School University Partnerships : What Do the Schools Want?

The growing perception of a need for robust school university partnerships to improve the quality of teacher education, and to promote learning outcomes for school students, has been given further impetus by the Ramsey recommendations in Quality Matters (2000). This article briefly reviews the literature on both professional development schools, and recent school university partnership initiatives in Australia, and reports a survey of all state primary school principals in NSW, on their support for a broad range of school university partnership activities. The findings indicate strong and uniform support for the full range of activities including supervision and mentoring, collaborative teaching initiatives, action research, joint professional development, shared planning, and school enrichment and support