There are online training resources for school and preschool governing councils.

The training gives council members, site leaders and other interested people:

• easy-to-use and accessible training resources
• flexible learning opportunities
• consistent training content.

Governing council training

Anyone on a governing council or who has an interest in being on a governing council can do free online training.

The training will give you a clear understanding of school governance and the roles, responsibilities, function and operations of governing councils.

This training is self-paced and could take up to 2 hours. It can be paused for you to come back to at any time.

Sign up to the plink training portal

Everyone needs to create their own account on the plink training portal before starting the training.

Non-department staff will need to set up a new account. Once you’re on the plink page, select ‘governing council member’ in the account type.

Staff can log in to the governing council plink portal with their LearnLink credentials.

You can do the training on your own, or if it suits your governing council you can do the training together.

When training in a group, your principal must send the names and emails of everyone doing the training to Education.sitegovernance [at] sa.gov.au. Once you complete the training it is recorded on everyone's plink profiles.

Merit selection training

Merit selection training for governing council members is provided by the South Australian Association of School Parent Communities. Contact them to arrange a suitable time for this training.

You can also complete the department’s free online merit selection training, which is available on the governing council plink portal. You can log in using the same method described above, or through your previously established plink account.

Some links in the training module can't be accessed by governing council members. This is because they link to our staff Intranet. The most important information is provided below:

• Code of Ethics for the South Australian Public Sector
• Merit selection procedure (PDF 732KB) (PDF 665 KB)
• Merit and local selection panel processes for vacancies (PDF 647KB) (contains the ‘selection guidance notes’ referred to in the training)
• Panel composition information (PDF 587KB)

If you have any further questions, please contact your panel chairperson.