FAST tracking social inclusion by bringing together families, schools and support agencies: a case study
Sabina Leitmann and Fran Crawford
Curtin University of Technology
Contact Email:   S.Leitmanncurtin.edu.au

In this presentation the institutions and practices involved in the implementation of a FAST project at an Eastern suburbs high school in Perth, Western Australia are explored. Issues identified as emerging from our on-site participatory evaluation of this project are used to map and explicate social policy challenges in effectively addressing social exclusion-inclusion on the ground. FAST (Family and Schools Together) is a family support program developed in Wisconsin in the early nineties to address issues of school-related disempowerment and exclusion among children and their families. Since then this research based and relationship focused program has been packaged and exported to other countries, including Australia. The Commonwealth Department of Family and Community Services fund this program as part of their Stronger Families and Communities Strategy. Emerging discourses on social exclusion offer conceptual tools and a language to reframe existing dominant materialist understandings of structural disadvantage. How does such reframing look when performed at a specific site by embodied practitioners enacting an international design with extra-local funding? This presentation on a recent evaluation of a FAST program uses a multi-dimensional layering of the concept of social inclusion to allow for an examination of the dynamic ways in which rights, resources and relationships intersect within one particular family support program.

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