Attaining student equity through the Universities Accord

Descriptive transcript

It's wonderful seeing so many equity practitioners in the one room. It's a pretty great room of great people, so thank you very much for being here today.

As you know, this is a forum about attaining student equity through the Universities Accord. We've obviously heard what the Minister had to say about the primary role of equity in his vision for what a Universities Accord would look like, and our job today really is to tell both the Minister and the Department how we plan to help them do that.

So it's a really great opportunity to have our voices heard in this Accord process, and we'll be giving you the opportunity both in the room but also online to be able to make sure that your submissions are all taken into account.

Before I begin, of course, I want to acknowledge that all of us in this room are on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The Gadigal people were, of course, the nation of first contact, so they're the Indigenous owners of this land who bore the brunt of the first invasion, but of course they survived and they never ceded this land. It is now, was then, and always will be Aboriginal land.

So we're here to discuss the future of student equity in Australia. We need a higher education system that offers the same opportunities regardless of someone's location, financial circumstances or cultural background.

The Australian Universities Accord discussion paper recognises that universities are embedded in and contribute directly to the development of their diverse and multi-layered communities, and emphasises the need for targets beyond overall participation in higher education to drive long-term better outcomes for all of our students.

So how do we do this? That's really the job of today's forum.

It's an excellent opportunity for all of us working in equity practice in the higher education sector to reflect on the question posed in the discussion paper and develop a response that will ensure we achieve meaningful progress in student equity.

It's a really specific ask that Mary O'Kane has made, and she'll be joining us later. She's, as you can imagine, got a number of meetings, but she will be joining us especially for the panel session, and she really does want us as much as possible to provide concrete solutions as part of this Accord process. This really is about providing those solutions to government who are asking for us to give them.

The Dawkins reforms in the late 1980s ushered in a new era of Australian higher education, transforming access to university from an elite model to a mass model, underpinned by a philosophical commitment to greater equity in higher education.

This focus on student equity, and there really has been a focus on student equity at a policy level for 30 years, so we have made gains, but we're still not meeting the equity participation targets as a nation, and what's more, we're seeing those signs of socioeconomic segregation in the higher education sector itself, and that's something we'll be looking at today.

Fifteen universities, and Alan Pettigrew will take you through some of these figures later on, but to give an example, 15 universities out of 42 educate almost 60% of the total low SES population in Australia. Eleven universities educate almost 60% of Australia's rural and regional students. Currently, our funding model does not appropriately support the universities who make this enormous contribution to our low SES participation in Australian higher education.

I don't think I need to tell this room that HEP equity support funding is still a very small proportion of the overall teaching grant for any university. The original allocation proposed by Bradley was 4% of the Commonwealth teaching grant, and regular cuts and adjustments since 2012 means that HEP now sits at just $150 million in an overall education spend of $35 billion.

For universities with high concentrations of equity cohorts, additional transition and academic support is needed to ensure student success. We also need to make sure that there are incentives for universities with low numbers of equity cohorts to contribute to system growth, rather than just taking the best and brightest of a group of students already heading to university.

We need a national strategy across the lifetime of learning, and a system that rewards universities working together to expand access for equity cohorts across the education ecosystem. It's also vital to hear the student voice and student experience, particularly when informing equity policy.

I think what's exciting about this Accord is it gives us the opportunity to tackle inequity holistically so that we can better serve the whole community. So, we've got some really amazing people in the room today and online.

Joining us from the Universities Accord panel are Professor Mary O'Kane, as I said, who will be arriving a little bit later—she'll be here in person. Online we have Professor Barney Glover, Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt, the Honourable Fiona Nash, and the Honourable Jenny Macklin. We've got people from the Department here, and we're really happy to have them here—Mary Pearce, Kate Chipperfield, and Rebecca Mason.

For the agenda today, we also have a distinguished panel of speakers, which I'll be introducing to you properly when we come to that. But first, you're going to be hearing a wonderful keynote from Associate Professor Nadine Zacharias. She's going to give our student equity keynote lecture, and she's going to be followed by a sector analysis presentation by Emeritus Professor Alan Pettigrew. We'll have a Q&A session addressing the issues—the questions outlined in the Universities Accord paper.

So it's now my huge pleasure to introduce our keynote presenter, Associate Professor Nadine Zacharias. Nadine leads transformative work in higher education to achieve a more equitable and high-performing sector. We have loved working with Nadine over the years. It's just been really fantastic. The contribution to student equity research, policy, and practice was enabled by roles with the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education, including as an inaugural equity fellow, as well as senior management roles at both Swinburne and Deakin University. Welcome Nadine.

Thank you so much, Verity, and to our colleagues at IFEA for giving me the opportunity to kick us off today at what promises to be a really significant contribution to the national conversation we are currently having about the future of, well, the higher education system or the tertiary education system in Australia, and how we can rebuild it and redesign it to improve equitable participation. Welcome to you all. It is so amazing to see so many people, recent connections and people who I haven't literally seen in years. It is wonderful to have all of us here together for this particular conversation.

I'd like to echo what Verity said. This conversation will be richer for your contributions and for the really great questions I'm sure you're going to ask of us. My presentation is the updated version of a public lecture I gave at Swinburne in October. It was meant to be this really intimate affair at UTS, and look what that became. That is just wonderful. Some of you here or online might have seen this before, but I've updated around the edges just to make it relevant to the conversation we are having today.

In essence, it is structured around five big pieces of work I've done over the past 10 years. For my sins, I was here when the HEP was first proposed, declared, and then implemented in Australian universities, and it has really been the red thread of my career. The focus is very much on the world, according to Nadine today. We can draw lots of really great implications from those five pieces of research. Four of them are collaborative research projects, but one is, and I should just go to the slides. I really did not do that properly. We are starting with the best chance for all, and really the best chance for all as a reminder that amongst equity practitioners, the conversations around lifelong learning and inclusively designed systems and universal participation are not new. We have been in this conversation for a long, long time, and we have to update the graphic and insert the O'Kane review of 2023, and also in 2023, 2030 does not seem that far away. We probably have to also expand our horizon a little bit.

Before I jump in, I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this country, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and thank Elders past, present, and emerging for their care of the land on which we live and work. I was also privileged to see the opening keynote of Professor Megan Davis at the recent Universities Australia Conference, and I was struck by the grace and the resilience of Indigenous peoples in Australia to ask again the people and the Parliament to be included, explicitly included in the decisions that impact them, and Professor Davis reminded us that this is a question of principle, and I really can't see how we can do anything else but endorse the principle of Indigenous voice.

But I'm going to start at the beginning, and this is a wicked problem. What we're talking about here is not simple, because if it were simple, we would have worked out a solution a long time ago. The issue of inequitable access to higher education rests on factors which are multilevel—so they happen at the macro or the policy level, the meso or the institutional level, and the micro or the individual level. They are intersectional, and they compound in influence, and they accrue over a person's lifetime. So disadvantage starts really, really early on, when one mum goes home to a year's paid maternity leave and another one goes home to a few weeks on the minimum wage if she's lucky. That's where disadvantage starts. This means that there are no simple solutions, and multiple actors need to come together to achieve change.

I'll show you this amazing table which I have shared with global colleagues multiple times. In Australia, we are so lucky to have access to this kind of information, to have a time series of 30-plus years of equity data. We are unique in the world, and we are the only ones who can produce tables like that that show us how the cumulative effects of disadvantage. The way to read this table is left to right and horizontally. We start with an index score of zero, which says that of those people who enrolled in a bachelor qualification in 2011 and did not belong to any of the six or the four equity groups that they are tracking here, those people had a chance of almost 72 per cent of completing their bachelor within a period of eight years. That's the reference point. That group makes up about 61 per cent of that cohort. The next level down is students with one level of disadvantage. You can see how it drops. There we are down to 65.5 per cent of completion over the same eight years, and that's about 30 per cent of the cohort. Then you drop one further, and you go with students with two levels of disadvantage are down to 60 per cent completion. Then you see the three and four, so the really compound disadvantage, the completion rate drops to under 50 per cent. This is just 1 per cent of the cohort, but you can see how, and we can see in the data, the amazing challenges that these students are up against. It also gives us, while equity group membership is not predictive necessarily at the individual level of success or struggle, it gives us a pretty good starting point for the kind of work that we are doing.

So where to from here? The thoughts we have thought before is the best chance for all, which was a consultation process that I undertook with my colleague and dear friend Matt Brett, who is at Deakin University and under the amazing mentorship of Professor Sally Kift. We consulted with the sector on what a proposed policy statement, a possible policy statement around student equity in higher education could look like for the Australian context. What we came up with in conversation with our colleagues was the best chance for all. So here is the full statement. The best chance for all says Australia's future depends on all its people, whoever and wherever they are, universal participation, being enabled to successfully engage in beneficial lifelong learning. And again, with an eye to the Accord process, that contributes to a fair, democratic, prosperous and enterprising nation and prosperity is explicitly called out in the review discussion paper, reconciliation with Indigenous Australia, cultural, civic and intellectual life. This is why we are in this game. It's achieved by an inclusively designed system with multiple entry and exit points, proactive removal of barriers to participation and tailored support where needed. Again, this is half the answer of some of the questions that the O'Kane review asks of us. And we want to be accountable through an integrated approach to measuring success at institutional and national levels to align performance with policy objectives. And I am really looking forward to Alan's analysis of that. And it might give us a bit of a better story there. So this is really, you know, that's what I'm saying. This is not new. We have, you know, like an existing framework in which we can approach some of these questions. And we have thought about the answers before. So this is really about contextualising it to 2023, to a post-COVID world, where AI is live, you know, it's a life challenging classroom. So it's really an adaptation of where we are right now, rather than a complete rethink.

I've included a bit of a policy context, which for people in this room, and I'm just making an assumption here that the, you know, virtual audience is as clued into this, I'll work through that very quickly, I just, again, wanted to remind us, you know, on the journey we've been on. So in Australia, we have a very long policy history and commitment to equitable participation in higher education, which started with the white paper of a fair chance for all in 1990. We are measuring equity in enrolment share of the undergraduate domestic student cohort. And we are following three designated equity groups. As I said, we have a 30 plus year time series, which is unique in the world. I know that Mary O'Kane spoke about, you know, like her sort of reference to the Bradley report, which happened, you know, which was released in 2008, on which basis the Gillard reforms were designed and implemented. So we had the 40-20 attainment target, demand driven funding, and the introduction of HEP. That all happened at the same time, the third bit of policy reform was the Gonski funding, which never fully came to fruition, and I'm going to circle back to that in a little while. So we are unique in having made a substantial investment, so $1.5 billion over 13 years and both are counting, notwithstanding, you know, like the reduction, it's been an incredibly significant investment into, you know, more equitable participation of students who belong to nationally recognised equity groups and particularly low SES students. There were two lots of reform, again, one you might have chosen to forget, which was the 2017 one, which was sort of the second unsuccessful attempt, the first one was the one by Christopher Pyne, which also features in a later bit of the presentation of performance based funding, but that was the point where the system was recapped through the funding process rather than through an act of legislation. There was the external evaluation of the HEP through ACIL Allen and the equity groups were also reviewed, so 2017 was a big year, and then the reform in 2020 that you're all probably painfully aware of, which is Job-ready Graduates and everything that came with that, so HEP became, or like HEP and enabling funding and regional loading became the LSAF. There was a commitment to partnership funding, but it's really a bit of a drop in the ocean. In comparison, again, I'm going to talk about the Queensland consortium, which got $21.7 million over three years, and Bridges got something similar, so $7 million over four years is really not going to cut it in the partnership space. There are targets at the moment which are below the actual participation rates of students from low SES backgrounds and Indigenous students, so again, it speaks to the ambition of the previous government, and we'll wait to see what the current government does with those. All of this is under review currently, so Mary O'Kane has the explicit brief to look at the Job-ready Graduates legislation, so I won't dwell on them. So let's jump into what we are going to talk about.

[Section omitted for brevity in this sample. In a full transcript, all spoken content would be included, including descriptions of visuals and significant sounds.]

Descriptive transcript

It's wonderful seeing so many equity practitioners in the one room. It's a great room of great people, so thank you very much for being here today.

As you know, this is a forum about attaining student equity through the Universities Accord. We've heard what the minister had to say about the primary role of equity in his vision for the Accord, and our job today is to tell both the minister and the department how we plan to help them achieve that. This is a great opportunity to have our voices heard in the Accord process, and you'll have the opportunity both in the room and online to ensure your submissions are taken into account.

Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that all of us in this room are on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The Gadigal people were the nation of first contact, the Indigenous owners of this land who bore the brunt of the first invasion, but they survived and never ceded this land. It is now, was then, and always will be Aboriginal land.

We're here to discuss the future of student equity in Australia. We need a higher education system that offers the same opportunities regardless of someone's location, financial circumstances, or cultural background. The Australian Universities Accord discussion paper recognises that universities are embedded in and contribute directly to the development of their diverse and multi-layered communities, and emphasises the need for targets beyond overall participation in higher education to drive long-term better outcomes for all students.

So how do we do this? That's the job of today's forum. It's an excellent opportunity for all of us working in equity practice in the higher education sector to reflect on the question posed in the discussion paper and develop a response that will ensure we achieve meaningful progress in student equity.

It's a really specific ask that Mary O'Kane has made, and she'll be joining us later. She has a number of meetings, but she will be joining us especially for the panel session, and she really wants us to provide concrete solutions as part of this Accord process. This is about providing those solutions to government who are asking for them.

The Dawkins reforms in the late 1980s ushered in a new era of Australian higher education, transforming access to university from an elite model to a mass model, underpinned by a philosophical commitment to greater equity. There has been a focus on student equity at a policy level for 30 years. We have made gains, but we're still not meeting the equity participation targets as a nation, and we're seeing signs of socioeconomic segregation in the higher education sector itself, which we'll be looking at today.

Fifteen universities out of 42 educate almost 60% of the total low SES population in Australia. Eleven universities educate almost 60% of Australia's rural and regional students. Currently, our funding model does not appropriately support the universities who make this enormous contribution to low SES participation in Australian higher education.

HEP equity support funding is still a very small proportion of the overall teaching grant for any university. The original allocation proposed by Bradley was 4% of the Commonwealth teaching grant, but regular cuts and adjustments since 2012 mean that HEP now sits at just $150 million in an overall education spend of $35 billion.

For universities with high concentrations of equity cohorts, additional transition and academic support is needed to ensure student success. We also need to make sure there are incentives for universities with low numbers of equity cohorts to contribute to system growth, rather than just taking the best and brightest of a group of students already heading to university.

We need a national strategy across the lifetime of learning, and a system that rewards universities working together to expand access for equity cohorts across the education ecosystem. It's also vital to hear the student voice and student experience, particularly when informing equity policy.

What's exciting about this Accord is it gives us the opportunity to tackle inequity holistically so we can better serve the whole community. We've got some really amazing people in the room today and online. Joining us from the Universities Accord panel are Professor Mary O'Kane, who will be arriving a little later, Professor Barney Glover, Distinguished Professor Larissa Berendt, the Honourable Fiona Nash, and the Honourable Jenny Macklin. We also have people from the department here: Mary Pearce, Kate Chipperfield, and Rebecca Mason.

For the agenda today, we have a distinguished panel of speakers, which I'll introduce properly when we come to that. But first, you'll be hearing a keynote from Associate Professor Nadine Zacharias, who leads transformative work in higher education to achieve a more equitable and high-performing sector. We've loved working with Nadine over the years; her contribution to student equity research, policy, and practice was enabled by roles with the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education, including as an inaugural equity fellow, as well as senior management roles at both Swinburne and Deakin University. Welcome, Nadine.

[Keynote by Associate Professor Nadine Zacharias:]

Thank you so much, Verity, and to our colleagues at IFEA for giving me the opportunity to kick us off today at what promises to be a significant contribution to the national conversation about the future of the higher education system in Australia, and how we can rebuild and redesign it to improve equitable participation.

Welcome to you all. It's amazing to see so many people, recent connections and people I haven't seen in years. It's wonderful to have all of us here together for this conversation, and I'd like to echo what Verity said: this conversation will be richer for your contributions and the great questions I'm sure you'll ask.

My presentation is an updated version of a public lecture I gave at Swinburne in October. It was meant to be an intimate affair at UTS, and look what that became! Some of you here or online might have seen this before, but I've updated it to make it relevant to today's conversation. In essence, it's structured around five big pieces of work I've done over the past 10 years.

For my sins, I was here when the HEP was first proposed, declared, and then implemented in Australian universities, and it has been the red thread of my career. The focus is very much on the world according to Nadine today, but we can draw lots of great implications from those five pieces of research. Four of them are collaborative research projects.

We're starting with "the best chance for all", as a reminder that among equity practitioners, the conversations around lifelong learning, inclusively designed systems, and universal participation are not new. We've been in this conversation for a long time, and we have to update the graphic and insert the O'Kane review of 2023. And also, 2030 doesn't seem that far away, so we probably have to expand our horizon a little.

Before I jump in, I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this country, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and thank elders past, present, and emerging for their care of the land on which we live and work. I was privileged to see the opening keynote of Professor Megan Davis at the recent Universities Australia Conference, and I was struck by the grace and resilience of Indigenous peoples in Australia to ask again the people and the Parliament to be included, explicitly included in the decisions that impact them. Professor Davis reminded us that this is a question of principle, and I really can't see how we can do anything else but endorse the principle of Indigenous voice.

But I'm going to start at the beginning, and this is a wicked problem. What we're talking about here is not simple—if it were, we would have worked out a solution a long time ago. The issue of inequitable access to higher education rests on factors which are multilevel: macro (policy), meso (institutional), and micro (individual). They are intersectional, they compound in influence, and they accrue over a person's lifetime. Disadvantage starts really early on, when one mum goes home to a year's paid maternity leave and another goes home to a few weeks on minimum wage if she's lucky. That's where disadvantage starts. This means there are no simple solutions, and multiple actors need to come together to achieve change.

In Australia, we are lucky to have access to 30-plus years of equity data. We are unique in the world, the only ones who can produce tables that show us the cumulative effects of disadvantage. For example, people who enrolled in a bachelor qualification in 2011 and did not belong to any of the equity groups had a 72% chance of completing their bachelor within eight years. Students with one level of disadvantage dropped to 65.5% completion, two levels to 60%, and those with three or four levels of disadvantage dropped to under 50%. While equity group membership is not necessarily predictive at the individual level, it gives us a good starting point for the kind of work we are doing.

So, where to from here? "The best chance for all" was a consultation process I undertook with Matt Bratt and under the mentorship of Professor Sally Kift. We consulted with the sector on what a possible policy statement around student equity in higher education could look like for the Australian context. The statement is: "Australia's future depends on all its people, whoever and wherever they are, being enabled to successfully engage in beneficial lifelong learning. This contributes to a fair, democratic, prosperous and enterprising nation, reconciliation with Indigenous Australia, and cultural, civic and intellectual life. It's achieved by an inclusively designed system with multiple entry and exit points, proactive removal of barriers to participation, and tailored support where needed. We want to be accountable through an integrated approach to measuring success at institutional and national levels to align performance with policy objectives."

This is not new; we have an existing framework in which we can approach these questions. It's really about contextualising it to 2023, to a post-COVID world, where AI is live and challenging classrooms. It's an adaptation of where we are now, rather than a complete rethink.

[The keynote continues with detailed discussion of policy history, research projects, data, and recommendations, including:]

- The importance of sustained, high-engagement outreach in regional and remote communities, and the need for a national approach to data collection and program delivery. - The value and limitations of equity scholarships: they assist students in financial need to hang in there but can't overcome the effects of complex lives. Only a small proportion of eligible students receive them. - The need for appropriate income support through the Commonwealth, and the impact of the COVID supplement on student success. - The importance of evaluating and reforming institutional HEP programs, honest conversations about co-funding mainstream services, and the need for ongoing employment of core staff. - The development of a HEP evaluation framework at Swinburne, using human-centred design and program logic models. - The need for a national database to track outreach and equity initiatives, and for meta-analysis of the research already done. - The combination of demand-driven funding and HEP made a difference, but universities need to be sustainably funded to deliver. - Gonski funding remains an aspiration and is the missing link in attainment; we won't be able to grow much beyond current numbers without fixing attainment in public schools and disadvantaged areas. - At the institutional level, we need evidence-informed and honest assessments of HEP programs, and to place students at the centre of program redesign.

[Q&A Panel Session:]

The panel included Dr Leanne Holt, Associate Professor Nadine Zacharias, Chris Ronan, Dr Kylie Austin, and Darlene McLennan, with moderation by Professor Verity Firth.

Key themes and responses included:

- The need for more investment in programs like HEPPP and ISSP, with evaluation frameworks to ensure smart, evidence-based investment. - The importance of universities contributing to equity beyond supplementary funding, aligning commitment with investment (not just monetary, but also structural). - The difference between numbers and percentages in equity participation, and the need for bold aspirations—aiming for parity. - The bottleneck in equity is in schools; investment is needed in the schooling pipeline, as well as better articulation of pathways between VET and higher education. - Regional participation requires nuanced understanding; regional Australia is diverse, and marginalisation within communities must be addressed. - The value of partnerships and community-led solutions, such as Country Universities Centres, and the need for coordinated national policy. - For students with disability, the need for high expectations, coordinated transition planning, and better investment in inclusive initiatives. - The importance of a streamlined, easy-to-access national approach to income support (Centrelink, Abstudy, Austudy, youth allowance), and the limitations of scholarships as a solution. - The need for industry partnerships to provide meaningful employment opportunities for students while studying. - The challenge of Centrelink policies requiring full-time study loads, which can clash with students' needs and lead to attrition. - The importance of embedding student voice in equity practice, through advisory committees, co-design, and partnership approaches. - The need for universal design for learning (UDL) and accessible ICT procurement, and for universities to champion accessibility as they do environmental sustainability. - The potential for regional university hub models to be adapted for urban areas, and the need for data to highlight gaps and overlaps in outreach. - The importance of collaboration over competition in equity work, and the need for national data systems to coordinate outreach. - The challenge of incentivising universities to collaborate, and the potential role of funding, reputation, and regulatory levers (e.g., TEQSA registration). - The need for demand-driven funding, but also for support structures around it, and for funding formulas to focus on completion and graduate outcomes, not just access. - The need for minimum standards of support for all students, and for increased investment in disability support. - The importance of partnerships with VET providers, and ensuring accessibility to employment as well as higher education. - The need to think about lifelong learning across the entire education ecosystem, with coherent principles and pathways from early childhood through to higher education and employment. - The importance of credentialing partial learning and enabling flexible entry and exit from education.

The session concluded with thanks to all participants and a reminder that submissions to the Accord process remain open.