Successive British, and international, Governments have concurrently promulgated the professionalisation of school governance, perfecting technologies of rational self-management (Wilkins, 2019a), and the marketisation of education. Subsequently, key principles of democracy: inclusion; representation; participation; and empowerment, are now secondary to narrow, instrumentalised conceptions of good governance and market principles (Wilkins, 2014). The focus on skill-over-stake and the removal of stakeholders from local school governance raises questions over stakeholder representation and the accountability of English school governance to be responsive to community and parental needs (Woods and Simkins, 2014). Thus, creating a democratic deficit. Significantly, some schools, Co-operative Academies Trust (CAT) schools, maintain a commitment to technical-managerial and democratic priorities owing to their sponsorship model (Hetherington and Forrester, 2022; Davidge et al., 2017). The CAT is a Multi-Academy Trust, which are groups of publically-funded, private schools existing under the direction of a sponsor, in this case, the Coop Group.

The CAT is legally bound by its sponsor, the Coop Group, to adhere to international values of co-operativism, including a commitment to democracy. This empirical research explored the extent to which the value of democracy was evident in the CAT’s engagement with parents as decision-makers, in line with its values and documentation. This case study is of one CAT academy. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with the academy principal, chair of governors and three parent governors, as well as a focus group with five members of the parent forum. To evaluate the effectiveness of the polity’s deliberative democratic processes, three lenses of deliberative democracy were used: Dryzek’s (2017) inclusivity, consequentiality, and authenticity; Erman’s, (2012) political bindingness and equality and Hendriks’ (2009) exploration of power with or over the polity. The research is significant nationally and internationally, given the tension between the neoliberal imperative and the democratic deficit associated with governance currently (Hardin, 2014), and the concurrent tension with democratic practices associated with co-operative values (Wilkins, 2019b).

Findings show that parent representatives are typically not representative of the wider community. The Local Governing Body (LGB) tends to be raced and classed, (Kulz, 2021; Reay et al., 2007) and policy implementation is particularly impactful on social groups such as parents or community members of low socioeconomic status, women and non-white Others. Furthermore, the parent representatives' perception of deliberative democracy tends to be overshadowed by an accepted illusion of democracy within the LGB-empowered space, achieved with engineered consent (Locatelli, 2020). ‘Anti-democratic’ and exclusionary practices emerge through privileged speech patterns (Curato et al., 2017), ‘silencing’ and ‘civilising’ opportunities to deliberate policies and practices in the public space. Lastly, findings show neoliberal school governance is unscathed through the strategic co-option of carefully selected ‘trusted’ parent governors who privilege technocracy and upward accountability.

Upholding co-operative values, nationally and internationally, in deliberative democratic systems, has potential to challenge, should inculcated leadership (re)visit cooperative and democratic structures. There are implications for reimagining genuine co-opervatism and particularly democracy in school governance at a time when schools are being brought under the control of new post-neoliberal sponsorship models removed from traditional structures of government.

This paper responds to a profound questioning school evaluation frameworks. Through an engagement with the flowering of co-operative schooling and the school inspection framework in England (OFSTED) the paper explores the principles and possibilities for evaluation of schooling which includes consideration of the purposes of schools.

Mainstream state co-operative schools In England were based on legal models which stipulated the defence of co-operative values that included democracy solidarity, equity, equality, self-help and self-responsibility (Woodin and Gristy, 2022; Woodin, 2017; 2019). This paper is informed by the work of a co-operative education research group (CERG), consisting of schoolteachers and university research staff working in co-operative schools (Gristy et al, 2015). The CERG aimed to be a collaborative research community, using co-operative principles and values as a guide for their work together (Stevahn, 2013). The work of this group included the surfacing of the tensions in working co-operatively in fiercely uncooperative and uncollaborative school and university environments and engaged directly with the central tautology between co-operative schooling and the evaluation judgement framework under which schools were operating.

The high stakes school inspection OFSTED framework that operates in England has impacted on the way all schools operate (Fielding, 2001). Schools working to the co-operative values found themselves at odds with the framework against which they were judged (Dennis, 2019; Facer, 2012). Amongst co-operative school leaders in the research group, there was real fear of the risks of ‘failure’ on the very narrow range of metrics on ‘achievement data’ by which their schools were judged.

Current market-oriented contexts for much of education and schooling in Western democracies, focus on accountability where standards and assessment are emphasized. Schools in neoliberal contexts tend to be driven by data, market forces, choice and individualism. Neoliberal education practices may be considered antagonistic to practices of co-operative education model and the development of the collection of co-operative public schools in England is a very useful space to consider evaluation of schooling in contemporary times.

In England, as in many other countries, there is a currently a profound questioning of high stakes accountability and inspection systems and their work that standardises schooling. This period of questioning offers opportunities to consider other ways to evaluate the work of schools such as co-operative schools which include collective and communitarian objectives.

This paper goes onto consider approaches to evaluation of education provisions that might be useful in an opening up of thinking about public schooling and its work, particularly co-operative and democratic schooling. These approaches include the evaluation of other public services and community benefit societies with the associated ideas of social impact (Social Value UK, 2024) and social auditing (Speckley, 1981), the European Councils’ reference framework of competences of democratic culture (Council for Europe, 2016) Fielding et al’s (2006) work ‘establishing a new rigour’ when evaluating the working of schools.

This work on evaluation leads to fundamental thinking on the purpose of public schooling and a revisiting of the objectives of formal education that any evaluation would be working to assess.

In recent decades education has been accorded a much higher priority in most parts of the world. Yet it remains a paradox that the policy attention to education and learning has also led to a focus upon technical measures and specific forms of schooling and education at the expense of others, for instance adult education and holistic conceptions. One source for rethinking education and learning is the history and range of co-operative and mutual enterprises and community based educational initiatives. Co-operation, mutuality and community initiatives have a long history of affinity with education and learning. Co-operatives have been recognised as forms of self-help in which members learn to work together, to build and extend business and community activities – participation itself is seen as inherently educational. In addition, examples such as the British consumer movement reveal a line of popular educational practices relating to citizenship, culture, business, social science to name a few. The co-op has often been an innovator in helping to develop reading rooms, libraries, adult education classes and other forms. Moreover, the codification of the values and principles of co-operation emphasised the role of learning and training which helped to stimulate a process of adapting existing forms as in the formation of co-operative schools in England from the early 2000s. In this way, co-operative ideas and practices fed indirectly into various forms of state and community education (for example, Woodin and Shaw 2019).

This presentation will reflect on these various initiatives and draw out key themes, principles and ideas that contribute to an understanding of what democratic co-operative education might look like. In doing so, I will engage with some recent examples of work in this area (for instance, Moss and Fielding 2011; Brighouse 2022). Competing and contested notions of community and democracy can obviously be used to challenge some contemporary educational assumptions. Yet I will also explore how far it is possible to respond to current assumptions about the organisation of education and learning which itself reveals many contradictions.

This paper-in-progress is inspired by a three-year research project, which investigated the co-operative schools project in England, an experimental education initiative of the Co-operative Group and the Co-operative College, UK (Dennis, 2018, 2019: Woodin and Gristy, 2022). This follow-up work seeks to reflect upon and develop that empirical study, using it as a springboard to develop further ideas about what a fully theorised co-operative pedagogy might look like, and to consider important questions about the possibilities of co-operative education, in a contemporary context that is so often defined by competition. The paper positions Spinoza’s (1996) ontology of co-operation as one pathway for navigating the confounding issues that are present within the dominant neoliberal agenda of marketisation, privatisation, individualism, competition (Mills, 2015), arguing that Spinoza’s ‘collective individual’ offers an alternative ontological positioning to the utility maximizing individual of the neoliberal subject,

Spinoza’s theory is based on a form of ‘collective individualism’, which emphasises the co-operative power of the collective individual and, as such, offers a relational way of being together, implying forms of expression that are dynamic, ethical, affirmative and democratic (Gatens and Lloyd, 1999; Read 2015).  For Spinoza, expanding the collective individual is our ethical responsibility. That is, by attending to our own and others becoming. Therefore, we can see how this is significant question for education settings - a school that places co-operation at the heart of what it is, is a community that is committed to the expansion of the collective individual.

Using a selection of empirical examples, this paper explores this theory and its possibilities further, using it to imagine the ways in which transindividual co-operation might operate in contemporary education contexts. The paper explores how co-operative education is possible and why it might be desirable. It raises questions about who co-operates, and with whom. It considers the possibility and potential of co-operative learners, pedagogies and schools, and it explores what happens when co-operation fails and disagreement occurs.

This paper concludes that a narrow emphasis on policy and governance to engender school improvement and raise standards overlooks the necessary role of pedagogy in school transformation. It demonstrates how Spinoza’s theory of co-operative power, which relies on collective transindividual relationships, allows for a rethink of school transformation through a dynamic co-operative pedagogy. This alternative foundation offers a productive lens through which to reconfigure co-operative education, with wider implications for the reimagination of schools and their communities.