Our Place
- Project: Implementation of the Our Place approach at Morwell Park Primary School
- Amount: $750,000 over three years
- Year(s) Funded: 2024
Implementation of the Our Place approach at Morwell Park Primary School
Recognising schools as a powerful platform for change.
Together with our many partners, we are demonstrating that schools can be powerful platforms to support children and families, starting from birth. Bringing together the services and supports in a school setting can unlock the full value of the considerable existing investment in the system. Placing children and families at the hear of the collaborative local service system leads to increased and more effective use of these services and supports, and ultimately improved education achievement and life opportunities.
Sean Cory, Chief Executive Officer, Our Place
”Primary schools are about so much more than children learning to count and spell. A local school is a meeting point, a melting pot and a community hub, all rolled into one, with the common theme of enrolled students.
Our Place is an initiative that seeks to explore this reality and build on it, to enhance the lives of children and their families. By bringing partners together from many elements of family health, support and welfare, the Our Place program can help a child’s development and ability to engage in learning and social opportunities, while also allowing the family to more confidently engage with their child’s schooling and their own learning. Community thrives with a sense of connection, pride and belonging, and so the idea of family-centred practices and systems all interacting from within a school hub has enormous potential.
Our Place was created by Julius Colman’s Education Foundation in 2012, with a pilot project at Doveton College, which was then expanded, at the request of the state government, to 10 schools. Refined and empowered, Our Place has been introduced to Morwell Central Primary School, and is now being introduced to Morwell Park Primary School, with both schools located in a town that includes rates of childhood development vulnerability up to four times the state or national benchmarks. Helen Macpherson Smith Trust has previously supported Our Place, with a three-year grant to ensure rigorous program evaluation. Now, the Trust has committed to assist the program’s expansion in Morwell with a $750,000 commitment over three years. The Trust’s grant is contributing to core operational costs and staff, allowing this systems change work to take place.
While there are many services designed to help children and families in Morwell, coordinating those services has not always been effective. The Trust believes the Our Place program can make a significant and tangible difference by building the concept of the primary school as a hub for all partners and wider family needs.
The Trust’s ambition, along with the Colman Education Foundation and other funding partners, is to increase the number of Morwell children and families engaging in the school community and education, as well as continuing to prove the wider case for the Our Place program model, to prove it is sustainable and capable of being adopted by government as a way forward for improved outcomes in primary school children’s education and wider family and community support across Victoria.