Maria Raciti

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report. The University of Queensland is the host institution of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Indigenous Futures, the first entirely Indigenous-led ARC Centre of Excellence that commenced in 2023.

Please find attached a submission responding to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report prepared by Professors Maria Raciti, Marnee Shay and Bronwyn Fredericks, who lead the Education and Economies theme of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous Futures. The discussion and recommendations are provided for your consideration.

Success is often assumed to have a common definition and to be a transparent term. However, the data shows that success is, in reality, personal, sociocultural and structural. According to Government policy and institutional measures, it is considered in terms of pass/fail, grade averages or gaining employment (O’Shea & Delahunty, 2018). However, when students are asked about success, whilst there are references to vocational and quantifiable

notions of success, equally, highly valuable personal, community and familial experiences are conveyed. This research clearly reveals the multidimensional and contextual nature of success.

Prior research has found differences in students’ success at university in relation to their socioeconomic background. However, these studies have used relatively restricted and potentially biased definitions of success (e.g., grade performance, course completions) that do not take into account students’ own perceptions of success. In contrast, this project aims to broaden engagement with notions of success through in-depth consideration

of students’ perspectives, highlighting the diversity of experiences and meanings in the context of students’ lives. Through this process, we move away from imposed, top-down, monodimensional definitions of success towards a

multidimensional understanding that success is related to the diverse contexts of lived experience.

The present project was commissioned by the Australian Government’s Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) under the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Programme National Priorities Pool scheme. The project aimed to provide a more comprehensive and integrative understanding of success in higher education, including when and how it is predicted by students’ socioeconomic status (SES). In particular, the project aimed to investigate SES differences in the definition and experience of success in higher education.

The project focuses on students’ perceptions, experiences and understandings of success, bringing together a quantitative and qualitative study to develop holistic and more equitable understandings of student success in higher education (HE).

This seed project aimed to enhance Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander university student engagement and retention. Specifically, this project attended to the notion of the 'university place' and provides information and two tools that universities can use to help optimise the persistence and educational outcomes of Indigenous Australians. This project has produced meaningful, useful and novel contributions that are relevant to the sector. Central to this seed project is the notion of place. Place is broadly defined as 'space + meaning' (Harrison & Dourish 1996). People's identity is intertwined with places and, as such, people and places are knitted together (Sack 1997). Even so, the relationship between people's identity and place is often overlooked (Malpas 1999). Place is defined as the experiential setting that consists of a specific location and the cognitive, emotional, behavioural and social activities that occur within (Relph 1976). People alter their identity to help them navigate places (Baumeiser & Muraven 1996). Thus, the 'university place' comprises cognitive, emotional, behavioural and social activities in a locale that transpires across students' university experience and with which their identity is intertwined. For this project, a case study approach comprisedof two universities and employed mixed methods that were organised into three stages. Stage 1 included the collation of baseline data from the participating universities (e.g. Indigenous student enrolment numbers) and beginning-project presentations. Stage 2 comprised interviews and focus groups from which qualitative data was collected from: a) undergraduate and postgraduate Indigenous university students; b) academic teaching staff; and c) relevant administrative, professional and technical (APT) staff. From this qualitative data, a framework was developed and was discussed at mid-project presentations and disseminated in the mid-project report. Finally, in Stage 3 quantitative data was collected via surveys of: a) undergraduate and postgraduate Indigenous students; and b) academic teaching staff. Stage 3 served to evolve the framework and develop the two project tools. End-project presentations, workshops, publications and an e-booklet served to widely disseminate the findings. [Executive summary, ed]

Report submitted to the Australian Government Department of Education and Training, Canberra. Education is transformative. Education delivers benefits to individuals, their families and communities. It is this far-reaching impact that compels research into understanding why people from low-socio economic status (SES) backgrounds are under-represented in tertiary education, and finding new ways to address this situation. This position paper reviews what is currently known about interventions for widening participation in tertiary education, with the intention of mapping those findings to a social marketing strategy aimed at people who have not traditionally considered tertiary education as a career pathway. A practical approach is taken, to give an overview of the current discussions and debates in the literature to review which approaches work best for the cohorts under consideration, and consider the reasons for that success. This project is novel as it synthesises two similar yet different domains; social marketing and widening participation. The social marketing-widening participation nexus that underpins this project not only provides a more robust platform which will generate new insights, it also represents a different lens through which to view the issue of underparticipation in tertiary education by people from low socio-economic backgrounds.