Home, school and community partnerships in numeracy education: An Australian perspective

The importance of building educational partnerships between families, schools and communities is increasingly acknowledged since family and community involvement in education is thought to be associated with children’s success at school. Yet there are discrepancies between the rhetoric of policy documents and the practice of family and community involvement in education. This paper draws on a large Australian study to critically examine different perspectives on numeracy education partnerships, with particular emphasis on the extent to which the needs of educationally disadvantaged children were being met. We elaborate a framework for analysing key features of educational partnerships, and then use the framework to compare the features of effective numeracy
education partnerships represented in two case studies from our study. The case studies highlight different ways of initiating partnerships, different perspectives of stakeholders, different numeracy practices, and different ways of responding to cultural diversity and geographical isolation.