Thrive: Finishing School Well is a research program that combines the power of statistical machine learning, lived experience and community co-design to understand what factors impact NSW school students finishing school well.

Thrive’s unique approach integrates the expertise of education specialists with the development of new causal machine learning methodologies, rich longitudinal datasets and qualitative research methods to engage communities, including children and young people, to identify specific challenges and how to address them for positive change.  

The initiative is grounded in the Bayesian paradigm, which is instrumental in bridging the gap between quantitative and qualitative research. It allows for the synthesis of diverse sources of information, such as government datasets, individual case studies and community experience to understand and uncover the pathways that lead to overcoming social disadvantage.  

The program is a collaboration between the Human Technology Institute at University of Technology Sydney, and Western Sydney University, with substantial funding support from the Paul Ramsay Foundation (PRF). It will support a diverse team of Master’s and PhD research students, postdocs and academics in statistics, computer science and social sciences, as well as experts in public policy and education.  

The knowledge generated will inform policy decisions, enabling the design and implementation of more effective educational programs which support all students to finish school well, irrespective of the barriers they face.  

Thrive is a living lab, ensuring that strategies are continuously updated and improved as new information comes to light. This unique collaboration creates a fertile environment for innovative solutions to emerge with a strong potential for beneficial impact across the entire community.  

Through its emphasis on the creation and application of cutting-edge statistical machine learning techniques, along with the harnessing of qualitative and quantitative data, Thrive is pioneering a unique pathway in education research. Its work promises to position Australia at the forefront of employing innovative and evidence-based methodologies to tackle pressing social issues.  

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Transcript

At UTS, our vision is to be a leading public university of technology. We're absolutely committed to research and innovation which has public value. We are defined by how we support our communities to thrive economically, socially, and culturally. The Thrive program is a very important initiative for HTI. It highlights the importance of research by demonstrating that the creation of new AI methods can aid educators and policymakers to make robust decisions to improve outcomes for school students, irrespective of the barriers that they face.

Thrive is a really exciting project. It's bringing together researchers from UTS, from Western Sydney University, and also from the NSW Department of Education.

We at the Paul Ramsay Foundation are an Australian charitable foundation focused on supporting all people and communities in Australia to thrive by breaking cycles of disadvantage. We're investing in the Thrive program because we know that when young people finish school well, they are much more likely to thrive throughout their lives—and their kids are too.

We are essentially trying to bring together both worlds, where unstructured data and qualitative understanding of educational outcomes merges with mathematical models and data, in such a way where artificial intelligence and machine learning support this development.

I would say our technology is human-centred data science, or you would call it human-centred AI. It brings the community values, it brings the expert knowledge. It's AI that puts the human in the middle. It's the most important part of that model.

This new technology is essentially looking at individual students' data—privacy-preserving, of course—and we are able to figure out what are the patterns that are ultimately influencing their outcomes.

The Western Sydney University team brings the expertise in lived experience, and so we're all about creative methods of engagement and authentic collaboration and co-design with communities.

We'll develop a toolkit of arts-based and other research approaches to try to tap into the most diverse groups of young people that we can, in a way that's meaningful for them.

We at the Paul Ramsay Foundation are really excited by this innovative partnership. It's drawing together rigorous qualitative research that elevates the voices of young people and their families, with innovative quantitative methods based in machine learning. It's also a long-term partnership between two outstanding research institutions, government, and philanthropy.

I think it's a beautiful marriage of different skill sets and expertise. Of course, our colleagues in the Department of Education are experts in terms of the delivery of education and education settings, and also in educational policy, and so they're critical to this project.

It's so exciting to be working so closely with them. We're creating solutions to real-world problems, which is really exciting. We are able to really change the world we live in by developing novel technology, and that's a really fun thing to be part of.

We are looking for students that are passionate about social justice, about education. Their background could be anything, just because we are a really multidisciplinary program.

We are looking for students who wish to enrol in a postgraduate research degree and are interested in developing and using AI and emerging technologies for social good. We have scholarships available from the NextGen AI and Emerging Tech program, which is administered by CSIRO. Students with lived experience are particularly encouraged to apply.

Enrolment is available at the University of Technology Sydney, Western Sydney University, and the Australian National University.

Visit Thrive website