What is Enabling Spaces?

Enabling Spaces is a public, web-based resource designed to support the development of a community of practice that has developed from an ongoing collaboration between organisations and university researchers looking at what organisations do and the limitations of internal and external evaluation requirements. It is a resource for organisations working to improve outcomes for young people at risk of disengaging from learning that contains a shared measurement framework for organisations that keep marginalised young people connected to education.

Young people who do not form reasonable relationships with peers and staff are unlikely to benefit from being at school. They tend to disengage and become excluded from school. The resource consists of a contextual space that documents programs that keep young people connected to learning; an evidence space, that holds publications and documents the nature of the information created and kept by these programs; and a measurement and evaluation space that holds the shared measurement framework, built around the principles of Connection, Capacity and Meaning.

A small number of programs and agencies do the work of keeping young people at risk of disengaging from mainstream education connected to learning and actively participating in their communities. These organisations and programs work to create enabling ‘social’ spaces. It was this concept of an Enabling Space that this website was named after. Enabling Spaces are spaces where respectful relationships occur and are characterised by a set of attributes including emotional and physical safety, co-operation, and trust. They are often embodied in actual sites or physical learning environments; however Enabling Spaces can also be constituted as conceptual or emotional states.


This site also includes How Schools can Move Beyond Exclusion - an article that shows how the conceptual framework of enabling spaces can be used in practice to explore respectful relationships through the overlapping lenses of Connection, Capacity and Meaning.