This chapter introduces the rationale and conceptual ideas for partnership work in education settings in the early years and primary setting. It provides arguments for building dynamic relationships as the basis of partnerships with families and community. You will learn about the benefits of partnerships and how these benefits can impact positively on children, families, professionals and communities as a whole.You will also explore key underpinning policies, legislations and research theories that positions strong, positive and proactive partnerships as a systemic solution to children’s learning development.At the same time, you will be able to appreciate the need to form partnerships for the good of children’s development as well meet the standards of practice that teachers and professionals in general should aspire to achieve.This chapter sets the stage for the rest of book, which aims at enabling and empowering you to build authentic and sustainable partnerships with families, external professionals and community representatives.

In this chapter, we build on the legislative requirements, conceptual ideas and theories that underpin the way we see and understand partnership work in education settings. As you engage with the chapter, you will be introduced to theoretical modelling and ideas that can inform your work with families, professionals and community. The ideas presented in this chapter will also support you to understand the various practices and communication strategies that are introduced in the succeeding chapters in this book.

Ecological models acknowledge the importance of human-environment interactions in understanding and changing behavior. These models incorporate multiple levels of influence on behavior, including policy, community, organizational, social, and individual. Studies applying ecological models to explore health behavior correlates have tended to identify determinants at the individual level, with fewer exploring correlates at the social, physical, and policy levels. While primarily developed to explain human behavior, some ecological models have been further developed to inform interventions to change human behavior, often paired with theories such as social cognitive theory, organizational theory, and behavioral choice theory. Evidence syntheses indicate that ecological models are seldom used to inform intervention design, with the majority focusing on just one or two levels of the model. Most interventions applying ecological models to target child and adolescent health behaviors have reported small effect sizes, while child obesity prevention initiatives targeting factors at multiple levels of influence have shown larger effects. Future research should focus on developing interventions targeting all levels of ecological models, using interventions based on ecological models to change the behavior of whole communities, using ecological models within a systems framework, and exploring how they can assist with the scaling up of interventions to improve population reach.

Turner and colleagues (this volume) have written a thoughtful and comprehensive overview of theory and research across a vast literature: environmental and sociocultural influences on the development of personality disorders (PDs). They review behavioral genetics studies and studies on the prevalence of PDs in different countries and from different socioeconomic backgrounds. They describe a wide variety of theories of how PDs develop and review environmental risk factors from early childhood adversity to the quality of communities. This commentary, focusing on borderline PD (for which there is the most research), extends this work in two ways. First, the authors propose an overarching theory of environmental and sociocultural influences on the development of PDs. Second, they add empirical support for two of the theories that Turner and colleagues present: attachment and biosocial theories. In this way, the authors aim to identify processes underlying the development of PDs that may be the focus of interventions. An appropriate intervention at the level of the individual would include Young’s Schema Therapy (Young, 1994), and at the level of the family system the Family Connections Program (Hoffman et al., 2005).