Scoping Community Engagement in the Context of Tomorrow’s Schools in Aotearoa New Zealand: An Integrative Review of the Literature
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Authors
Boyask, Ruth
Drake, Melanie
Macdonald, Maryanne
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Journal Article
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Informa UK Limited
Abstract
Schools in a democracy need community involvement; community engagement in schools needs structures to support it. This article scopes how community engagement is conceptualised and enacted within Aotearoa New Zealand’s self-managing Tomorrow’s Schools system between 2009–2024 through a systematic integrative review of scholarly and grey literature. Using a replicable, PRISMA-informed protocol, we identified 68 eligible sources across government, education and academic sectors, and analysed them using reflexive thematic analysis. Definitions of community engagement were rarely explicit, and reported practices clustered at the lower end of the engagement continuum, particularly communication and participation, with comparatively few examples of durable, democratic decision-making. A consistent theme arising from the review is that policy ambiguity, including an under-specified notion of ‘community’, can constrain meaningful engagement and may leave gains for historically underserved groups less secure. The review concludes with implications for policy and future research, emphasising definitional clarity, representative infrastructures and longitudinal, collaborative inquiry.Description
Keywords
1303 Specialist Studies in Education, 2103 Historical Studies, 2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields, 3902 Education policy, sociology and philosophy, 3904 Specialist studies in education, Community engagement, school-community partnerships, school governance, integrative review, Tomorrow’s Schools, policy enactment
Source
Journal of Educational Administration and History, ISSN: 0022-0620 (Print); 1478-7431 (Online), Informa UK Limited, 1-23. doi: 10.1080/00220620.2026.2657799
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© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.