Partnership Forums and school visits made for a great few days in WA - 24/05/10

Josie Kaddour writes:

As a relatively new member to the Schools First team, what had me most excited about my trip to WA was the school visits. While it has been interesting learning about the program, school-community partnerships and all the events, activities and winners from last year, I couldn't wait to see what Schools First is really all about. First though, the Perth Partnership Forum...

I met up with my Schools First colleague, Drew Arthurson, at the NAB office in Perth and we were joined by around 60 people for the Partnership Forum. An equal mix of school and community representatives listened intently throughout the presentation and asked lots of questions to myself and Drew, as well as Jocelyn Cook from ACER's Perth offices who provided invaluable information about the application process, guidelines and criteria.

There were representatives from five winning partnerships from 2009 with Chad Sexton-Finck, former Principal at Redcliffe Primary School, who were the 2009 WA State Impact Award winners, providing attendees with an overview of the many successful partnerships in place at his former school. He talked about the ease and integrity of the program and, most importantly, encouraged all schools to seek partnerships in their communities. Finally, he spoke first hand about how school-community partnerships can be just as successful and beneficial in primary schools as secondary schools.

Chatting to many of the attendees at the end of the forum, it was extremely pleasing to have Nicole Cox from the National Disability Coordination Officer Program, who won a Seed Funding Award in 2009 with Holland Street School, approach both myself and Drew to let us know how much winning a Schools First award has meant to their partnership. Nicole's appreciation was very warming as was hearing how the funding is benefitting this partnership. All in all, a great start to WA.

Whether it was my body clock still on Melbourne time or the excitement of the two school visits scheduled for that day, I was awake at 3.30am on Tuesday and a few hours later Drew and I hit the highway for our visit to Pinjarra Senior High School.

A Seed Funding winner in 2009, Pinjarra are in partnership with the University of WA to implement 30 Science lessons to students over the course of two years. Delivered to Year 8 and 9 students, the lessons are based upon ‘The five pillars of Thinking Science’, which encourage students to complete hands-on tasks in groups and think about how they were able to formulate a solution to the task.

Handling the added pressure of having the school principal, a representative from the University of WA as well as Drew and I in the room, the students showed us first hand the benefit of the partnership, correctly completing their task on probability. Pretty impressive seeing as some of the adults in the room had no idea!

According to Science teacher Heath Dullard, the program is proving very popular with the students and it's not hard to see why.

After kindly providing Drew and I with morning tea as well as a packed lunch for the road (thank you!) we bid farewell to all at Pinjarra and made our way to Newton Moore Senior High School in Bunbury.

Newton Moore was the setting for the Bunbury Partnership Forum. Before that though, Science teacher Lorraine Ellis took Drew and I on a tour of the school to show us the rewards of their partnership with the City of Bunbury.

The school has a number of environmental programs in place from having a licence to breed threatened species to having dolphin watching programs, water testing excursions and a wetland studies area at the school. Not surprisingly, the class sizes have doubled over the last few years and the students we encountered were excited and proud to show us and talk to us about what they've learnt and achieved. Credit to Lorraine for her boundless enthusiasm and passion towards environmental science and her students. The program looks so amazing that despite graduating more than 10 years ago, I wished I was back in high school. The thought of writing an essay though soon had me focusing on the task at hand, the Bunbury Partnership Forum!

The forum was attended by 30 very engaged participants. With help from six fantastic NAB volunteers and one Year 11 student who kindly pointed all attendees in the right direction (thank you Jodie!) the evening involved a great presentation from Lorraine, with Bruce from the City of Bunbury, and lots of questions from the participants which left us in no doubt that there are some great partnerships taking place in WA. We look forward to receiving all of the submissions from this enthusiastic part of Australia.

At 7pm, it was time to hit the road. While the sounds of 92.7 kept Drew and I entertained (and me awake) on our drive from Perth, we pulled out our own tunes for the journey back. So while I played DJ, we danced (me, very badly) and sung (Drew, look out Justin Timberlake) our way back to Perth after a long, but very enjoyable and rewarding day in WA.