The Foundation Fonts for Australian Schools collection is a set of handwriting fonts designed specifically to meet Australian Education standards. While weights, widths and optical sizes were carefully crafted to work well in an Australian classroom environment, they are just as comfortable to read and work with in the home environment.

Each Australian state teaches different handwriting styles in lower primary school (although some states do share the same style). There are essentially three stages involved with each state's styles:

The foundational stage involves learning basic letter formation.
The transitional stage adds joining ligatures to some letters.
The cursive stage joins almost all letters (with some exceptions).

The NSW ACT School Fonts include both:

New South Wales Foundation Print - a simple sloped print for early primary school.
New South Wales Foundation Cursive - transitional joining letter alternates (pre-cursive stage).

Students in New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory learn Foundation Print from years 1 to 2 and Beginner Cursive from year 3.

Google Workspace users are provided standard versions online, however they may download or build the complete OpenType versions from GitHub for local installations. To download the full version, or to contribute, see github.com/MezMerrit/AU-School-Handwriting-Fonts.

The handwriting fonts that help Australian students learn how to read and write are now available in Google Workspace

Google for Education Australia and Google Fonts partnered to make Foundation Fonts for Australian Schools available on Google Workspace, including Google Workspace for Education. The fonts are also available for download from the Google Fonts website.

Australian teachers are required to use state-mandated handwriting styles to teach reading and writing to school children from ages four to nine. Designed by Tina and Corey Anderson, the five Foundation Fonts exemplify proper handwriting for English and other languages using the Latin writing system, and include common math symbols. The regular weight of each font imitates the pencil thickness of handwriting, making the fonts easy for students to recognize as they learn how to write letter shapes.

The availability of these fonts on Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides is also important for the adoption of Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education in Australian schools.