“There are strengths that are vast”

In 2019, for the first time since the 1970s, the majority of people in the UK described themselves as ‘dissatisfied with democracy’.1 This dissatisfaction has many causes, but, according to Harry Quilter-Pinner from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), key factors include the disjoint between the lives people hoped to lead and the lives they are living, combined with a lack of confidence in governments’ ability to tackle the challenges that matter to citizens.2

According to Essex School of political theorists, the perceived failures of representative democracy are the origins of populism – in which people's grievances are brought together and expressed as a hostile rejection of an ‘out-of-touch elite’.3 Yet Education – Power – Change, a new book telling the stories of school-based projects supported by the charity Citizens’ UK, offers hope that a dissatisfied descent into populism and polarisation is not inevitable.4 The citizen activists featured in the book's case studies hint at a more optimistic and inclusive manifesto for revitalised communities, with democracy at their heart.

As members of communities on the sharp-end of the trends described by Quilter-Pinner, you might expect the individuals featured in the book to have given up on the system – rejecting it, refusing to be part of it, and instead carving off new and alternative enclaves. But that hasn't been their approach. Instead, Janice Allen, a headteacher in Rochdale, argues that these citizens were creating ‘liminal spaces’; spaces at a threshold that make politicians pause, and that precipitate a profound response which prompts them to think differently about how they respond to social problems.

Frustrations with power structures often come from the sense that they are impenetrable, but rather than rejecting existing structures, these citizen activists refused to accept boundaries and opened up new routes across divides. In order to do so, they refused to be bound by conventionality and carefully calibrated how much tension to create between themselves and those they sought to influence. In other words, they did not stand outside the system and throw stones, they demanded to be let in so that they could sit with those in power and negotiate change together.

Individuals and communities can unleash surprising power when they span ‘structural holes’ and mobilise the “bridging capital” that the American Sociologist, Robert Putnam describes as “sociological WD-40”6. Putnam critiques the rise of “mere card-carrying membership organisations” where people pay their fees and outsource their voice, a form of participation that fails to bring people together and build the bonds nurtured by civic participation.

The participation catalogued in Education – Power – Change is of a very different ilk to ‘mere card-carrying’, shrinking the distance between decision makers and citizens by unleashing what Community Organiser Hannah Gretton goes on to call, ‘relational power’, or, ‘power with’. In the city of Bradford, students penned a manifesto in which they demanded to be “partners in policymaking.” As Natasha Boyce realised through her anti-racism work with the Stephen Lawrence Ambassadors in Leicestershire, “the key to success in working towards systemic change is having close proximity to power”.

Relational power or ‘power with’ is about far more than the passive power of ‘the consulted’. As Esol Teachers Dermot Bryers and Kasia Blackman argue, it involves a much greater degree of respect and accountability. It is also far more unpredictable – as the story of Mohana demonstrates. Having been a Maths teacher in India, Mohana struggled to navigate systems and language barriers when she arrived in the UK, to the point where she was frightened to leave home. However, as she began to find her voice as an activist, her leadership potential was unleashed and she galvanised her community in pursuit of social change.

The same happened when a vanguard of young Stephen Lawrence ambassadors began to share their work with a network of Leicestershire schools. Meanwhile, in Lewisham, it was only when parents at St Mary's CE primary were brought together and compared their experiences that they discovered the overlaps in their concerns – unleashing their collective will to pursue change.

There is no getting away from the need for ‘patient tilling of the soil’ to prepare the ground for action as Hannah Gretton puts it (quoting civil rights organiser Ella Baker). And herein lies a paradox that Dermot and Kassia from LoveEsol put their finger on: “we organise because we don't have money but to a certain extent we need money to organise”.

As key civic institutions, schools can play an important role in pump-priming and getting the ball rolling, as James O'Connell-Lauder from Dixons Academies Trust explains. Dixons is part of a group of multi-academy trusts that came together to fund a local Citizens’ Alliance. Ultimately, organising for change is not a free-for-all, and it is called ‘organising’ for a reason. Investing in the structure matters.

If our society, and the next generation in particular, are to stand a chance of bouncing back, then a reinvigorated collectivism in some form or other is surely our only hope, offering a powerful alternative to populist anger, polarisation, and disempowerment. As Jon Yates argues in Fractured, “the crisis of Covid has distanced us from each other. We see anew how far apart we are. The result must be a new way to bring us together”.8 Schools must surely be at the heart of this, and the stories in Education – Power – Change paint a picture of what that might look like.