Should schools take the lead on public health and the Big Society?

This article was originally published in the Sept/Oct 2010 Edition of Government Gazette.

Education debate in recent months seems to have been about how embarrassing the Building Better Schools fiasco was - how many times does Michael Gove have to apologise to the House - and how little public interest there seems to be in the Government's Free Schools initiative.

The only other recent innovation is Ed Milliband suggesting he will look at the way grammar school ballots are conducted; still a live issue in the local authority where I was a local Councillor in for 20 years. However will anyone reopen the issue when so few schools are involved? In any case parents in those areas may easily be driven to stick to the status quo if they fear a cap on aspiration.

However, are there other parts of the Government's agenda that could be much more interesting to schools in the long-run?

In the last 10-15 years we have heard a lot about about the concept of "schools in the community" and have seen some advances with:

• Shared community sports facilities
• Children's Centres - often based at schools
  
• Safer Neighbourhood Teams working out of school sites

Nevertheless, despite the "community" terminology, these have often been about the delivery of big government programmes and large revenue streams, rather than local capacity building. Outside of some regeneration areas, the school as the hub of the community is still perhaps a concept rather than a reality.

There are also new challenges, most of all overshadowed by the current financial situation:

• The commitment to Social Mobility, something the Liberal Democrats may want to stress as their distinctive coalition contribution. The appointment of Alan Milburn seems a sensible thing to reach across the political divide after their joint anti-Labour press conference with the Conservatives earlier in the Silly Season
  
• Widening Health Inequalities - the right-wing think-tank attack on the Spirit Level's statistics over the summer show this is still a live issue
  
• Community resilience in response to public expenditure reductions
  

The Big Society has been advanced by the Prime Minister and more recently by the Deputy Prime Minister as an approach to address some of these issues. However this seems to be characterised at a local level as simply "helping you to help yourself" when it additionally needs to be framed as helping poor communities to "help each other" and also be described in such a way that it is seen as a motivator for those who are more intrinsically driven to "help others".

Can schools play more of a role here? I think so. Looking at the challenges I outlined, here are some thoughts:

• Social Mobility - Schools can play a much bigger role in locally marketing education to communities where it might be undervalued. Does the average primary school, know which of its pupils went on to University. Most of us have had computers and databases on our desks for over 20 years,so can they start thinking the importance of their success stories to the young people that follow. Too often in the poorest communities, the outflow of success, is not reported back years later thus allowing a negative culture of low-aspiration to be reinforced.
  
• Public Health - The transfer of public health funding to local authorities could see a small public health team swamped in the culture of a local authority. Education is the biggest local spend and is all about supporting people's ability. However as the forthcoming Public Health White Paper should show, Behaviour Change theory also recognises the importance of motivation and at last this is being looked at in collective action terms rather than left to American self-help books. Schools could develop their role here using mentoring. Linked into this the biggest national public health campaign Change4Life about childhood health eating may be moving away from advertising campaigns and into encouraging businesses to support local initiatives. Schools could provide the useful delivery point for the next stage of Change4Life supported by public/private collaboration. It would almost certainly be better than McDonald's simply sponsoring some Change4Life event to a wall of cynicism.
  
• Community Resilience - Too often when we talk about the Big Society it seems to be about getting a few more volunteers to work at libraries. Yet there is a history of volunteering with PTA's and people helping on school trips. Can this be expanded? Perhaps less so in the school itself and much more in terms of local school community outreach, perhaps improving local social networks where negative outlooks and behaviours are more prevalent. Local authorities are beginning to appreciate the importance of tapping into local word of mouth and schools could play a bigger role here, linking into the two previous issues.
  

So rather than focus on a few free schools, perhaps Michael Gove should look a lot more at his Cabinet colleagues agenda and seize some opportunities to support local schools to become the real embodiment of the Big Society and also the key base for supporting the new public health agenda.

Towards a Behaviour Change 2.0?

Behaviour change is likely to rise up the public policy agenda in the coming months. The publication of the Public Health White Paper in December is likely to lead a significant debate as to how government led behaviour change strategies should develop.

Elsewhere I have looked at the rising importance of less direct approaches to behaviour change; where a specific behavioural outcome is a corollary of the intervention; as an alternative to more traditional directly targeted behavioural interventions. I have also looked at the concept of Obliquity , similar in many ways to Systems Thinking, which states that in a complex system, the factors involved are too numerous and too intricately connected to be easily understood. Therefore, just as we cannot be sure that long-range weather forecasts won't be affected by some unforeseen influence, we cannot be sure that single-mindedly striving for a single behavioural change is most likely to lead to desired outcome. In any case, it is increasingly recognised that some of the challenges of public policy are also too intractable for top down solutions, hence the current Big Society debate in seeking to tackle them in different ways. In developing a wider palette of approaches, I argued in the earlier posting that social networks are something that may underpin obliquity.

Rather than also seeing these various approaches as being different or in conflict with each other, perhaps the better analogy is the difference between Web 1.0 which is of course still exists in the form of static websites and the addition of the more complex, socially interactive Web 2.0.

The more directly targeted interventions of "Behaviour Change 1.0" should still be applied and evaluated and no doubt may build a proven track record. However a more networked Obliquity based intervention of "Behaviour Change 2.0" could also strengthen local community cohesion, resilience and social norms and thus contribute to the success of a range of more direct interventions.

We cannot simply make or impose new social networks. They have to evolve. However In order to understand and support the development of better social networks a number of things might help:

1. A Values Based `multiple psychological index' built on internationally recognised research such as the World Values Survey. Just as the Multiple Deprivation Index helps us better appreciate the wider picture of needs, a `multiple psychological index’ helps us better appreciate the wider picture of individual and community level motivational triggers. These may cross a whole number of public policy issues and make us all think in terms of a much wider, perhaps more indirect, approach. This measure of psychological values is something academic and market research may need to include far more in its studies, along with traditional measures of demographics such as occupational class. Increasingly old classifications are proving inadequate to the task as society gets more complex and old social demarcations dissolve in the light of globalisation and technological change.

2. An oblique approach to informal interventions that concentrates on identifying a wider range of people who might be able to contribute within the community. Once identified the aim would then be to support and expand their role so they make the individual connections to build stronger local networks within their community. We have commented before, how too often when one "Googles" the postcode of a poor community, one finds lots of information on outside public bodies and not on people actually living within the community. Local support could then assist with the building of local local social capital at a personal and social level rather than just at a structural and institutional one, as has often been the case in public policy in the recent past. This sort of intervention could then contribute more broadly to reducing negative social behaviours, through perhaps creating new local social norms. In this case the approach might also be built through a wider mix of individual, public and private sector funding (perhaps also through secondments, mentoring and training) along with voluntary sector and individual involvement at a local level. The emphasis might then be on "helping local people to help their community, themselves and to help others" rather than just the direct public interventions of the past.

Just like in Web 2.0, the elements for the approach described above are potentially already around. The real challenge is how to combine them effectively. That is why hopefully the Public Health White Paper will not just allow experimentation, but also incentivise it and invest in at least some of the innovation risks.

Making it happen

The development of these new approaches is at a very early stage. In order to make this happen we next need:

1. More research into the operation of social networks and also the deeper relationships within them. Paul Ormerod's very recent RSA essay on the types of social network seems to be a way forward in defining the various types for further research.

2. A wider shared approach to psychological measurement, building on the common typology developed in the World Values Survey.

3. Deeper insight and communications and a values based language to address communities that enables one to more effectively intervene obliquely.

To understand any social network we clearly need to understand the individual relationships within it, so perhaps there is also a more "emotional" and empathic approach to behaviour change as well. I will explore that aspect more in another posting.

Understanding Networks and Behaviour

This blog is about sharing thoughts in a range of fields that I am interested in, namely:

Community Engagement, Community Cohesion, Behaviour change for a social good, Social Marketing, Service Transformation, Co-production, Mutualisation, Social Psychology, Behavioural, Attention and Complexity Economics, Complexity Theory, Systems Thinking, Social network mapping, Social media, Bridging social capital, Emotionally intelligent narratives, Cognitive dissonance, Community resilience, Inequalities and inequality of capability, Social mobility, Theories of demotivation, Needs development, Reframing Maslow's heirarchy, Values based segmentation, Peer to peer communications, Community organising.

Unlike other stuff I write in either a professional or political capacity, the aim is to be more experimental and to explore issues without assuming this is a correct line of thinking.

Hopefully it will lead to some interesting lines of enquiry.....