Levelling Up Education:

New Approaches to Place, Work and Education

Hosted by the Manchester Institute of Education (MIE) and the Academic College

Day ONE: 2-6pm, 15 June 2022

Day TWO: 9:30am-1pm, 16 June 2022

Participants include:

Kate Green MP, former Shadow Minister for Education

Prof Ruth Lupton, Honorary Professor of Education , MIE

Prof Richard Jones, Vice President for Regional Innovation and Civic Engagement, University of Manchester

Dr Eric Lybeck, Presidential Fellow, MIE

The event will be HYBRID with live talks in the Beyer Lecture Theatre in the Old Quadrangle of the University of Manchester, Oxford Rd. These will also be livestreamed via the Academic College and recordings will be available after the event.

The event is FREE, but we would ask that you register indicating whether you will be attending in person, online or via catch-up (subscribe to Academic College).

#LevelUpEd

For over 40 years, a liberal, individualistic approach to education has dominated policy and pedagogy based on the assumption that more education leads to greater social mobility. While true for select talented (and lucky) individuals, it is becoming increasingly clear that aggregate levels of mobility across dimensions of class, ethnicity, gender, migration status and more have stagnated or are declining. Even more troubling: the expansion of credentials without corresponding growth in jobs may well be producing greater precarity across all occupations and statuses. Culturally, this condition produces swelling resentment amongst non-credentialled, often older, populations against professional, political and media ‘establishments’ — who too often return this disdain through blanket dismissals of others’ intelligence. Meanwhile, younger student populations experience crisis levels of anxiety earlier and earlier in life as all are compelled to compete in this overheating hamster wheel. The global popularity of Squid Game is testament to the scale of shared experience of this damaging liberal paradigm around the world.

Yet, bringing the particularities of regions and ‘place’ back into our analysis only intensifies awareness of these emergent dynamics. Clearly some places are doing better than others at reproducing and aggregating the social advantages that education is designed to make and distribute. Further, disadvantaged places too often exhibit multiple, overlapping forms of social deprivation, of which educational attainment is just one element in systemic, place-specific problems. The government in the UK have begun talk of ‘Levelling Up’ regional economies, though they retain a Schumpeterian faith in technology that has also failed to deliver on promises in recent decades.

We need to begin to rethink education from the ground(s) up. We need to ask new questions including:

• Does everyone and every place require the same education?
• Can we rethink the ‘ends’ of education as being not just academic/university credentials?
• How has the pandemic and changes to hybrid working effected the relationship between education, work and place?
• Can we remove ‘deficit’ thinking in education, by reflecting on places as systems where all contribute and learn in different ways?
• Can we rethink the way advanced knowledge — both intellectual and practical/craft knowledge — are integrated and developed in places?
• Can we usefully develop typologies of different knowledge ecologies that are suited to, for example, post-industrial towns or seaside villages?
• Can we develop (in fact, recover) place-based education and curriculum?
• How do we co-develop these kinds of place-based curricula with communities themselves?
• Can we map and understand the overlapping dynamics between power, place and knowledge? What are some major regional differences to consider alongside education?
• Can we contribute to policy discussion around ‘levelling up’ through well-conceived strategies to link research, policy and practice?
• Can we critically interrogate the idea of ‘levelling up’? Who do we privilege and who do we exclude by prioritising this frame?
• What does ‘Levelling Up’ mean in a global context? Do the term and issues apply elsewhere?
• Can we develop a non-individualistic, civic approach to education that understands these relational dynamics between place, work and knowledge?
• And, countless other questions rooted in any number of national, disciplinary, professional, and political backgrounds. All are welcome!

Read more about Place-based Education Policymaking HERE: https://blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk/posts/2022/03/levelling-up-education-what-place-based-education-could-look-like/

Full Programme:

15 June

2-3pm – Introduction and Documentary (Richard Jones)

3-4 – Panel

- Nidia Banuelos (Advancing Community Cultural Wealth: Early Findings from the Networks and Cultural Assets Study (NACA))

- Paolo Caffoni (The Digital Walls of the University: New Metrics of Labour, Education and Mobility in the COVID-19 Crisis)

(break)

4:30-5:30 – Panel

- Natalie Cunningham and Chantelle Wyley (How do the experiences, perceptions and needs of leaders in the International Development sector inform lifelong teaching and learning approaches and strategies?)

- Sophie Atherton (Levelling-up for trans and non-binary youth)

16 June

9:30-11 – Panel

- Drew Whitworth (Discursive mapping: Informed learning through a place-based pedagogy in HE)

- Elizabeth Mason-Hale (Continuing Forward: Rethinking Education and Educational Equity)

- Karen Healey (Role of parent participation in decision making by school governance: local knowledge experts)

(break)

11:30-12 – Eric Lybeck (Education as a placemaking vocation)

12-1 – Plenary discussion

- Ruth Lupton

- Kate Green MP

See video links below at time listed above or view directly on YouTube. Your comments and questions there will be visible to our moderators in the conference room.