Partnership plus: the power of new school networks

‘In going forward, we have a choice between cooperation and shared responsibility for our children or fragmentation and division. Education Foundation Australia’s experience is that there are already many people and institutions who wish to work cooperatively for the benefit of all children rather than struggle with the divisions that currently prevail in Australian schooling.’
Ellen Koshland, Founder, Education Foundation Australia

The challenge to provide a quality school education for all young Australians is on the rise, with compelling evidence that some groups of young people are missing out on the essential opportunities associated with educational engagement and achievement. After years of attempts by schools and systems to address educational inequity, there is a strong collective sense that the time has come to take up this challenge in a more systemic way. It is possible to see this collective sense at work in a number of ways:

• there is a growing agenda across Australia for a joined-up response to social issues including school education
• there is a growing awareness that education is a central factor in addressing other social issues
• there is a growing awareness of the potential to reframe schools as centres of their communities
• there is a growing desire by other sectors to support the work of schools.

What is clear is that schools cannot by themselves provide the solution to educational inequity. As Glyn Davis has explained, the recent Australia 2020 Summit identified a widely held desire to strengthen civil society by encouraging and enabling Australians to solve social problems outside the constraints and structures of government. Schools - especially schools within the public education system - offer a natural focus for support and involvement by the wider community. Other aspects of public and private life are being strongly shaped by connectivity and connectedness: the same should apply to our schools.

Many Australian schools are already engaged in partnerships with other organisations including community and nonprofit agencies, philanthropy, local government and business. These partnerships represent an important social contribution to school education, especially public education. They bring needed resources into schools serving disadvantaged areas and direct support to improve outcomes for young people. They also tend to depend on the vision and energies of individual people within the school. They tend to have short lifespans, be poorly resourced and remain a real challenge for schools in high poverty areas already suffering from limited internal capacity.

What if all schools in any given locality - regardless of whether they are funded by the government, Catholic and independent system - worked together as part of a formal, cooperative network to share resources, meet the learning needs of all students in the locality and build value for the local community? What if these local school networks became the focus for significant and sustained partnerships with other agencies that provided all young people in the area with powerful learning resources?

There is an enormous collective knowledge in Australia about how to conduct effective partnerships. Shifting the partnership paradigm from the individual school to a network of local schools would put this knowledge to use for a greater number of young people. It would enable schools to work together to identify, engage, manage and measure those partnerships that offer the greatest collective benefit for their students and communities. It would also open the door to more creative and more sustainable forms of partnership.

The corporate sector is one sector with an increasingly strong commitment to improving educational outcomes for young Australians. As the Business Council of Australia has pointed out, one in five chief executive officers of leading Australian companies now identifies the quality of education as a high priority for action by the Federal Government. Many companies are themselves seeking vehicles to invest in the future of young people, but the opportunities for this investment are still limited.

Organisations like Australia Cares and the Australian Business and Community Network are doing a lot to increase the scope, degree and quality of corporate partnership with schools, including schools in the public education system and schools in areas of need. A collaborative network of local schools would represent one of the most significant ways of increasing the benefit of these partnerships. It would create the scope for companies to work in ambitious ways to leverage opportunities for all young people in a district. It would also create new scope for companies to work collectively for young people’s benefit. A report commissioned by Ernst & Young about corporate support for public education in the United States has a strong message for Australia:

‘Imagine the power of the nation’s leading scientific and engineering companies coming together to focus on improving science instruction and learning opportunities for students. Imagine the nation’s largest professional services firms coming together around the shared goal of developing strategic plans for urban school districts. Imagine the nation’s largest corporations partnering with leading private foundations such as Gates, Broad and Wallace to take collective action on a specific issue in education. (...) More effective collaboration among corporations, and between corporations and other private educational funders, would leverage a much larger pool of resources and expertise to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our country’s public education system in more effective ways’.

Even more could be gained if local, cross-system school networks became the focus of collaborative resourcing from the government, business and philanthropic sectors, which could work together to fund significant joint initiatives for communities in need. With support from policy, such networks have the potential to change the enterprise of school education in a way that would significantly improve outcomes for young Australians, particularly in the communities where their educational needs are not being met.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ms Rosalyn Black is the Director of Thought Leadership at Education Foundation Australia. Her book, Beyond the classroom: building new school networks, will be published by ACER (Australian Council of Educational Research) Press and launched in November 2008.

 

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