Hardman, MA; (2010) Learning to Teach in ‘Urban Complex Schools’. In: Durant, Danny, (ed.) Proceedings of the BERA Conference 2010. BERA: Coventry, UK.

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Abstract

Ofsted’s (2003) report into access and achievement in urban education suggested that the gap in achievement at GCSE between deprived urban secondary schools and the national average continued to grow between 1993 and 2002. Recognition of the additional issues presented by urban education still dominates education today and urban education has become a political battleground. Those of us working within urban settings are familiar with the issues of cultural and linguistic diversity, parental disengagement with the education system, lack of role models, gang culture and a host of other issues which contribute to making teaching in these environments challenging. In some schools this becomes a vicious cycle of not being able to recruit and train teachers to deal with these issues within a school and subsequently the quality of education continuing to decline. To break this problem down I intend to first of all draw on a growing theoretical field of complexity science to try and elucidate what complexity means in these settings. Secondly I wish to outline two studies to see whether this conceptualisation of schools as complex might be useful to student teachers and those who work with them.

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