Supporting Family-School-Community Partnerships for Learning

Parents, families, and carers are a child's first and most important teachers. When families and schools work together children’s learning is enhanced. The Australian Government has many initiatives and resources to help parents, schools, and communities work together to improve children’s learning.

Partnerships for learning and wellbeing

Parents, families, and carers are a child's first and most important teachers. When families and schools work together children’s learning is enhanced.

Partnerships for learning and wellbeing are about parents and carers, schools and communities working together to ensure that every parent can play a positive role in their child's learning, school community, sport, and social life.

Parents and families play an important role in supporting their child's education. Research has shown that when schools and families work together, children:

  • do better
  • stay in school longer
  • are more engaged with their schoolwork
  • go to school more regularly
  • behave better
  • have better social skills

Partnerships for learning also result in longer term economic, social and emotional benefits.

The Australian Government has many initiatives and resources as outlined below to help parents, schools, and communities work together to improve children’s learning.

The parent engagement implementation guide

The Parent Engagement Implementation Guide aims to provide school communities with practical guidance on implementing successful parent and family engagement practices.

The guide was developed by the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth and is the result of a four-year parent and family engagement in learning project funded by the Australian Government.

Parent engagement resources to support school transitions

The Australian Government provided funding to Catholic School Parents Australia to undertake cross-sectoral research on effective parent engagement in primary and secondary schools. The findings were used to develop a series of toolkits and video case studies for families and schools to help with children’s transition into primary and secondary school.

Learning Potential

Learning Potential resources can be accessed for free through an app and website. It provides parents, families, and carers with practical tips and inspiring ways to be more involved in their child's learning, from the highchair to high school.

Family-School Partnerships Framework

The Family-School Partnerships Framework supports school leaders, teachers and school teams to build partnerships between schools and families.

The Framework’s vision is for families, schools and communities to actively work together as partners to support learning, development and wellbeing of children and young people.

The revised Family-School Partnerships Framework materials include:

These revised materials provide an update to the 2008 Family-School Partnerships Framework.

National Parent bodies

The Australian Government recognises the following national parent bodies to give parents a voice in education policy development: