Parent School Partnership
Action Team for Partnership at Ashbourne CNS
At Ashbourne CNS – Our core values are…Courage Creativity, Collaboration and Care. We seek to build a collaborative approach with parents, teachers, staff, students, and the community in which we all live and work. We wanted to create caring and supportive space for all within our community.
When we approached the National Parents Council (NPC) regarding establishing a representative body for parents, we learned of their Partnership Schools Ireland (PSI) programme. This seemed to be the best fit for our school. It was agreed by the parent representatives appointed in 2019 (and rudely interrupted by Covid) to pursue this model as it aligned with our core values.
The PSI model is inclusive of parental voice, professional voice and the student voice. The child centred approach improves educational outcomes by building relationships between home, school and the students themselves. Thus providing ‘excellence in education‘.
The inclusion of 4th & 5th Class students on the Action Team for Partnership (ATP) provides authentic opportunities for student voice as well as building leadership capacity in the student body.
Parent representatives will continue their work to build positive relationships with each other and the school as part of the ATP. Community representatives will help to embed our new and growing school into the community.
Staff will help facilitate and develop leadership capacity in the other representative groups and will help to provide the professional and academic context for the necessary goals etc. for example, they will explain the School Self Evaluation Process.
The ETBI values of Respect, Equality and Community are embedded in the Partnership for Schools Ireland model which is underpinned by Dr. Joyce Epstein’s ‘Six Types of Parental Involvement’.
We will continue to work with PSI and the NPC and will update you here on any developments. We are currently engaging with PSI regarding training (online only for now) and are doing our best to move things forward in the context of ongoing Covid restrictions.
Thank you for your patience and continued support.
