Engaging with community: What do schools plan and why?

The Ian Potter Foundation funded the Peter Underwood Centre at the University of Tasmania’s (2016-2018) project ‘Facilitating school-parent-community partnerships throughout Tasmania to help children realise their educational potential’. The project delivered capacity building workshops for school leaders, community and families designed to facilitate school-parent-community partnerships which increase parental and community engagement schools. The workshops supplemented mentoring of school-parent-community engagement planning groups as the groups, which consisted of school leaders, parents and community members, refined, implemented and evaluated their strategies.

This presentation reports on the community engagement strategies that schools developed, that is, those not explicitly intended to engage parents. It analyses the relationship between the strategies and school goals, how the school planning groups intend to evaluate the success of their strategies, and reflections from school planning group members about the effectiveness of the strategies to date. We note that community, including industry, offers a wide range of learning opportunities for school students of all ages. Many schools have traditionally asked community for sponsorships, but community and industry are generally very willing to assist schools in ways beyond sponsorship. Schools and industry do not always ‘speak the same language’, and can be unsure of each other’s’ motivations for engaging and needs and resources that could be aligned.