Barriers of cooperation between schools and other social services

Complex nature of social problems in contemporary societies requires different social services to cooperate. It seems that it is especially important for public schools as specific organizations. Their main aim is (or should be) to support development and learning of every child. In order to fulfil that mission, schools have to cooperate with other social services that may help them to understand and solve problems of individual children and make educational process better. Schools naturally understand this and are open for cooperation, in fact they cooperate with numerous organizations. The problem is that there are a lot of factors that may influence such cooperation, both positively and negatively. The paper tries to present and discuss list of such factors based on practical experience from prevention programmes run in the city of Cracow during last three decades. Author uses case studies of such programmes to show main areas of difficulties and tries to recommend what may be done to support cooperation and make it more successful. Some recommendations for school leaders training are also given pointing out what kind of competencies of school leaders are crucial from the perspective of good cooperation