The Role of the Big Society for Delivering Cross-Community Education: School 3.0 in Wales

Introduction

Continuing with the premise set forth in the abstract, by stopping tying the hands of the or- ganisations that want to take part in improving community taking the initiative to change it, the government can do more than it could by taking a leading role. As this chapter shows, with only financial support from government, a lot can be achieved by those outside of it using responsible capitalism and community cooperativism. When one gets away from the tribal party politics and focussed on the didactic then anything is possible. The Emotivate Project aimed to improve the social cohesion between the communities of Treforest and Llantwit Fardre, as stated in the grant applications. These included, that we set out to educate young people about the arts and make a visible contribution to the community by improving the local environment and to encourage the use of electronic learning methods. We also aimed to improve cultural, economic and environmental development of the local communities as well as increase the social cohesion between the local communities. Furthermore, we set out to engage with local community members and encourage participation in improving the local environment and the local community as well as engage with socially excluded people within the community including young offenders and people on probation.

Intellectual capital is intellectual material, such as knowledge, information, intellectual property, and experience, which can be put to use to create wealth (Stewart, 1997). Intellectual assets are things such as written documents, software, musical compositions and so forth, which are created by humans and can be exploited by an undertaking to achieve their objects (Davis & Harrison, 2001). The actors in the project consisted of the Managing Director taking on the role of ‘Internal Affairs Manager’, the Company Secretary taking on the role of ‘Project Manager’ and one of the Non-Executive Directors taking on the role of ‘External Affairs Manager’. Actors that were brought in included the learning ‘Instructors’ and ‘Facilitators’ and of course the beneficiaries of the project, the ‘Learners’. The systems used in the project included ‘Accounting’, ‘Booking’, ‘Project Management’ and ‘Learning Management’. Tools used by the young people included Moodle run on PCs in an extended school, and the instruments associated with painting. The landscapers used the obvious tools for planting, and it was generally the case that all persons in the project used email for communication.