Lowick Cluster of Social Enterprises

Specialist business support

The active involvement of Enterprising Communities in the debates concerning the future of the School only began once the decision to close was confirmed by the SOC.  Enterprising Communities focused primarily on the role that a social enterprise model might play in securing the future of the school long-term rather than simply opposing its closure and advocating a return to the school being funded by the local education authority.  Rose’s comments confirm this.

‘I only started to use some work time after the decision to close the state school was made.  At that time we started to create a model for effectively developing a community buy-out of the school.  We wanted to run a state funded community managed school that was sustainable.  It seemed like an exciting merging of social enterprise succession theory and rural policy in supporting the sustainability of rural schools.’

The School’s links with Enterprising Communities opened it up to a wide range of support from organisations and companies that specialise in social enterprise support. 

‘We made contact with Gareth Nash who provided additional support through a Plunkett [foundation]  initiative called Rural Renaissance.  He helped us get funding from Co-op Action and the Co-op Foundation among others to research a constitution for a co-operative school.  The majority of the work was looking at school governance requirements and creating a constitutional model with Cobbetts, a solicitors firm in Manchester which  specialise in registering social enterprises and a business model to support the proposal for a new co-operative school.  The process of making a proposal for a school had very detailed requirements and we also worked with the DFES, Schools Organisation Unit in the North East on it.  They were very helpful in navigating through the complex stages of creating a proposal, publishing it, going out to consultation and reporting on the response.’

The project was also able to obtain support from Lancaster University Management School during this process.  Rose also worked at the promotional side, as there was great interest from national press including newspapers, TV and radio.  They believed, incorrectly as it turned out, that if they were in the public eye the decision-making would have to be fair and open.  They also created a seven-star marking system to review small projects following co-operative values and principles.

Rose’s involvement in the work at Lowick was considerable and much more than full-time. She describes it as follows:

‘The support was highly intensive – I lived and breathed it for about five years in total. I am still closely involved as we now have weekly meetings and I am volunteering one day a week to create activities for the future in the former school building.’

Contact with Education Authority officials was one of the main focuses for the development work.  These contacts appear to have been problematic – in part because their ideas challenged an accepted order – but also because they were seen as a school to be closed. The following comments by Rose are typical:

 ‘Our first steps were in exploring pre-school provision.  The support teams for pre-school support had a very clear approach.  None of the models we were shown fitted us.  We had to have 24 children on a daily basis to ‘move on to the next stage’ and there were people needing after school support as well as pre school support but not enough for the school [CHECK] to be sustainable on its own.  The only way we felt we could develop a sustainable service was by sharing services across age groups. This was not a well-received idea.  Since then there has been more ‘partnership’ working  through the creation of Children’s Services and the impact of the Children Act, but at the time there was absolutely no communication between departments and our trials at being multiple stranded in delivering multiple services [CHECK THESE LAST FEW WORDS] through the school didn’t fit anyone’s remit.’

Despite these setbacks, interest in the developments at Lowick was growing. ’We discovered later,’ says Rose, ‘that some of the education authority officers were quietly interested though at the time there was no support for alternative (non-statutory provision) partnership activities through the LEA.  Nor could we access community support at that time other than through VAC itself.  The process was very top-down: you had to apply to be part of countywide projects and very little was supported that was grassroots-led. And all the models were urban with large single service provision.’

Whilst support developed inside the LEA, more active and public support came forward – and interested parties began to request presentations from Lowick with regard to their new ideas and approaches.  Lowick made contact with the local Co-op Group local committee and a local Co-op shop manager agreed to come onto the Board.  Rose acted as the intermediary in working with specialist solicitors in Manchester at Cobbetts, and also worked with Gareth Nash at Cooperative Mutual Solutions to create a model that was applicable to urban and rural schools and could be used to form a single organisation that co-operatively managed educational and community activities within the same premises.

The team at Lowick were asked to present their model to conferences and events nationally.  These events included a member’s event for the Coop Group, the Co-op Congress, a Co-op Education Conference, and at the Labour Party Conference Fringe in Manchester – where they were introduced by Alun Michael, then a Minister in DEFRA who had worked in social enterprises before becoming an MP.  Here they spoke alongside other Cumbrian co-operative solutions for rural regeneration.  These activities resulted in significant support from the co-operative movement itself – generating letters of support from co-ops nationally including some financial support in response to Co-op Action asking members to donate £300 per organisation to help prove the benefits of the new model.

Support was far less forthcoming from more traditional business support and advice agencies. Rose comments on their relationship with Business Link as follows:

 ‘Support from standard support agencies had not been particularly helpful – we were a school and not a business so it was hard to engage Business Link.  It was also hard to engage funders who were very wary of working with a school and being involved in case they were seen to be funding statutory provision.  It was very hard to persuade them of the independent non-statutory activities that we were working on.  This was part of the reason that we needed in the early days to create a different organisation to support these developments.  It started with the Friends of Lowick School which was a constituted association. However, even that did not seem far enough away from statutory provision for many funders.’

When asked about the specific areas in which Rose thinks Business Link had difficulties, she notes:

‘Networking support is very important and you need to know a very wide network of organisations, policies and funders who may help kick start projects.  Similarly group development work and participatory processes of empowering and engaging people is key to the process.  It also involves a lot of evening and weekend work.  Business Links have difficulties in all these areas.’