Scoping Community Engagement in the Context of Tomorrow’s Schools in Aotearoa New Zealand: An Integrative Review of the Literature

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.