In February, Minister Gillard announced funding for a Family-Schools & Community Partnerships Bureau, a joint venture between the Australian Council of State School Organisations (ACSSO) and the Australian Parents Council (APC).

Family, school and community partnerships are about people: students, parents, teachers, principals, school support staff and members of the local community, working co-operatively together with a shared focus on young people’s effective learning and personal development.

The Family School Community Partnership Bureau is being established:

• to help seed, grow and nurture such partnerships
• to provide constructive and meaningful support to those who seek to build better relationships around education
• to inform all interested parties about best practice
• to harness the potential for community-based partnerships to lead to improved educational outcomes for our nation’s most valuable asset: our young people.

The Bureau will be officially launched on 11 August.   Also on that date, the Bureau’s website will go online, providing a suite of online tools to invite and capture the experiences and points of view of stakeholders, to assist in building and sustaining mutually beneficial partnerships between schools, families and their local communities.