protection for child rights and well-being in Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia https://www.unicef.org/eca/reports/social-monitor-regional-report
Paul Gorski (2008) The Myth of the Culture of Poverty April 2008 | Volume 65 | Number 7 Poverty and Learning Pages 32-36 3.
PISA in Focus http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/pisa-in-focus_22260919,
Eric Jensen (2013) How Poverty Affects Classroom Engagement, May 2013 | Volume 70 | Number 8
Faces of Poverty Pages 24-30

Author

• Svetlana Jurko, Network of Educational Policy Centers