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Obstacles in forming partnerships

21 July, 2015 - 17:38

Through its Educational Project 2009-2011, AEVH identifies as a barrier/obstacle to partnership with families, the remoteness of parents and guardians from school life, stating that their active participation in school activities is a success factor of that partnership. On the other hand, the Local Authority’s Educational Charter, a document produced by CMM, recognizes the authority/influence of the School concerning educational services, and even its autonomy, while showing the CMM organization’s strategy of collaborating with the School in carrying out its mission.

It is also of note that none of the interviewees referred to the role of parents or the need to involve them in achieving education for entrepreneurship, and in particular, in the EMPRE project, despite their involvement being foreseen in the project’s supporting documentation. In this particular aspect of the involvement of parents as partners in activating entrepreneurship education programmes, the evidence of this study does not confirm the conclusions of  1 and  2 that parents are becoming a pressure group able to influence the school curriculum, despite recognizing their authority and desiring their intervention and collaboration in those programmes. Indeed, in the documents guiding AEVH, there is an expressed wish to involve parents and families in school life, but their remoteness is also mentioned and considered a barrier to forming partnerships with these actors.

At this moment, the challenge for AEVH seems to be to get parents involved somehow in the activities developed at school rather than obtaining their support for decisions concerning the curriculum to implement. The lack of parental effort in implementing EEP, in particular, could be due to considering it as an exclusive sphere of action for the school and its professionals, regarding the school curriculum and the trust placed in the community’s institutions to lead these programmes.

This study does not confirm reluctance by the school and its professionals to be exposed to public scrutiny nor an attitude of mistrust by teachers or the head regarding the community’s legitimacy to contribute to pupils’ scholastic success, as has been mentioned in the literature on School-Community partnerships, namely in the study by 3. However, in the interview with the head of AEVH, it is evident there is a certain discomfort in elements of the school caused by the loss of absolute control of the process, as a result of forming partnerships. Despite that and the merely informal appreciation of the results of the partnerships, their continuation assumes the result is positive.

The following quotations give other empirical evidence of the barriers felt by the partners involved in these inter-organizational partnerships.

  • The universe of young people focused on could perhaps mean a limited success rate. Partners’ participation in school activities could be more frequent, partners could devote more time to the relationship with the school (…). The existence of specific funding to channel to EMPRE could benefit the relationship” (Mayor of CMM).
  • The absence of a global strategy for the medium and long term of educational authorities to take advantage of existing resources implies work repeated annually in launching the partnership” (Tagus Valley coordinator). Also for the person in charge of this organization, “the EMPRE Project begins very late in each school year, due to the need to repeat each year the process of launching the partnership with the school, because of the lack of a global policy and m.l.p. of the educational authorities”. The“lack of funds, the need to contact the school administration at the start of each school year to renew the partnership, leading to a delay in beginning the EMPRE Project in the school year”, is also pointed out by the EMPRE coordinator as a barrier forming partnerships.

In this context, the head of AEVH underlines that the “partnerships imply a loss of absolute control of the process, a loss of decision-making capacity and immediate intervention. The EMPRE Project appears to be already formatted, necessitating adjustment without the possibility of altering the format; lack of accompaniment in the 3rd edition (…)”.

The head of this Group of Schools also highlights that“there are not many institutions that can add unequivocal bonuses in a project of entrepreneurship education (…). There is “little diversity of partners and partners do not have enough time to deal with the school’s needs”. The lack of finance was another obstacle identified by this interviewee in implementing EEP in the school.