Our Work
The Country Education Partnership is focused on enhancing learning opportunities and improving education outcomes for children and young people within rural and remote communities.
The CEP philosophy is centred on finding local solutions to local challenges in rural and remote education communities. In 2018 the CEP developed future strategies and approaches to further enhance learning provision and improve opportunities and outcomes of young people in rural and remote communities.
Further details of these strategies and approaches are available in the below documents:
CEP has five key focus areas that provide the foundation for its work:
Advocacy and Representation
CEP builds strong partnerships with rural and remote communities to ensure that its work is relevant and responsive. As a result, the CEP has a strong understanding of the challenges, opportunities and great learning initiatives that are occurring in rural and remote education. This enables the CEP to play a vital representative and advocacy role on behalf of rural and remote learning communities when approaching government and education sectors.
Some of the CEP’s key efforts include:
- Representing rural and remote education communities on numerous government and education sector working groups
- Developing papers and submissions in relation to government policy impacting on rural education
- Contributing to the ongoing development of the rural and remote secondary school fund to enhance post-compulsory learning
- provisionContributing to the allocation of extra equity resources within the school global budgets for rural and remote schools
- Participating in numerous reviews and research projects focused on education in rural and remote communities
- Facilitating several education forums annually on specific issues relevant to rural and remote education communities.
Support for Rural Learning
The CEP provides direct support to rural and remote learning communities with an aim of developing creative and innovative learning initiatives. These initiatives focus on developing learning that is place based, collaborative, and utilising a whole-of-community approach.
Workforce Development
CEP delivers programs and services directly to education leaders, educators, support staff and community members of rural and remote learning communities to assist in their professional learning and growth. This aims to build the capacity of rural and remote communities to provide quality learning experiences.
Our programs and services include:
- Professional development activities, programs, forums, conferences and overseas benchmark tours
- Provision of a consultancy team providing quality support for rural and remote learning communities
- Partnerships between rural clusters, education organisations and teacher education universities to encourage preservice teachers to be involved in rural and remote education communities
- Support for new graduates working in rural and remote education communities
- Facilitating a range of programs and support services specifically tailored to ensure rural and remote communities have access to quality education leadership – inclusive of both recruitment and retention of education leaders.
Rural Youth Aspirations and Student Agency
CEP supports the development and implementation of a range of activities aimed at enhancing the aspirations of children and young people living in rural and remote communities. This support is delivered via the Rural Inspire initiative, which sees the CEP work with rural and remote communities in developing strategies that improve the aspirations of their young people.
Across many states, CEP facilitates the Rural Youth Ambassadors program, a highly regarded rural youth leadership and agency initiative.
Research and Data Collection
CEP undertakes work across a range of focus areas, aimed at ensuring that information and relevant research is provided to governments, education sectors and rural and remote communities.
The CEP achieves this by building partnerships with key stakeholder organisations, and also undertaking our own research.