We believe potential is everywhere in Australia. Our work is making sure opportunity is too.
Schools Plus is a national education not-for-profit organisation that works alongside schools, educators and communities to help children facing disadvantage succeed at school and beyond. We identify promising approaches to the most persistent challenges in Australian education, fund and support their development, and help build the knowledge and practice that can travel from one school to many.
We are an organisation that backs the educators who are already working with extraordinary commitment to change the lives of the students in front of them giving them what they need to go further.
Why we exist
Australia has long held to the idea that where a child starts in life should not determine where they finish.
Yet the circumstances of a student’s background remain among the strongest predictors of their educational outcomes. The gaps between students from advantaged and disadvantaged communities are not small. By Year 9, disadvantaged students are years behind their peers.
These are not gaps in potential. They are gaps in opportunity, in access and in the support that every child deserves.
Schools Plus exists because those gaps are neither inevitable nor acceptable, and because the most effective responses to them are already being developed by teachers who understand their students, by school leaders who know their communities, by educators who believe in what is possible and are looking for the resources to prove it.
Who we work with
Schools Plus partners with government, independent and Catholic schools across Australia, from early learning settings to senior secondary, in cities, regional centres and remote communities.
We work with individual school communities and with networks of schools facing shared challenges.
We partner with leading philanthropists, trusts, foundations and corporate partners who share our commitment to equity. Across all of these partnerships, our focus remains constant: the students who face the greatest barriers, and the educators who are doing everything in their power to remove them.
Schools Plus acknowledges the Traditional Owners and their custodianship of the lands on which we work. We pay our respects to their Ancestors, the land’s first teachers, and their descendants, who continue cultural and spiritual connections to Country. We recognise their valuable contributions to Australian and global society.