A qualitative and quantitative study
In May 2005 the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), in
association with the Australian Council of State School Organisations (ACSSO) and the
Australian Parents Council (APC), commissioned this research on the subject of family-school
partnerships. It was the third phase of an initiative launched by the Australian Government on
28 May 2004.
The first phase had consisted of a literature review. In phase two a draft framework of principles
and strategies for building family-school partnerships had been developed. The task in phase
three was to trial the draft framework in schools.
The draft framework was circulated among government and non-government schools across
Australia, and schools were invited through their peak bodies (ACSSO and APC) to submit
proposals for projects which would give effect to its principles and strategies. The idea broadly
was to find out whether, in practice, these principles and strategies provided a useful foundation
for building family-school partnerships.
Each school’s project was to be, in effect, a piece of action research on which to base an
assessment of the framework’s usefulness.
To help schools meet the costs of the projects, grants of $10,000 were made available to all
participating schools. A small number of isolated schools were given slightly more in recognition
of their generally heavier costs.
Saulwick Muller Social Research was engaged to carry out a number of tasks associated with the
implementation of the schools’ projects, and to conduct overarching research on the
effectiveness of the framework. Because of the size of the research program, Denis Muller and
Irving Saulwick, the principals of SMSR, formed a consortium with a team from the Australian
Catholic University led by Professor Doug Clarke, Professor Phil Clarkson and Dr Janelle Young,
and with another independent consultant, Simon Brown-Greaves, of Melbourne.
