VIOLACIONES DEL DERECHO A LA EDUCACIÓN

This section explores the social capital practices that reflected different aspects of skills and competences amongst the PTPP observed (Figure 6.5). Skills and competences were important in PTPP because they were required in order for individuals to be able to engage effectively with each other (Hodgson and Turner, 2003; Muro and Jeffrey, 2008). This section will explore the practices involved in using different skillsets including technical and specialist skills, interpersonal skills, and literacy and cognitive skills. Communication was a particularly critical social capital practice in the PTPP observed.

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Figure 6.5: Social Capital Practices relating to Skills and Competences

6.8.1 Properties of skills and competences in PTPP

The three different skillsets observed in this study were grouped into technical and specialist skills, interpersonal skills and literacy and cognitive skills. Technical and specialist skills tended to relate to an understanding of policy, legislation, design and engineering. Some participants’ skills directly related to their work experience (e.g. retired assistant director of a local council, retired transport planning lecturer, retired civil engineer at a local council, former national transport spokesperson for a political party). Interpersonal (or social) skills were the skills that participants used in interactions with other people. In these processes, communication and teamwork were the most frequently used interpersonal skills observed. However more subtle aspects were observed, particularly in terms of an individuals’ emotional intelligence. This included the extent to which individuals were able to exercise diplomacy, discretion and manners when dealing with people, particularly when they were the victims of abuse, aggression or antagonism.

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Communication was a fundamental social capital practice that underpinned the PTPP observed (Ercan and Hendricks, 2013). The quality of the communication was closely related to the other categories of social capital practices (Chapter 7) and depended upon the language used, the relevance of the discussion, and whether the conversations were solely deficit led (i.e. only about complaints or problems). Many participants saw PTPP as an opportunity to share problems or concerns about existing sustainable transport provisions. However, the people they were engaging with such as council officers and councillors saw the same processes as an opportunity to share information about what the council was doing in that area and what potential changes were going to take place in the future.

Other important interpersonal skills and competences used in the processes observed were cooperation, coproduction and negotiation. Cooperation describes the ways in which people work together whereas coproduction additionally describes the act of producing something tangible (for example a document) through cooperation. These participants recognised the importance of collaboration and demonstrated the interconnectivity of social capital practices (including relationships, learning, and communication) which is explored in Chapter 7. Negotiation skills were used to reach collective decisions or to de- escalate a negative situation. Negotiation practices involved debating issues, considering options, arranging future plans, and managing people who are perceived to be difficult or dominant in a group.

Good literacy and cognitive skills were required to process what was happening in the processes observed, however it never felt as if there was an explicit level of literacy, numeracy and IT required to participate. There was an expectation (or assumption) in the PTPP observed that individuals were able to read and understand agenda, minutes and had access to the internet. There were situations where participants weren’t necessarily expected to have a specialist technical understanding (e.g. of real-time bus information), so it was important for the relevant professional to use language and information that was suitable for the target audience. However, there were times when participants were able to

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use their cognitive skills to see through arguments or responses that they didn’t agree with (Interview 3). Participants with good cognitive skills were also able to demonstrate an ability and/or willingness to deal with transport problems by seeing them in their wider context rather than in isolation.

6.8.2 Conditions for skills and competences within PTPP

The balance between different skillsets used in each case study process differed significantly. For example, the CCAG and MK BUG were the process where the individuals observed offered the most in terms of their technical and specialist skills through their memberships of professional bodies or experience of providing transport services. On the other hand, the public facing groups such as the Cross Gates Forum required far less in the way of technical skills or knowledge in order to participate effectively. The differences in the processes tended to lie in their level of engagement with detailed policy and design principles. The CCAG needed to consider detailed engineering plans and MK BUG dealt with calculations of bus passenger subsidies, whilst the Cross Gates Forum mainly consisted of verbal briefings relating to everyday events and changes in their local area.

The importance of good interpersonal skills in participation were acutely illustrated by some behaviour that I observed in the Leicester Bus User Panel. On one occasion when a member of the public was outwardly rude to a council officer, the chair politely reprimanded the individual by suggesting that he had perhaps let his anger cloud his judgement, and the individual then calmed down. This demonstrated that the leader of the group had good emotional intelligence in handling a difficult situation. Conversely, the individual who was rude on that occasion (and other participants who I observed in other processes shouting, talking bluntly or being rude) tended to demonstrate poorer interpersonal skills. Participants with poor interpersonal skills had a significant impact on the perceptions that outsiders had of the whole group or process, which in turn dissuaded people from participating (Interviews 2 and 6). However, the

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individuals themselves were either unaware of their impact or unwilling to conduct themselves differently, preferring to stay true to themselves.

Another illustration of the difficulty that participants sometimes had negotiating the norms of the formalised PTPP observed also case from the Leicester Bus User panel. In one meeting a participant became frustrated at not having had a chance to make a representation to the group and the leader had to explain that such representations came under the relevant part of the agenda (which at that time was at the end of the meeting, although follow up interviewees have since reported a shift to the agenda to accommodate issues earlier on in the meeting and using an issues log to avoid repetition). The individual concerned was new and therefore unaware of the formal structure of the process. Other participants touched upon this in their follow up interviews in that they had to find their feet through first-hand experience (Interviews 8 and 15).

Poor communication was not always the fault of an individual but rather the venue. I observed situations where people were hard to hear because of the acoustics, particularly with the Cross Gates Forum and its pub function room venue, or because of technical difficulties in MK DAG with microphones or hearing loops. MK DAG was a particularly useful illustration of the need for inclusive facilities given its inclusion of people with a variety of disabilities or sensory impairments.

Cooperation, coproduction and negotiation were important interpersonal skills observed in this study. Examples of good practice included: the CCAG position statements on aspects of cycling policy and design within the City Connect project; the MK DAG Transport Sub Group’s contribution to MK Council’s draft taxi policy; and the Bus Passenger Charters which were coproduced by MK BUG and the Leicester Bus Users Panel in their respective locations. Cooperation enabled the processes observed to achieve productive outcomes. However, some participants regarded cooperation as challenging:

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“people are learning how their attitude will change things, errm the adversarial

role I think is changing dramatically. I don’t think it will work for very much longer actually. I think it’s got to be collaborative now.” (Interview 4)

Another participant also talked in their follow up interview about the balance between saying what you want to say but knowing when to work cooperatively:

“Maintaining the relationship with the [council]… is really important, …we’ve really

lost ground [when] they’ve felt embarrassed in public, or …felt that they’ve

needed to protect their officers.” (Interview 15)

The CCAG and MK BUG demonstrated some of the strongest levels of interpersonal skills and competences in part because of the strong ties that existed between participants (see also Sections 6.6 and 7.5.14). The Leicester Cycle City Forum also demonstrated strong ties through their shared passion for cycling which meant that they were also very collegiate and open to negotiation. Other processes observed were formed of looser groupings or independent individuals that exhibited weaker ties. In those cases, negotiation appeared to be less prevalent as a result.