The term partnership is now thirty years but is used in education and training over the past twenty years (Zay, Gonnin-Bolo, 1995) and remains controversial (Dhume, 2003; Paniagua, 2011). Apart from the polysemy of word partnership combining recent common usage of the language, technical and ideological purposes etc. ; The diversity of application fields (economics, management, training, social, education) that mobilize the concept and the paradoxes that traverse its etymology (Merini, 1999). It is possible to mobilize the term partnership in different ways from one culture to another. As a result there have been a number of attempts to research and make sense of partnerships over the last twenty years, notably following two dimensions: synchronic and diachronic. The aim of ECER 2012 “Partnerships in Education” symposium is to explore these two dimensions.

             The synchronic dimension: This dimension explores whether the concept of partnership is mobilized in similar ways between countries or/and in comparable fields of application. Using this dimension as a research lens it seeks to find out evidence that partnership improve learning, and in which way cognitive, social, emotional aspects or is a specialization in areas of intervention usually not supported by the School; unless it is a facilitation of teachers' work or a way to do economies, even even a real and strong relationship between school practices and teacher training investment parents or the community in the educational process; or finally inter institutional agreements legitimizing educational policy but which then, a facilitation of the employability of students? And so on.

The diachronic dimension can help us, from an analysis of the work of authors who worked the issue for twenty years, to establish a historical perspective of the evolution of theoretical frameworks. What are the theoretical currents mobilized to identify and understand the form of action in partnership? Where are the limits of these currents? What contributions have allowed? What do we really know of the partnership, its challenges and its effects?