What is the Partnership? 

The Police and Education Partnership is a collaborative working group of organisations from the education sector and the New Zealand Police. 

Why do Police have a national partnership with the education sector?

District police, individual principals, Boards of Trustees and schools have long had a range of formal and informal local relationships.  The Partnership supports these relationships through a co-ordinated national approach that provides schools and Police with significant opportunities to achieve our shared goals.

The Partnership also acts as a reference group for how Police work with schools in a preventative role, such as partnering with schools to support students to be engaged and safe, providing early identification and intervention from family harm environments, or focusing on those who offend or at are at risk of offending. 

Who are the members?

 What has the Partnership achieved in the past?

Over the last few years the Partnership has collaborated on a wide range of matters, including: 

• developing consistent approaches and communicated them to schools, including for synthetic cannabis and psychoactive substances, school balls, alcohol supply to young people, and gang insignia in schools
• providing a consultation forum during Police’s process of changing the role of their School Community Officers, and for developing their school engagement model as well as templates for individual school partnership agreements and school profiles
• giving feedback during the development of national guidelines such as the Ministry of Education's 'Surrender and Retention of Property and Searches' and 'Bullying Prevention and Response' guidelines
• providing a wide dissemination network to schools, for example to assist Police to identify unknown children and young people in sexually-exploitive photographs
• providing a forum for mini-presentations to the sector on developing and current topics of common interest, such as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), sex offenders living near schools, and the abuse of methamphetamines.

For more information, contact Siobhan Dilly at NZCEO, s.dilly@nzceo.org.nz.