Formación continuada no universitaria

Abraham Moss High School (AMHS),

Location: Crescent Road, Cheetham Hill and Crumpsall Ward, Manchester. United Kingdom.

AMHS is selected for the case study in this research study. AMHS is a secondary school. The school is located in Cheetham Hill and Crumpsall ward. The school provides education for students from age 12 to 17 that lives in the Cheetham Hill and Crumpsall ward area since it first opened in 1973.

Like many other community schools in England, AMHS has worked together for its community under the 2006 Extended Schools policy to provide a range of services and activities that help meet the needs of students, families and the wider community. Since the UK‘s education system highly encourages building the relationship between schools and their wider communities in terms of community cohesion, AMHS has worked on the expectations more than what the education systems required (Ofsted, 2009b).

AMHS provides facilities and services that maintains and optimises its purpose and provides basic needs for its local communities (Filkins, 2010). The school often gives services and plays a key role in facilitating space for every new community to meet and existing local charities to grow (Boylan et al., 2008). Services often take place outside of normal school hours and can include access to childcare, sports and music or learning support. In 2012, AMHS completed its re-development project at a cost of around £17 million under Manchester‘s Building School for Future (BsF) programme which purpose was to provide top quality new buildings and ICT facilities.

A good school provides more accessibility than other community facilities in the area and the

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school is also a significant aspect of the social setting and they should not be disregarded. Moreover, schools, especially the secondary type always come with facilities for educational support and curriculums. The Abraham Moss High School (AMHS) in Cheetham Hill and Crumpsall in Case Study 1 basically consists of one main hall, school sports facilities, dining room, training centre and football pitch that are ready to be used by the locals for a period of time, subject to the school rules and regulations implemented by the school management committees. During term time, these facilities are recommended to be used from 6 pm – 9 pm from Monday to Friday and 9 am – 5 pm on Saturday and Sunday or during the non-term school session, the accessible opening time will be from 9 am – 9 pm from Monday to Friday and 9 am – 5 pm on Saturday and Sunday. Alternatively, part of these facilities is also useable on a one off basis in the evening or at the weekend on request.

6.1.1. Description of interviewees

All in all, 40 in-depth interviews were conducted for this research. The first 15 interviews were conducted for Case Study 1 in Manchester, United Kingdom in 2011 and the second 15 interviews were done for Case Study 2 in Malacca, Malaysia, in early 2012. The following 10 interviews were then continued from both case studies as to present the main findings in refining the initial framework.

Most of the interviewees represented those who were acquainted with the multi-racial demographic composition of both case studies. They also tend to be those who were both knowledgeable and had experience of working together with the locals towards having harmony living in a multiracial neighbourhood environment.

Interviewees were respondents who had been initially selected using a convenience snowball sampling technique as explained earlier. This is due to the standard procedure of data collection in most grounded theory approach; data collection with unexpected sources became more significant to this research as it highlighted the originality of the phenomena under study.

In the scenario for Case Study 1 which was in the United Kingdom, the community living and were active in the Cheetham Hill and Crumpsall area were of different ethnic groups. As previously mentioned in Chapter 4, most of the data (ten respondents) was provided by different individual interviewees who each represented their own local ethnic community groups. There were six major ethnic community associations representing Pakistanis,

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Libyans, Jewish, Irish, Africans and Malaysians who lived in the case study area. Within the 15 in-depth interviews, all interview sessions were conducted privately. The interviewees were made up of two Pakistani males, two African males, two Libyan males, one Jewish female, one Irish female and two Malaysians, of which one male and one female. Interviews were mainly conducted in English. As for the subsequent interviews (five respondents) at the Abraham Moss High School, four were with the school governor and the representative of the governors and the last one was with a caretaker of the school facilities. Effectively 21 individual people were interviewed; however, six of them did not give enough information during the interview session, so they were taken out from the list, as they were of no value to the research.

6.1.2. Scope of Interviews

Expanding on the research aim and objectives that guided the entire data collection process of this research, most of the questions for the interview referred to the background information from the literature review which was done earlier in Chapter 2 and 3 of the research. The questions that were asked to the interviewee were not always referred from a standardised list of questions posed to all interviewees. Instead, a list of semi-structured questions was prepared as both a guide and reminder of the areas that the research was going to cover for the interview (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). The grounded theory approach emphasises the advantage of using these types of questions in that it provides a flexible approach to deal with emerging issues and provides new and unexpected insights. It also ensures that the most important subjects are covered in the interview. A sample of these guided questions for this research can be referred from Appendix F (Section B).

As mentioned in Chapter 4, the interview questions were considered on controlled aspects of the local communities‘ experience that would highlight and address the key issues in refining the conceptual framework for this study. The data from the interviews were then used as a platform to consider and correlate with the emerging themes for the framework.

At this time, the line of enquiry for these interviews tended to focus on developments that had occurred since the first interview (snowball sampling). The grounded theory approach (when data from the ground, analyse straight away by the researcher) helps to understand the specific aspects of the local communities‘ experience that would fill in the gaps in developing the emergent cores or themes. These continuous interviews were used as a platform to

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consider and correlate both the emerging themes and the refinement of the initial conceptual framework for schools to be considered as a community hub.

Each interview lasted 40 to 60 minutes and was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. All 15 interviews from Case Study 1 were recorded with the permission of the interviewees. The recording allows for an accurate record of the interview. It was then transferred to a computer and transcribed. The transcription was saved in one file folder with backup copies prior to being imported into NViVo 8, a qualitative data analysis software. Some of the respondents‘ body languages and impressions were observed by the researcher. This is to help the researcher frame important keywords for the next question during the interview (Punch, 2005b). Every time the interview took place, the researcher took notes relating to important points and impressions from the interviewees, especially when the emphasis was on the community‘s relationship, their experience with school services in term of community cohesion and the knowledge of schools as a community hub.