Partnerships between schools and socio-educational support organizations around school support

Abstract

The creation and consolidation of partnerships between schools and socio-educational support organizations is considered a success key factor both for learning and for the development of academic support. The present study aims to identify favorable conditions for the configuration of partnerships between schools and socio-educational support organizations. This work has applied a sequential research design as well as qualitative techniques to analyse the perceptions of 16 socio-educational support organizations in United States and Spain regarding the configuration of solid partnerships with schools. During the first phase of this study, 11 semi-structured interviews have been carried out alongside 3 discussion groups. In a second phase, 4 good practices have been analysed in order to verify the preliminary results obtained. The final results derived from this study show that the development of partnerships between institutions is mediated by the quality of the academic support, the vision of the professional teams, the coordination among institutions and the evaluation of processes and actions. These findings have allowed us to offer an interpretative framework to identify favourable and distorting elements for the construction of partnerships and, consequently, for the success of academic support. Hence, we may highlight that the goal of educational success in contexts of complexity and social and cultural diversity benefits from the collaboration between institutions, which are able to identify institutional strengths and weaknesses, to analyse context's opportunities and threats and to plan collective processes and actions.