This resource document has been developed to assist communities – organisations and individuals – in establishing partnerships to support career and transition services and flexible education programmes in meeting the needs of young people on their education and employment pathways. The resource provides guidance on establishing these services, and information on the lessons learnt from the Career and Transition (CAT) and Partnership Outreach Education Models (POEM) Pilots.
In recent years, there has been a growing trend for governments to replace more centralised planning of services delivered to communities, with planning models that also make use of knowledge and expertise at the local level. In effect, governments are more frequently providing broad guidance and flexible programme models from the ‘top down’, so that communities at the local level can build in strategies and ways of working with these models from the ‘bottom up’, that best suit local needs and circumstances. Community partnerships in particular, are seen to be an effective way for a range of stakeholders in any given community, to come together and work towards achieving common goals, using the strategies that are most appropriate to their local contexts. In Australia, a strong motivating factor for adopting a community partnerships approach for the delivery of career and transition support services, arose from the findings of the former Prime Minister Howards’s Youth Pathways Action Plan Taskforce, Footprints to the Future (2001). This report recognised that the environment in which we live is a challenging and rapidly changing one, and this is creating a need for new ways to engage and assist young people with their transitions through life, learning and work roles. It also found that delivering this support requires a co-ordinated community response, which is able to address the unique needs of each young person, in the specific settings and circumstances in which they live.
When looking at partnership approaches to assist young people with their transitions, the Taskforce in its Footprints report specifically found that:
- All stakeholders in the community are responsible for working in partnership to support young people to make decisions about their futures, and in their transitions from dependency to active community participation;
- Local solutions to local problems are effective because they can be designed to suit the local context. Local ownership of initiatives also encourages participation and commitment;
- Community partnerships work best if they have clearly stated, shared and agreed goals, strategies, outcomes and accountability requirements, with all stakeholders working together to achieve common objectives;
- Bringing about change at the local level requires flexible guidelines in government-funded initiatives, with the provision of assistance, support and ideas for those communities that need it;
- Effective partnerships include young people and their families in decision-making processes;
- Young people are often portrayed in a poor light in media and the community, which can exclude them from participating in their communities. Opportunities are therefore needed for young people to participate in decision-making and to develop leadership skills;
- Learning pathways plans are needed to help young people address transition issues as they arise, and should be developed from age 13 onwards.
The Taskforce also suggested that although there is a range of services available at the local level to assist young people and their families, people often struggled to find relevant services and gain access to them. The report went on to suggest that more effort needed to be directed towards building community partnerships, in order to create sustainable transition support networks that could assist young people at the local community level.