As part of the NSW Government’s Collaboration and Innovation Fund, UTS, UNSW and Macquarie University have received funding of $500K for our newly formed partnership, the NSW Equity Consortium: Imagined Futures project.
This Consortium seeks to demonstrate a new model of outreach in school, building student capabilities to access and succeed in post-school learning outcomes. The partnership targets whole cohort year-groups between Years 7 and 9 at selected Greater Western Sydney high schools where students are under-represented in higher education.
With a joint literacy and student equity focus, the Consortium’s goal is to reduce the socioeconomic gap in students in terms of academic success.
‘University widening participation programs are intended to remove barriers to education and create a more diverse student cohort,’ said Sonal Singh, UTS University Lead for the project and Equity and Diversity Manager (Student Equity), at the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion.
‘At present – due to a range of funding and other pressures – typical outreach programs target only the senior secondary years. But research shows us that we need to be targeting these students much earlier.
‘This partnership is using evidence-based teaching programs and evaluating their efficacy, and early feedback from the first term of implementation suggests that the program is yielding positive results.’
The program develops student interest and confidence in future study while driving the importance of literacy as crucial to not only students’ immediate classroom context, but beyond.
‘Across the higher education sector, widening participation has become the key strategic objective linked to promoting equity and social inclusion in higher education’ says Verity Firth, Executive Director, Social Justice at UTS.
‘UTS acknowledges the importance of an inclusive learning environment. These values are embedded in UTS’s 2027 vision and strategy and are fundamental to our role as a public purpose university that champions social change.’
The in-school program runs for six weeks, for around 1,100 students per year group from a highly diverse student cohort.
Ms Ngov, a teacher at Cabramatta High School said it is ‘a fantastic program which brought personal and social issues to light, whilst indirectly achieving literacy outcomes. Students enjoyed the atmosphere the university students brought to the classroom, and they looked forward to it.’
‘This consortium embodies a best practice approach to student equity that has never been undertaken in this way in Australia before, by working in partnership with MQ and UTS we are able to undertake a connected program which is designed for whole cohorts’ says Mary Teague, the project lead, CI and UNSW Director of Access and Equity (Students).
The whole-of-cohort approach lends itself well to a rigorous, large-scale, and practice-informed evaluation strategy. Its longitudinal design means that change – both anticipated and unanticipated – can be tracked in real time.
By working together, the partnership minimises replication and maximises resource usage by sharing a single program design, evaluation framework and longitudinal research plan. It is a model for collaborative outreach that can be adopted by universities and schools across NSW.
The NSW Equity Consortium is led by UNSW Sydney in partnership with UTS and Macquarie University.