CLADA Associate

Maureen Breeze

With a varied career in formal and informal education and in a variety of contexts and settings, Maureen has a wide range of skills and experience.

A science graduate, Maureen went on to undertake a PGCE and subsequently taught for 7 years in secondary schools. As a young teacher, passionate about the value of informal and experiential learning, she moved on to work in an educational development role for the Youth Hostels Association and then on to manage their urban studies centre in the then new Bristol dockside development.
It was her next posts working for the Co-op in member development and social policy roles that focussed her practice towards co-operative approaches, in particular in her role as an educator. During this time, inspired to deepen her understanding and to gain external validity for her practice, she undertook a MEd. It was through the research for this that she discovered the International Association for the Study of Co-operation in Education (http://www.iasce.net) and attended their conference in Canada in 1999. She was subsequently responsible for bringing the 2002 conference to Manchester and played the leading role in its organisation. She has been a Board Member since 2000 and in November 2010 was elected Co-President, which she considers a privilege and an honour.
She has held a variety of professional roles since the Co-op, working within the prison service and managing an education-business links consortium. Her current post in Wiltshire is a countywide role. It involves providing assistance to schools in the implementation of the former Government's Extended Services agenda. The work is to support collaboration between clusters of schools and support agencies, in order to engender more positive outcomes for young people, particularly those that are vulnerable. In each one of these roles, she has managed to find some way of incorporating co-operative approaches to learning or co-operative ways of working.
Passionate about finding co-operative solutions to local sustainability much of Maureen's free time is spent on community and co-operative development. She is the co-founder and remains active in a community co-operative that runs a village shop, news agency and small coffee shop, as well as having been a director of what was the first prison-based community interest company run for offenders.