Changing Communities: recognising schools as sites of transformation
Glasgow, Scotland, 2019

Educators from the five nations gathered in Glasgow in January 2019 for the Five Nations Network annual conference. The ambition of this conference was to re-visit some of the practical issues related to developing pupil knowledge and experiences of ‘active citizenship’, and to think more broadly about schools as social institutions with a civic mission, and teachers as members of those institutions who are civic actors in their own right. The aims of the conference were to:

• Discuss the role of schools in responding to change in communities and empowering teachers and pupils as agents of change
• Explore different approaches and pedagogies in developing pupils as active and informed democratic citizens
• Consider the opportunities and challenges for citizenship teaching in the different jurisdictions of the Five Nations Network
• Encourage new thinking and learning about citizenship education, teaching and practice and promote dialogue and collaboration across the five nations.

Download the conference programme

In advance of the conference, delegates were provided with a briefing note, written by Lee Jerome, Associate Professor of Education, Middlesex University and England Country Lead.

Keynotes, workshops and seminars

Our conference opened with three guest speakers. Amal Azzudin - one of the ‘Glasgow Girls’ and a human rights campaigner - and her former school teacher Euan Girvan shared their experiences of challenging those in power around the treatment of asylum seekers. Claire Dunphy, a primary school teacher in Scotland, then shared how she uses this story in the citizenship classroom.

The second day opened with a keynote by Dan Firth, the Labour Party’s Director of Community Organising, who shared his views on the need to invigorate more young people to take up political action.

Participants then had the chance to attend two of four fantastic workshops and seminars - two led by teachers on their own experiences of empowering students to tackle challenging issues, one about teaching controversial issues and one about how to remove financial barriers to education that some children experience using a whole school community approach.

Watch films and access resources from keynotes, workshops and seminars

Five Nations Development Projects (FNDPs)

Four short, focused FNDPs were funded in advance of the conference to allow teachers in schools to take forward a range of citizenship and values education projects:
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• Revolution Youth: Power of the Youth (Aylward Academy, England)
• Mixed Media: Mayflower Voyage (Woodlands Special School, England)
• From Deliberation to Action (Our Lady and St Patrick’s College Knock, Northern Ireland)
• Inclusion: addressing difference and inequality (St. Eunan's Primary School, Scotland)

​Four teachers attended the conference and shared their findings through poster presentations. Five Nations Development Projects