Community involvement in school management in Portugal

Abstract

This article discusses the ways in which the community is involved in Portuguese school management. It is based on an analysis of the external evaluation reports of 298 Portuguese schools for the academic years 2006–07, 2007–08 and 2008–09. The corpus analysed allowed the identification of two main aspects of the participation processes: (1) local community involvement in school life and (2) the processes and limitations on the involvement of two groups of actors – parents/guardians and pupils. Although the growing involvement of different actors in school management activities has been verified, the participation processes are not consolidated in the same way in different school organisations and in the different territories in which they are located. The presence and involvement of different actors in the schools studied is congruent with a larger understanding of the school community including pupils, teachers, parents/guardians and other actors from the local community to which the school belongs. This involvement increasingly implies in-depth knowledge of the construction processes of cultural learning taking place in school organisations.