The partial function is a typical example of a higher order function: It takes a function as argument and returns a function. As the name of the functools module suggests its purpose is to provide tools for working with  functions. This should, in my opinion, include a much bigger set of higher order function combinators as they are known from functional programming.
As a start I suggest to add the following functions:

identity: The identity function which returns its input
compose: Create a function pipeline (threaded computation)
sequence: Use compose without binding it to a variable