Numerous efforts have been devoted to understanding how schools should change to meet the demands of a society that is characterised by complexity, change, and uncertainty. Some have focused on teachers’ professional development, some on the role of management teams as promoters of educational transformation, and others on improving collaboration between schools and the local community.

The school-community relationship is usually formalised through participatory organisations and associations, and also through informal contexts by sharing experiences, meetings, and conversations, etc. However, schools must have a greater institutional presence in their community, as is not only made up of students’ families, but also includes town halls, social and health services, training centres and universities, cultural and sports entities, neighbourhood associations, libraries, museums, and the local media, etc. It is important to support school-community partnerships from the perspective of democratic participation in education, which itself has value and enables educational processes to be improved.

Advances in this matter can help address the challenges facing schools in relation to their desire to improve. Various initiatives serve as concrete examples showing the value of the school-community relationship, such as:

• Educational community plans, (for cooperation among local public entities and other educational stakeholders to support disadvantaged pupils in particular),
• Educating cities (to promote education as a tool for social transformation),
• Municipal education councils,
• Local pacts for education (agreement among local policymakers and entities of different types to reinforce the commitment to education).

It is important that collaborations revolve around support and reciprocated trust. The community contributes to building education by reinforcing schools’ work and providing resources, participating in joint projects, and promoting interinstitutional collaborations, etc. On the other hand, schools build their communities by ensuring the right to education, fostering feelings of identity and belonging, cooperating in common proposals, opening their doors to the community, committing to popular initiatives, and establishing networks, etc. This justifies the need to move towards more open, flexible, and inclusive schooling.

Intensifying collaboration between schools and their local communities, as far as educational management is concerned, can be achieved through organising joint seminars, publishing bulletins on education, and allocating spaces and times for conversations, etc. However, for actions like these to become a reality, it is necessary to share values and concerns, change individual and collective attitudes, modify the forms of institutional functioning that are required, generate their own styles and dynamics, and grow together.

Finally, networking is an opportunity to effectively practice systematic, coordinated, and complementary collaboration that is capable of weaving synergies and relationships in open and diversified spaces to achieve common purposes through specific interventions. Schools and their local communities must actively engage in networking, inspired by mutual learning, through critical reflection, self-evaluation, and knowledge sharing.

This would allow schools and their communities to take on new positive challenges, accelerate the development of educational proposals, learn from innovative practices, and stimulate reciprocal relationships. The connection of networking with the development of schools and their communities should go hand in hand with organisational transformations that can improve educational processes.

In this regard, intervention by educational managers and leaders could become the backbone of these dynamic processes, promoting the desired and necessary changes, especially in the most vulnerable communities and, ultimately, improving the well-being and life trajectory of their students.

José Luís Muñoz Moreno is a professor in the Department of Applied Pedagogy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a member of the Center for Research and Studies for Organizational Development CRiEDO. His main line of research is linked to social participation in education.