Working with existing resources

Schools, particularly primary schools can serve as a universally accessible hub for families, offering engagement opportunities in a non-stigmatising location. Positioned in familiar locales, schools can function as powerful community platforms, uniting existing system resources and services to provide essential support and expanded opportunities for children and families centrally and consistently. 

The community school model focuses on integrating existing services efficiently rather than creating new or parallel systems, emphasizing collaborative efforts among various systems responsible for child learning, health and development and family wellbeing.  The collaborative approach utilises the existing expertise in the system, reduces fragmentation and brings the essential supports that children and families need to succeed to places that are centrally located and a permanent infrastructure in each community.

Establishing Schools as Community Platforms requires additional resources for roles facilitating family engagement, cross-sector planning, collaboration, and service coordination. Cost-effectiveness is achieved by leveraging existing resources from multiple partners. In this model, partner organizations maintain autonomy but commit to testing and applying new approaches to achieve better outcomes. 

Integrating and co-locating services is necessary but not sufficient. It is only when these initiatives actually deliver greater access to higher quality and more effective services and resources, that align with the needs and priorities of families in the community, that they can have an impact¹

It is crucial to clarify during preparation and implementation that integrated approaches go beyond mere co-location, free office space, or convenient client access. The emphasis is on innovative ways of working to produce meaningful results. 

Early discussions of the concept need to explore the potential opportunities for aligning future infrastructure plans to the creation of Schools as Community Platforms, there may be opportunities for example to encourage local government to consider locating planned infrastructure on the site of an upcoming school renewal project.

 Our Experience/Learning

Some of the builds on Our Place sites have been achieved through a co contribution between the department of education and local government, where the local government has contributed to the building and/or maintenance of family focussed infrastructure as part of its ongoing resource planning for the area.  Establishing lease agreements between government departments has been necessary as part of the set up and is an area where having Government Department partners has been invaluable.

Much of the work in the planning stage has been about mindset shift to envisage a different way to deliver services.  In Victoria, the placement of Maternal and Child Health Nurses in community settings had been practice for some years, however in Queensland there has been a more centralised model of health services delivery. So, there has been a far greater conceptual shift needed to be able to bring this service into an integrated community setting. 

Having skilled professionals that are attached to organisations with their own professional support and development structures outposted to schools brings additional expertise and reduces the expectation that schools can be the experts across all sectors.

It takes more effort to work this way and break down assumptions between different services in the setup phase, but in the long run cross organisation collaboration works to the benefit of families and it is a more sustainable way to approach challenges of access and service gaps for families. 

There will need to be a testing of assumptions in everything from the build arrangements, internal communications, emergency management systems to availability of locker space for staff that need to be considered in the planning processes.