What Parents Say About Teachers School and Family School Partnerships
The Family-School and Community Partnerships Bureau (the Bureau) is a collaborative
partnership between the Australian Council of State School Organisations (ACSSO) and the
Australian Parents Council (APC). It was established in 2008 with funding from the Australian
Government, and its key objective is to encourage parents and schools to work together to
build parental engagement and community involvement in schools.
The Bureau conducts research about ways to improve relationships between schools,
families and the community. The Bureau also identifies where good relationships have been
established and shares these best practice case studies. The Bureau promotes the value of
parents being closely involved with the education of their children.
In 2009, the Bureau conducted a series of focus groups with parents of school-aged children.
The purpose of these was to gain some insights into how parents viewed the quality of
teachers and teaching, the effectiveness of schools and the education system, and the
nature of the relationships between schools and parents. These insights will be used by the
Bureau to help shape its research and information dissemination programs pointing, for
example, to the types of projects and materials that parents, teachers, principals and wider
school communities may find most useful in fostering productive family-school partnerships.
This report of the focus group outcomes conveys the broad sentiments of parents as they
emerged. Many views and issues were remarkably consistent across all groups and these
might therefore be extrapolated with some confidence to the wider cohort of Australian
parents. Equally, certain opinions arose which could not be considered representative but
which have nonetheless been included as they provide distinct perspectives on particular
aspects of schooling and of educational policy more broadly
