About the Research

Sustaining effective social partnerships - by Terri Seddon, Stephen Billett, Allie Clemans, Carolyn Ovens, Kathleen Ferguson and Kathleen Fennessy

Social partnerships are good tools for addressing issues which are too difficult for any single agency to tackle. Such partnerships - formed when people and agencies come together - are particularly useful in ensuring that a community has access to second chance learning and to skills development that supports local industry.

This report, Sustaining effective social partnerships, builds on an earlier project that identified key principles and practices underpinning the development and maintenance of social partnership. (See S Billett, A Clemans and T Seddon, Forming, developing and sustaining social partnerships. NCVER, Adelaide, 2005.) It used four case studies to see how these principles and practices operate and trialled the self-evaluation tool developed in the first phase of the project.

Key messages

• Forming and sustaining effective social partnerships depends upon five principles: having shared purposes and goals; having strong and well-defined leadership; establishing trust and trustworthiness; maintaining good relationships between partners; developing the capacity for partnership work; and having inclusive governance practices.
• The success of transposing these principles into practice is influenced by the size and complexity of the partnerships. If they become unwieldy, then the partnership can crack.
• By using the self-assessment tool developed out of this research, those involved in a partnership can reflect on the health of the partnership. The tool could also prove useful for evaluation.

Tom Karmel
Managing Director, NCVER

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