Attaining student equity through the Universities Accord

Transcript: Keynote Lecture – Nadine Zacharias
PROF. THE HON. VERITY FIRTH AM:  Hi, everybody.  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 has 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.
       
For those joining online, there will be an opportunity to chat and I encourage you to put in the chat the traditional owners of the land where you're meeting.
       
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 multilayered communities and emphasises the need for targets beyond overall participation in higher education to drive longterm better outcomes for all of our students.
       
So how do we do this?  And 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 questions 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.  
       
15 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; 11 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 HEPPP 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 HEPPP 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, Kelly 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.  

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. 
 
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 Swinburne and Deakin University. 
 
Welcome, Nadine. 

       
ASSOC. PROF. NADINE ZACHARIAS: Thank you so much Verity, and my colleagues at EPHEA for giving me the opportunity to kick us off today to what promises to be a significant contribution to the national conversation we are having about the future of higher education system or 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  you know, recent connections and people who I haven't literally seen in years.  It is wonderful, you know, to have all of us here together for this particular conversation.  And 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, right?  So that is just wonderful.  So 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 that we're having today.  
       
But in essence, it's structured around five big pieces of work I've done over the past ten years and for my sins I was here when the HEPPP was first proposed, declared and then implemented in Australian universities and it has really been the red thread of my career, so the focus is very much on the world according to Nadine today, but 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, right, I really did not do that properly  we're 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 doesn't seem that far away, so 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, so 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, right?  That's where disadvantage starts.  This means that there are no simple solutions and multiple actors need to come together to achieve change.  
       
So I'll show you this amazing table which I have shared with global colleagues multiple times.  So in Australia we are so lucky to have access to this kind of information to have a time series of 30plus 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 the cumulative effects of disadvantage.  
       
So the way to read this table is left to right and horizontally.  So you start with the zero, 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 four equity groups that they're tracking here, those people had a chance of almost 72% of completing their bachelor within a period of eight years.  That's the reference point and that group makes up about 61% of that cohort.  
       
The next level down is people with students with one level of disadvantage and you can see how it drops.  So there we are down to 65.5% of completion over the same eight years and that's about 30% of the cohort.  
       
Then you drop one further and you go with, you know, students with two levels of disadvantage are down to 60% completion and then you see like the 3 and 4, so the really compound disadvantage, the completion rate drops to under 50% and this is just  you know, just  1% of the cohort, but you can see how and we can see in the data the amazing challenges that these students are up against and it also gives us  you know, like 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've 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's 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 and what we came up with in conversation with our colleagues was The Best Chance For All.  
       
So here's 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're 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 that's what I'm saying, this is not new.  We have 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 postCOVID world where AI is live, you know, live challenge in classrooms, 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 virtual audience is as clued into this  I'll work through that very quickly.  I just again wanted to remind us 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 30plus 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 was released in 2008 on which basis the Gillard reforms were designed and implemented.  So we had the 40/20 attainment target, demanddriven funding, and the introduction of the HEPPP.  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 in both and counting, notwithstanding like the reduction, has been an incredibly significant investment into 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 performancebased 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 HEPP through ACIL Allen and the equity group review, so 2017 was a big year.  And then the reform in 2020 that you're all probably painfully aware of, which is jobsready graduates and everything that came with that, so HEPP became or like HEPP and enabling funding and regional loading became the IRLSAF.  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 like $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 lowSES 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 JobReady graduates legislation, so I won't dwell on them.
       
Let's jump into what we are going to talk about.  So these are the four pieces of research I'm going to remind you of.  All of them are available online.  Most of them are available through the NCSEHE.  The HEPPP Evaluation Framework is available from the Swinburne website and my LinkedIn page.  So we'll have a look at not quite the phases of the student life cycle but pre access and access institutional approaches to doing HEPPP and then HEPPP evaluation.  
       
I want to acknowledge that all of them are collaborative projects and very much call out the people who worked with me, including Annette Cairnduff, who's in the room today, which is one of the wonderful reunions for the scholarships piece.  So the outreach work was done with our colleagues in Queensland; the scholarships project with colleagues at Sydney, where Annette worked at the time, Deakin and QUT and Mary Kelly and her crew.  The fellowship I was lucky to have three great case study universities, so it was collaborative in that regard, and Swinburne's HEPPP Evaluation Framework we produced with colleagues at TDD Consulting and that was a really productive collaboration as well.  
       
And I'm going to check my time.  This is all good.  Okay, so I'm going to jump off from here and I'll keep that on the lefthand side for orientation so that you know where we are in the session.
       
So is university a desirable and achievable option for young people in communities who are underrepresented?  What we knew when we started, because none of this is a greenfield site, but because these studies happened over 10 years, it's really important to place them in their period.  So this project happened in 2018, so what did we know when we started?  To access higher education, students need to jump five hurdles and it is really interesting that sort of in terms of how do we talk about it and we need to sort of at least consider this in putting our responses together to the discussion paper.  Are we talking about barriers or are we talking about things that have to happen for success to occur?  
       
So for a young person or anybody, you know, to successfully access and participate in higher education, there's the five considerations of availability of a place; accessibility of the place, and that is particularly in terms of physical accessibility, and our regional colleagues know what I'm talking about; achievement, which could also be attainment, so this is your level of preparation to engage at higher learning; and your aspiration, that's the desirable bit, so you need to want to go to university or further education to engage; and the fifth one is affordability and affordability spans the student life cycle, and again, many of you are really acutely aware of what a hurdle this is.  
       
We did another piece of research with Kelly George at Deakin Uni that showed that regional students drop out really late in the piece.  So we followed through a cohort of school leavers as well and it was interesting where students dropped out and regional students dropped out really late and our hypothesis was they eventually ran out of money.
       
So they are the five As.  We've had a sustained investment in WP initiatives, but little published evidence to show a link between the outreach work we do and what happens in terms of application to higher education, so we have very little statistical data.  Two existing Australian studies had tried to do it and there was the Aim Higher evaluation in the UK.  So that's what we had.
       
But then the widening participation consortium in Queensland was this unique way to do outreach in Australia.  So they had a cluster approach where each university was responsible for a dedicated region, so they tried to do similar things in different places, and they had the statewide monitoring of the school engagement activity.  So Queensland is the only state that has a coherent, consistent, highquality, comprehensive data set on their outreach work where they can track who's doing what in which school, it's the only state, and that's why the data is so great.
       
So this is Queensland over time.  Queensland is also unique in terms of the fact that it is more diverse and more disadvantaged than most other states.  So it has 32% of the population reside in lowSES post codes, the national average is 25%; 37% in regional locations, where it's 29% nationally.  4% of the population identified as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, compared to 2.8% nationally; and it has the  had then and still has the lowest higher education participation rate in Australia.  
       
So part of why this worked in Queensland was because there was a sense that we could grow the pie.  There was enough for each university to go around, where the Sydney basin suffered a little bit of there is not enough to go around for everyone, right.  So that was a really important reason why this worked.  There is other reasons, but that was an important one of them.
       
You can see here, and that's probably pretty small, both on your screen and on my sheet.  The blue lines is the widening participation, schools regional versus urban, and then all Queensland schools regional versus urban are the lines.  I have another table later on with the 2021 data, but again, where did we jump off, this is where we jumped off, and you can see the really pronounced difference between regional and urban.
       
Okay, what did we want to do?  We did a mixedmethods and longitudinal research study.  So we wanted evidence to support that's what we found.  So we went looking for it and we found it, that when you have high engagement widening participation programs, so what are we talking about?  We are talking about deeply embedded and predictable engagement in schools where the schools know you're coming, they have worked it into their curriculum; there's multiyear engagements, or not just in one year level but in most of them; there's wholecohort engagements  we are not taking a few select kids that are recommended by the teacher, but you're taking the whole year level; and there's lots of oncampus and peer activity.  That's what we've classified as a high engagement widening participation program.  And we could demonstrate that these programs had a statistically significant and positive impact on application rates to university once we controlled for regional and socioeconomic disadvantage and what pathway they were on.  So that was still the time of the OP, were students on an OP pathway or not.
       
As I've already said, the degree of engagement really mattered in students' decision making process about post school options and the reason why we didn't find as much correlation in the regions was because a high level of engagement was much more difficult to maintain in the regions than in the urban centres, and for all the reasons that many of you will be well aware of.  So they hadn't been going for as long, they weren't as deep, they weren't as intensive as the programs in the urban schools.  Once the Queensland consortium rolled off its partnership funding, the $22 million that they had, that provided a real problem because universities fell back on their institutional funding and particularly the universities that had the big clusters in Northern and Far North Queensland, they just couldn't maintain the level of investment that was required.
       
The logistics resourcing and institutional priorities mitigated against engagement, especially with more remote schools, and for the project we flew to Mount Isa.  So you fly an hour from Townsville to Mount Isa.  It's 1000km to your nearest university town and the mine is right there and you can earn, you know, $60,000 as a firstyear apprentice fitter and turner.  Why would you go to university, right?  So it really sort of brought it home to us, like what the challenges are in engaging in remote communities.  So the outcome is in regional and remote schools that outreach work is mostly ad hoc versus comprehensive and integrated WP programs in regional locations are rare.
       
Chris Ronan and Cathy Stones, you found similar things in South Australia  not quite as extreme as Queensland in terms of the tyranny of distance, but similar  yes, similar patterns were found there.
       
So, in summary, the ambition of delivering similar things in different places was not fully realised and the funding was a key problem in that.
       
So what is the contributions of the study?  We found a statistically significant relationship between WP programs and applications to university.  It's the first study that has ever done that, so we were pretty proud of that.  We demonstrated the value of centralised longitudinal data collection for evaluation purposes.  This is the model for Australia.  What they did in Queensland can be a national model, so again, this stuff exists, it just needs to be scaled.
       
There is, we found, a virtuous cycle of sustained widening participation activity in highly engaged schools and you can see you demystify, you change attitudes, there's increased determination to achieve goals which go against the prevailing norms, you build instrumental skills so that students can navigate the choices and the processes that leads to more informed decision making to a specific pathway that leads to more applications to university, which over time shifts culture, that's the virtuous cycle and, we found that in quite a few of the schools where we interviewed school leavers and students and parents.
We also produced an analytical framework that considered institutional, situational and dispositional factors, so helpful for future analysis of widening participation work.
       
So what do we need to do to shift the dial in outreach and the preaccess phase?  This is the data that I was talking about before and it is pretty dire.  So these are lowSES schools, so SES of under 1,000.  If we start from the top, they are the more privileged schools, so they are not engaged in widening participation work with an SES of 1,000 or over and you can see how all of Queensland is tipping downwards, and then you have the grey one is the low SES schools not engaged in widening participation activities and they decline faster and the widening participation engaged in low SES schools, it's sort of it's buffering against the trend is the best we could say, right?  So again, it's not a super good news story.
       
Okay, so what can we do about that?  To develop a sustained high engagement strategy for regional and remote communities that does not solely rely on university funding and delivery.  The regional universities, we have talked about them already, right?  They can never generate that kind of funding that is required to service regional and remote communities in terms of outreach.  It's never going to happen.  And the more wealthy city universities are never going to see enough of a reason to put money into that work, which by many is seen as many, many, many years down the pipeline.  It's just not going to happen.  
       
There's different models across the globe.  You know, like in Scotland, for example, there's a third party provider that delivers regional outreach or remote outreach where all the universities contribute to a central bucket and then it gets allocated out.  You know, there are different models  hello  there are different models that we can draw on in terms of how to do regional average, but we need a different way to do this and we need a different way to fund it sustainably.  Otherwise it is not going to happen.  
       
That strategy needs to be complemented by Indigenousspecific engagement and parent engagement.  So the Indigenous numbers in Queensland are holding up much more so than the total numbers, which is really interesting.  So Indigenous is a bit of a success story.  
       
I've already talked about systemwide data collection and monitoring of widening participation and engagement.  We need a national tool to do this.  Otherwise what we do at the institutional level is not going to contribute highquality insights because we don't know comprehensively who else is in the schools that we are working with.  We need a coordinated way to collect this data and at least at the state level better nationally.  
       
And again, the model exists.  It's a higher education access tracker.  In the UK it's a membershipbased model.  They've offered multiple times to come out and help us.  Like it's not impossible.  This exists.  
       
And the return to demanddriven funding and to improve provision of higher education in regional and remote locations.  We saw immediately as soon as the system was recapped, that's why I put in the little history lesson, in 2017 the numbers drop, the curve bends down.  2017 was peak equity, and I would say that it's not a coincidence that that happened in 2017.
       
There's structural challenges, you know, that impede our progress.  So there's a digital divide in the availability of highspeed internet.  Again, you're all aware, it's well documented.  A school system in which disadvantaged students are years behind their advantaged counterparts upon graduation and that is a key barrier and I'm going to, as I said, come back to Gonski.  And COVID has impacted disproportionately on already disadvantaged students, especially the young ones in the locked down states and that is playing out in my very privileged neighbourhood in Melbourne and if it is playing out there, it will play out even worse in the more disadvantaged areas.  
       
So watch Victoria, parts of NSW, watch the year 3 NAPLAN results.  This year is down.  Next year is going to be even worse as sort of that washes through.  So this year's year 3s had year prep in school.  Next year's year 3s had year prep at home in home schooling, so that's going to be really, really interesting to watch that.  I don't have the analytical tools, but if anybody in the room does, please volunteer to do that project.  I would love to see it.
       
Okay, so this is pre access.  We're jumping into access and acts of faith, right, because that's what equity scholarships were called by one of our colleagues.  So where were we?  So this goes back to 2015, Annette  oh, my goodness  and we got together with Mary Kelly, who was the queen of the scholarship, many of you might remember, and who was rather incensed by Christopher Pyne's suggestion of the Commonwealth scholarships program and the conversion of the startup scholarship for regional students that went from a grant into a loan that got put on top of the HECS debt.  So that's where it started with Mary Kelly's rage at the Federal Minister of Education.  
       
So we got together.  In the literature we knew that financial stress was a well established problem.  That remained so and got a bit more acute.  The NCSEHE had done an overview of equity scholarships practice that had found little evidence of what constitutes good practice in equity scholarships and that there was a notable lack of systematic scholarly evaluation of impact, you know, like so we give out scholarships, what do they actually do, and we set out to address that gap in a comparative study.
       
So it was mixed methods.  You can see the trend.  Most of my work is mixed methods.  So we looked at institutional data of the students who received a scholarship versus those who didn't and we looked at retention and success rates, not at completion.
       
So we found that having an equity scholarship was positively correlated with retention and the qualitative data said the biggest effect was that it reduced stress levels.  It gave students more time to study, more time on task, so that they could reduce the hours in paid employment.  There were really mixed and that was consistent.  Across the three institutions, across all of the equity groups, retention was consistent and across the scholarship product.  So even if you gave students $500 as a oneoff, it had a positive retention effect, which was really stunning.
       
Very mixed findings with regard to success rates, no clear patterns.  The influence of equity scholarships seems to be more related to the recipient characteristics than the scholarship type.  So put another way, who you give the scholarship to matters more than what you give them, yes.  And that was really interesting where Sydney and QUT were at opposite ends, so Sydney had what we called an access merit scholarship where they went to you know, Mary called them the talented of the poor and QUT gave them to the most disadvantaged students they could find and so they had much worse retention rates than the others, so it mattered who you gave them to.  And it was a similar amount.  One got 5,000, the other got 6,000.  So that didn't matter.  It mattered who you gave them to.
       
And male scholarship holders had higher retention rates and female equity scholarship holders had higher success rates.  Interestingly enough, and I don't want you to draw the wrong conclusions from this, but giving scholarships to male students closed the attainment gap between male and female students.  It was really interesting, really interesting.
       
Okay, cool.  So what did that study contribute?  So scholarships assist students in financial need enough to hang in there, but can't overcome the effects of complex lives.  So they are no panacea.  That's what the Queensland data really showed us.  Just giving students money is not going to get them over the line, right, especially the ones  so what can money fix was the question.  Not everything is the answer.  
       
Only a tiny proportion of eligible students get them, so only 3% of the total cohort who were eligible to apply got a scholarship.  So it's teensytinsy, it's icing on the cake.  None of the universities handed out the money based on a locational indicator, so nobody went on low SES, everybody had variations of an assessment process, and this was the first published crossinstitutional study of equity scholarships globally.  
       
We were contacted  so we put up the report on the NCSEHE website and then we were contacted years later to say, "We've done this really comprehensive review, yours is the only crossinstitutional study we can find in the world, you should really publish it", and that's when we wrote the paper.  So, yes, things you didn't realise about your work when you move on to other things quickly.
       
So what do we need to do to shift the dial on affordability, and this is a big topic, right?  We should evaluate the national experiment that was the COVID supplement on the Centrelink benefits.  Again, I had a quick look at them yesterday.  So for 2020, success rates in Victoria and in Victoria the most, in New South Wales the effect is smaller, consistently went up across the whole cohort and all of the equity groups to the tune of 2 percentage points, right?  So it is significant.  In New South Wales, 1 percentage point.  In the other states not so much, right?  So the combination of getting double the money and being locked down did wonders for people's ability to study and to actually do well, right, in their studies.  So again, there is a bit of an angle there if people are interested in big data.
       
It is really the role of the Commonwealth to provide consistent, predictable, appropriate levels of income support to all students through the Centrelink system.  It exists, you know, like the assessment can be done in fairly  efficient ways. The amounts of support need to be adjusted.  Just as HDR students got an increase in their APA so that they rise slightly above the poverty line, the same should be done for all the other Commonwealth benefits.
       
For universities in giving out scholarship architecture go simple, go volume.  You know, you want simple, really efficient processes for assessing your scholarships.  QUT is a lovely model.  If you're interested, I'm sure the colleagues there will talk to you.  For optimal outcomes, scholarships should be money plus support, and I'm not sure how many of you are doing this, but this is a beautiful trial for our colleagues at the department of an innovative equity initiative and it could be done really quite simply as a randomised control trial if you desire.
       
The allocation of scholarships, you know, needs to be based on a multifactor assessment  I've spoken to this  and we could think about whether we make it nationally consistent, you know, to at least have a bit of a best practice recommendation and then every institution can tailor it to their circumstance.  And universities should really invest in a better evidence base and again, this gives us an opportunity to do this because it's actually quite straightforward to evaluate scholarships.  It's much easier than some of the other activities and initiatives we've run.
       
So this is access and affordability.  We jump off into HEPPP.  So this is my fellowship and where I started was the question of is HEPPP a onceinageneration opportunity to shift what we do around equitable participation?  So this is in 2016, I did my fellowship in 2016, and at the time there was really fierce debate about the sustainability of the policy settings and the contributions of the HEPPP to increasing participation rates.  So the policy settings or the concerns were around the price tag of the demanddriven funding system, the ballooning HECS/HELP debt and the Kemp/Norton review of the demanddriven funding system.  10 minutes, okay, cool.  I shall.
       
So what did I know when I started?  We had the Bradley review that was very much underpinned by the dual goals, the dual agenda of economic growth and social benefit.  Penny Jane Burke argued that it was or called widening participation the "neoliberal project of selfimprovement through higher education", which really masks like the structural disadvantage that underpins the challenge.  
       
Simon Marginson in 2015, and he did it again on Friday, challenged the very notion that higher education can change the status quo and basically argued it's a lot better at reproducing it than changing it, and the implication from this is, as I said, that like universities are not terribly great change agents, that disadvantage is structural, and that policy needs to unearth this and the activities we run need to address it, right?  So it can't just be about the individual.  It's structural.  You know, the fact that you were born into a regional area, you know, like in an Indigenous family, in a family that is wealthy, that is not something you did, right?  The disadvantage that accrues is structural.
       
What did I find?  This is the lovely data that the NCSEHE provides, unfortunately only to 2013, so the curve is a lot more dramatic when you go back to 2009 and you include the early increases in participation rates.  So HEPPP did provide an opportunity for universities to develop bespoke responses.  I said at one time I was looking for types, right, I was looking for typologies, and I said the rate I'm going, I'm going to find 39 different types of doing HEPPP, which is about what happened.  So everybody did their own thing, which is a strength of the program.
       
It broke the trend of stagnant participation of students from low SES backgrounds, but again, as Verity has reminded us and as Alan is going to share with us, the institutional differences were vast of who contributed to the uplift.  
       
Strategic intent emerged as an important variable.  So those universities who saw the equity cohort as a really important contributor to institutional growth, they went for it and that's where some of the biggest, largest growth was, and Swinburne was amongst them.  
       
The volume of HEPPP funding mattered.  So at the same time HEPPP was 12 times larger than the predecessor program.  So to be dealing with millions of dollars in universities mattered, and we had, you know, the PVCs Equity and Inclusion and, you know, big DVCs and Verity is about the last one who's still hanging on, you now, like to the empire.  Everybody else has sort of been restructured and demoted and a lot of us are way further down the food chain these days than we were in 2010, 11, 12.  Yes, it's a shame.  And there was transformational change in one of the case study universities, which I can now share with you was UWA, and we've just written this up again five years hence to see what happened and I'll share this once it's published.  It should be published in the middle of the year.
       
What did this contribute?  Particularly a set of diagnostic tools that are rather helpful.  It's the equity initiatives map which builds on the really great work by Anna Bennett, but makes it really specific to HEPPP.  The attributes of effective HEPPP programs an interpretive model to see how well governed and implemented HEPPP programs are.  So all of this exists in three case studies.  
       
Where do we need to take this?  So to their credit, successive governments and the Department of Education have adopted, you know, at least in principle, the main recommendations and have funded, have continued funding for HEPPP.  That is no small thing.  
       
Where do we need to go next?  We have a real opportunity to review and reform our institutional HEPPP programs  you know, where is the money going, how much do we know about what makes a difference, right?  We need some honest conversations about how we are cofunding mainstream services and programs and again, it would be really good to have some guidance.  In some institutions, again including my just departed, if we didn't use HEPPP funding to cofund mainstream services, they would simply not exist, and we have seen this in some of the eastern campuses where we mainly run VET programs.  As soon as you take these services out, the students struggle, in particular the students we care about most, and we had lots of nonEnglish speaking background students there and students with disability and it was terrible.  So there is a legitimate reason for this, but we just need to be honest about it.
       
We need to employ a core staff on an ongoing basis.  That is still a problem.  There's still a perception that HEPPP is up for debate and it might be scrapped in December and that is just not helpful.  And we have this chance to implement the SEHEEF.
       
Okay, final one.  So that was our attempt at Swinburne to develop a HEPPP evaluation framework.  We did it at the same time as the SEHEEF was being developed by the colleagues at UQ and it was one  Melissa is here and for Melissa and I, this was one of the best projects we've ever been involved in.  It was such a cool group of people who came together.  
       
So what did we know?  We knew that the core challenge in equity program evaluation is the number of variables that you have to account for in students' decision making around whether to come to university or not and then whether to stick it out and whether to access services or not, you know, like there's just so many variables in there that it is tough to get a hang of.  
       
The decisionmaking processes by the target group students  I've spoken to this, right?  They are complex and not all of them are within the control of the universities.  There's only so much we can do to convince students to stay, and sometimes the best thing we can do is work with them to have like a managed exit and then reentry because that's the best for them at this point in time.  
       
We also knew and know that student success is not just a function of student or institutional characteristics.  That is Ella Kahu and Karen Nelson's really great work as well as the excellent higher education standards panel discussion paper, which I still pull out, it's such an amazing resource, and we can't just rely on the data that we're already collecting.  We need some more.  And the JobReady Graduates package just made it a little bit more complicated and interesting because we are now not just dealing with one equity group, but with three.
       
What we did was it was a largely qualitative approach.  We used humancentred design methodology to get to grips with some of these variables and design a workable evaluation framework.  We had participation in performance dashboards, which allowed us to draw conclusions about most of our programs, particularly the services for current students.  In some they had very small sample sizes or sensitive data, and this is around we are cofunding some mental health programs where it was not appropriate to collect data, so we need to have these conversations as well around evaluation.  And then a third group of programs in outreach, which we just excluded because I'm still waiting for the national database that allows us to do a lot of these things.  And then we accounted for the fact that equity groups  students have different definitions of success.  Again, we know this and their needs across the university journey.
       
Here we are, okay.  So we produced this HEPPP evaluation framework.  As I said, it's available on the Swinburne website as well as my LinkedIn profile.  We developed experience map and student archetypes and I shared them at the EPHEA conference and I'm super happy to keep sharing.  They're also on my LinkedIn profile.  And we developed a program logic model template that we can apply to all activity.  I was super proud of this because it really on one page pulled together 10 years of the work that I'd done and that was a really, really cool moment, so personally that was great.
       
Okay, I know I'm behind.  Okay.  So how do we shift the dial on evaluation?  We need to collaboratively implement the SEHEEF, and we have so much to gain in doing this, right.  So don't fear, it will all work out and it will give us insight we have never had, which is the exciting bit.  Again, I won't repeat it.  So there needs to be the national database.  
       
3 and 4 are related.  So we haven't, and again  you know, Alan, I'm really hyping up your talk  I'm not sure to what extent you looked at this.  The HEIMS data and the QILT data are underanalysed.  There is so much more we can do with these data sets, especially if we link it to others.  There's a study out of UQ from last year which is amazing which linked TCSI data with PBS, Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, data and showed that if you have a preexisting mental health condition for which you've been medicated, you have as great a risk of attrition as if you were an Indigenous student, which has the highest rate of attrition among the domestic cohort.  And with the times we have just been through with COVID and the students who are coming into the sector from now on in, that is a real risk and just something we all need to know about, right, to wrap around these students when they're coming in because they are at risk of attrition.
       
The other opportunity we have is we have done so much great research, particularly through the NCSEHE.  What we need to do now is the meta analyses.  We really need to scoop this up, review it systematically and draw out the insides from the really great research there is, right?  That's where this conversation needs to go.
       
I've already talked about trials, you know.  Money plus support is one, but there's other things that we could trial across the sector in terms of initiatives, and I do live in hope for a repositioned NCSEHE that will help us do some of this work as a sector and as a peer group so that we can learn from each other and don't have to reinvent the wheel in every single university.
       
So the big summation, the insights across the decade.  So at the policy level, we know that the combination of demanddriven funding and HEPPP made a difference and it is the combination and like it was really hard empirically to work this out what is the contribution of HEPPP because demanddriven funding was so much more money.  So it was literally the truck that drove through while we were trying to evaluate HEPPP.  
       
Universities can be trusted and valued partners of very disadvantaged schools and their communities and it speaks directly to the chapter on community and the discussion paper.  We know we can do that and we have the evidence to prove it, but we need to be sustainably funded to deliver.  
       
Appropriate income support needs to be provided through the Commonwealth, full stop.  Gonski funding remains an aspiration and is the missing link in attainment and we will not be able to grow much beyond the numbers that we get if we don't fix attainment in public schools and disadvantaged areas.  It's as simple as that.
       
At the institutional level, as I've said, you know, I'm really looking for evidenceinformed and honest assessments of institutional HEPPP programs.  Again, the tools exist.  I'm very happy to implement them with you.  We need to place students at the centre of program redesign and we have so much to gain from doing this evaluation thing together.  So again, don't be scared.  Be excited about it.  It will give us so much to share with the world.
       
We know at the micro level, at the initiative level  we know in this room, in the virtual audience, we know what works.  We just have to put it all together so that we don't reinvent the wheel and when new people come in, they have this great idea which we tried 10 years ago and it didn't work and we have to share all these things, what worked, what didn't work.  You know, let's put it all together, learn from each other, find the really best practice models, share them across the sector so that like the learnings become multiplied.
       
Okay, we won't take questions, but I will  I'm not missing the opportunity for a little, little plug.  So what is happening for me is today is day one of a whole new life.  I have left my gorgeous colleagues at Swinburne and I'm  striking out by myself in a new venture which I've called Equity by Design and the website is live now and you can have a look and see what I'm doing.  If you have a bit of work to do, do give me a ring.  I'm available for new projects from June.  
       
The motivation for doing this is to say we have  we can demonstrate global best practice and we are just not putting the pieces together and I really want to work with all of you in this room, virtual or in here, to make that happen and to tell the Australian success story because it is amazing.  We know what works and we can share it with the world.  And we should.  (Applause).

Video 2 – Transcript – Sector Data Analysis
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  So Nadine prefaced a little bit of Emeritus Professor Alan Pettigrew's next presentation.  He will be presenting an analysis of sector data and it's an analysis that I found absolutely fascinating and I hope you'll enjoy it too.  
       
Alan has held senior academic executive appointments at the Universities of Sydney, Queensland and New South Wales as well as ViceChancellor at the University of New England.  In 2019 he commenced a term as Fellow of Senate and ProChancellor at the University of Sydney.  He is Chair of the Senate's People and Culture Committee and a member of the Risk and Audit and the Nominations Committees.  Welcome, Alan.
       
EMERITUS PROF. ALAN PETTIGREW:  Thank you very much, Verity, for the welcome and it's great to be here, actually.  I'm not an expert in equity, so I'm learning heaps this afternoon.  So thank you to Nadine  wonderful talk, really lots to think about out of what you've done and what you've said this afternoon, so thank you.
       
Before I go any further, I also would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, on whose lands we're meeting today and whose lands the University of Sydney is on and where my home is, so I'm very much in the Gadigal mould, as it were.
       
What I wanted to talk to you about today is an analysis of the data which is held by the federal department in Canberra.  From what Nadine said, it's only one of several data sources, but it's the one that I've gone to in order to understand the shape of the sector and how performance is going in the sector at the present time and some years previous to the present time to see what changes have been there.
       
The data that I've sourced is highlighted on the slide.  You can all go to that.  It contains all your data.  You can investigate this in the way that I've investigated it.  There's nothing that I've done that you can't also do.
       
Just to reveal what the data says, this is the table of table 16, the Institutional Student Equity Performance Data.  It goes from 2009 to 2021.  My estimate is that there's 90,000 data points or more in that little Excel spreadsheet.  I'm not going to talk about 90,000 data points this afternoon, but I'll bring some of it together so that it becomes a little more understandable as how the sector is going at the moment.
       
What I want to talk about are the major groups, the major equity groups.  I'm going to talk about participation numbers from over that 10year period, participation numbers by university and by university groups, and I'll show you my grouping in a moment, in 2021, and you can see the other things which I'm going to go through.  I've been given 20 minutes to go through 90,000 data points, so it's going to be a bit of a rush job, but I hope it gives you a picture of what the university sector looks like.  I'll summarise at the end with the bigpicture stuff about the sector.
       
So these are national equity student numbers.  This is the population of the equity groups in Australia over the last period, 10 years, and you can see the regional at the top and that number of students has grown by 16% over the 10 years.  Low SES has grown by 43% over the 10 years; disability up 164%, with a rapid rise in the most recent years.  
       
This is in contrast to all the other coloured lines there, which are relatively flat over the last five years, bringing in to frame what was the caps going back on the system, et cetera.  And you can see the other ones there  Indigenous has doubled over that period, 99% growth, but remote is only up 20%.  So they're national figures.  That is what everybody is playing with at the moment in the national scene.
       
If I then look at participation, this is comparing  I should have also pointed out on the previous slide that the total domestic growth grew by 31% compared to those other percentages.  This is participation, so this is the group percentage of total student numbers, and so you can see regional numbers appear to have fallen by 2.3% over the 10 years.  They certainly haven't grown in that sense.  Low SES is flat; disability has grown by 4.9%; and you can see the other numbers there.
       
What you have to understand when you're looking at this number is that there are two variables here.  One is the number of people  number of students in those equity groups, but there's also the number of students who are not in those equity groups and they have gone up.  So the reason why regional has fallen backwards a bit could be because there are fewer regional students participating.  It could be because nonregional students are increased, nonequity group students are increased, or both, and we just don't know.  But there is evidence that I've seen for a couple of individual universities where the number of regional students has not declined, it has actually grown a bit, but then nonequity group student load has gone up, and I think that is related in part potentially to regional campuses opening citybased campuses to pick up students from a different cohort.  So that's something that we need to look at down the track I think.
       
Now, I've been looking at these sort of data for the last 10 years or so and my original interest was in terms of research, what's the research profile of Australian universities.  I've since expanded that analysis into what's the distribution of student load across Australian universities and what's the distribution of staff of three different categories teaching only, research only, and teaching and research staff.  
       
All that data is shown on this slide.  When you look at the data from several spreadsheets and put them all together, as I've done here, you find that the institutions on the original data are listed alphabetically.  It's hard to pick a picture out of the alphabetical listing of Australia's universities.  And just a trick, if you want to get into this game, be very, very careful because universities change their name from time to time.  Not only that, sometimes universities are listed with "the university of" something or just "university of" something and that affects their position, so you see data wobbling around a bit if you miss out on that particular point.
       
These data  the orange bars on the left graph are research block grant, percentage share of total research block grant.  The blue bars on the same are percentage share of total EFTSL.  On the right is percentage share of staff.  And what you see when you look  if you take your glasses off and just look at the shape of the graph, what you can see here is that there are large institutions at the top with a lot of research going on, the Go8.  There's the middle group of universities where there's a balance, more of a balance between student load and research activity; and then there's the lower group of universities, where there's a lot of teaching going on, relatively a lot of teaching going on, but not as much research.  
       
So what I've done in all the analyses I've done, as I say, over the last 10 years is divide these areas into three groups.  There's the Go8 at the top.  I then go to G920 and 20 seems to hover around halfway through the sector, so I go G21 to the bottom.  I don't mean the bottom, I mean the lowest.  I mean  you know what I mean.
       
So that's my grouping.  There are different ways of grouping this, but I've done it for everything else that I've looked at in terms of staff research, student loads, et cetera.  So for today's purposes, I hope you'll bear with me and I'll stick with that grouping because it shows you the shape and the profile of Australia's higher education sector at the moment.
       
Equity participation numbers, these are the numbers of students per university, and you can see that the bars tend to get longer as you go down, right?  Now, the four colours are the four major groups: low SES; regional/remote; disability; and Indigenous is the smallest one shown in green there.  So that's the distribution of numbers and you can see the actual total numbers per university there on the bottom scale, it goes up to 30,000 numbers.
       
If I then break that out to show you the distribution across the different categories, you can see that the pattern is slightly different if you go across the four different categories here.  So low SES on the left, there's a lot of low SES going on in the lower part of the distribution, particularly also for regional and remote, and there are a couple of universities that are very, very big on regional and remote, and you'll see those in a moment.
       
Disability is a slightly different pattern.  A lot of the disability is being picked up in the institutions in the top half of the graph compared to the lower part of the graph.  And then Indigenous.  Interesting to me that apart from the top eight universities, the Go8, Indigenous seems to be fairly strong and more evenly spread, if you like, across the university sector.  
       
I just wanted to point out to you the scale of these graphs and if you look at the scale of the graphs, the smallest one is the zero to 4,000 on the right, which is our Indigenous load across the country.  It is very, very low, extremely low.
       
Now, if I avoid my original ranking system and now rank each of those four major categories by the proportion of the national total, so each university then is expressed as a percentage of the total, you can see them lined up rather differently.  So ranked on low SES, UWS  sorry, Western Sydney University.  I'm showing my age now, and my apologies to Barney, wherever he is watching in from.  You can see them listed there and the same  the pattern is different across the graph.  Ranked on regional and remote, you can see a different set of universities.  A few of them pop up across at least three of those and one or two pop up on one  namely, the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne in terms of disability.  
       
So these universities account for 50% of all the students in each of the equity group, and Verity in her introduction pointed out she'd used a figure of 60%.  I thought it was okay to go to 50%.  It's only 10% lower.  But it highlights the issue.  12 of 42 account for the first 50% of low SES enrolments.  Ranked on R&R, 8 of 42 universities are picking up on the bulk or at least the first 50%.  So you can see that.  
       
And the other thing I've done here is highlight with bold and grey those universities who carry less than 3% of the national student load, and you can see where the distributions are, particularly for Indigenous and particularly for rural regional and remote, okay?  So they're all concentrated in, or they're largely concentrated in a few universities.
       
Now, I need to explain this sort of illustration, which is common or garden Excel spreadsheet use of numbers.  The little key for how this works is on the bottom righthand side there.  So you can see what I've each dot on that little thing at the bottom righthand side there, each dot is the score for a university in a year.  So the series of dots there account for all the universities within that year.  
       
The box part of it accounts for the middle 50%.  The bottom of the box accounts for the first quartile, so anything outside that box on the lower side would be in the first quartile, and similarly above the box is in the last quartile and then what they call the whiskers  this is a Box and Whiskers Plot, so the whiskers actually show you what is 1.5 times the interquartile range above and below.  So the whiskers should contain most of the universities, but it doesn't contain all of them because this is a statistical analysis and occasionally there will be a dot outside the whiskers both above or below.  
       
And so the dot is labelled as an outlier, any dot outside the whiskers is an outlier, and on the top panel there you can see all on the same scale of percentage from zero to 100 where the low SES numbers are in 2011 and 2021 and you can see there was an outlier there up near 40% in 2011, but it's not there in 2021.  On the righthand side, you can see two outliers in the regional, but you can see the box is wider, so there's a wider distribution across the universities for that year and it's slightly lower for 2021 but there are four outliers there.  I'll come back to those in a moment.  
       
You can see, relatively speaking, how few remote students there are and how few Indigenous students there are and disability now up around the 10% mark, which you saw from the first slide, but you can see the relative spread across the institutions of the Australian higher education sector particularly for regional and remote students are very widespread.
       
So let's get into that in a little more detail.  Oh, for those of you who wanted to know where you were, if you're an outlier, there's the information.  So if you just look at the codes for the different universities, you'll find that the ones that I mentioned in bold and grey on the previous slide pop up on this particular slide as well  CQU, JCU, et cetera, UTAS and Federation University, for example.
       
So if we then go to look at these across the three groups of universities that I illustrated before, for low SES you can see the Go8 panels, you can see the G9 to 20 panels, and you can see the G21 to 40 panels.  I've excluded Torrens and Batchelor.  So it comes back from 42 to 40.  The reason for that is the numbers are very, very low at those two institutions.  So there are a few outliers there, particularly on the right, but you can see for low SES the numbers as you go from left to right across the groups of universities there are much bigger, much wider spread for low SES amongst the smaller universities in the bottom half of my ranking scale.  University of Adelaide is an outlier on low SES for the Go8 and CQU is the outlier on the top up there for the 21 to 40 group, Central Queensland University.
       
If I go to regional and remote, you can see the low numbers, relatively low numbers, amongst the Go8, and it's a very tight group, not much spread. The spread increases as you go to the G9 to 20.  Go on up the graph a little bit and then you can see the enormous spread for regional in the lower group of universities here.  
       
A similar picture for remote, but the numbers are very much smaller and the spread is greater and you can see a couple of universities with a high remote population are coded there as outliers.  So for regionals, UTAS is the big one here in that group and CDU on the righthand side there, Charles Darwin university, perhaps not unsurprising.
       
If we go to disability, you can see that between 2011 and 2021 the numbers have gone up, which goes with the graph you saw the rapid rise towards the end of the picture and you can see the spread of universities there.  There's a difference in scale here.  This is only going up to 20% at the top.  So I've done that so you can see the expansion of the data, and then for Indigenous at the bottom you can see that there's been quite a lot of movement in the Indigenous equity space between 2011 and 2021.  Looking at the spread and the 2021 for the lower group, quite a large distribution.  
       
CDU figures there, and now let's go on and I'll recombine all of that to make the national data to speed this up a little bit.  But what I've now done is show the same style of analysis for retention rate.  So this is a potential 100% score and you can see the distribution there, it's hovering around 80% for low SES and regionals, drops down to about 75% for remote, but you can see the spread.  Likewise, disability around 80% and then in the mid 70s for Indigenous.  That's retention rate.  
       
If I look at retention ratio, which is comparing the equity group to the retention rate of all other students at those universities, then you can see retention rate for low SES and regional is looking pretty good.  It drops back a bit for remote and you can see the spread down in this case, so some universities are not quite so successful, but on the other hand, there's a university there which gets up to 1.2, so their remote students are doing much better than their normal students  interesting.  One would ask a question what are the support structures which help those students in that environment?  Disability, you can see the links there, and Indigenous on the right dropping back to 0.9 in a ratio.
       
For success rate, you can see the pattern of distribution there.  It's not changed very much across the two years  sorry, the two shown years, 2011, 2021, but very, very wide distribution of outcomes for Indigenous students and also somewhat for disability, but certainly for Indigenous students.  
       
I was looking at this success ratio, which is the success of the equity group students as a proportion of the success of other students and as you can see, a very tight relationship for low SES and regionals quite close to 1 and in the case of the regionals, in excess of 1, which means they're doing better than other students.  Remotes and then disability and then Indigenous falls away, as you can see there on the graph.  But a very wide distribution amongst the Indigenous with a couple of outliers there.  So I think there's that was in 2011.  Things have improved somewhat for 2021, but nevertheless, quite a spread there of achievement amongst our Indigenous colleagues.
       
Okay, summary, over the last 10 years growth in national numbers, as you can see there, low SES, disability, Indigenous have grown more than domestic students' growth.  Regional and remote fallen backwards a little bit, but nevertheless, that's the observation.  National base equity group participation is highest for low SES and regional students and very low for the remote, disability and Indigenous groups.  
       
There is considerable variation across the university sector in participation rates for equity groups and it is heavily weighted towards smaller institutions with lower overall student load, smaller staff numbers and lower research activity.  And this is the crunch point in my view.  It's all related to all sorts of interplaying factors, such as geography, socioeconomic distributions, et cetera, all plays into this space, and also the tendency for students not to want to move, local area stuff.  So I think that's a big issue for equity practitioners and I know you'll probably get on to discuss all of that.
       
Retention rates for equity students are variable across universities for all of the groups.  They're not the same in every institution and they're quite variable.  Retention ratios indicate that low SES, regional and disability groups are comparable to other students and remote and Indigenous groups are slightly lower than for other students.  And success ratios, as you can see there, lower SES and regional groups show little variation  that is, they're quite tight  and are comparable to or better than those of other students, and remote disability Indigenous group show wider variations across universities and progressively lower success ratios.
       
So they're the sort of very, very highlevel conclusions that I drew out of the data.  There's a lot more fine detail that we should investigate and should look at, but getting to the data  at least I've found getting to the data was quite difficult.  I'm also concerned about some of the reliability of the data reporting, but it's not only in this area, it's also in the research area, the staffing area, and so on and so forth.  So I think  I already mentioned this to Mary, I think we've got to look into the quality of data which is held by the department and which underpins all of these analyses.  So that's my presentation.  Thank you for your attention (applause).

Video 3 – Transcript – Q&A
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Chris Ronan has worked in higher education and notforprofit sectors across the USA, New Zealand and Australia with a focus on regional and remote higher education policy.  Chris is the Acting Director of Country Universities Centre, National President of the Society for the Provision in Education in Rural Australia, and an Executive Member of the Equity Practitioners in Higher Education Australasia.  Welcome, Chris.
       
Darlene McLennan is the Manager of the Australian Disability Clearinghouse on Education and Training.  ADCET provides national leadership, information and professional development for educators and support staff in the inclusion of people with disability in Australia's higher ed and VET sectors.  Darlene has nearly 35 years' experience of working in the disability sector, of which 18 years are within the tertiary disability sector.  Welcome, Darlene.  
       
Dr Kylie Austin has extensive experience in the higher education sector, leading the strategic planning of student equity initiatives.  Kylie has led national research projects that are focused on widening participation to higher education and is the current President of Equity Practitioners in Higher Education Australasia and the Associate Director of Student Equity and Success at the University of Wollongong.  Thank you, Kylie.  And it's the equity practitioners' submission to the Accord that we're gathering a lot of this data for today, so whatever you say may very well end up in our submissions to the Accord.
       
Dr Leanne Holt is a Worimi/Biripi woman and author of Talking Strong, which tracks the development of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education policy in Australia.  She is ProVice Chancellor (Indigenous Strategy) and Adjunct Fellow at Macquarie University.  She's currently the Deputy coChair of the World Indigenous Higher Education Consortium and was previously the President of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education Consortium.  Welcome, Leanne.  
       
And of course we've also got the wonderful Nadine.  So as I said, if you have any questions for Nadine, you can also ask her now.  
       
We're using Slido.  I will be referring to Slido throughout it, but remember Slido is also for you to make your own comments, not just questions.  If you've got a particular burning opinion, burning evidencebased opinion, please put it in the Slido so we can capture that for reporting to the Accord process and we're going to begin with one of the questions that was posed by the Accord panel.  
       
And I might just take  why don't I just take it in order of the panel because it's the opening question, and let me just get it up in front of me.  The opening question: what is needed to increase the number of people from underrepresented groups applying to and prepared for higher education both from school and other pathways?  So a nice big question, just a simple one, and we'll start with you, Leanne, and work our way down.
       
DR LEANNE HOLT:  Thank you very much for having me and the question about what can be done.  Obviously, it's a loaded question.  There are so many areas that we can cover and it sort of may take up like answer the rest of the questions at the same time, but I think that the primary answer to that is more investment, more investment in programs like HEPPP and ISSP programs, but more investment with evaluation frameworks, like Nadine talked very well to that.  
       
I think that a lot of what we did, and I think that's why the presentations were so good today because I know that in our space evaluation is a real challenge.  We're so reactive on everything that we do.  We've got so much to do.  We want to do everything yesterday because we have so much to move that evaluation is something that gets lost in all of that.  
       
So I've been in higher education for over 25 years, and most of that in Indigenous higher education, and what I see when I look across the sector is that a lot of the time we're doing the same thing we've always done.  It might have different names, but we don't actually shift, we're not as innovative as we could be if we actually did look at the data and evaluation and say okay, well, this is working, but that's not.  So investing smartly is probably what my message is, investing smartly based on evidence base of what's working and not just doing what we always do and hope for the best outcome.  
       
Also, I'll just add before I pass it on that recognising that these funding groups, such as HEPPP and ISSP, are supplementary funding.  So how do we actually develop systems and processes where universities also are responsible for contributing to that and so that we're not just getting funding and saying okay, this is the boundary of the funding, work within that, that universities have strategies and plans and policies to say that this is our commitment, but that commitment has to be aligned to investment.  So it's okay having high aspirations, but if you're going to have high aspirations, then there needs to be the equivalent investment, and that's not just monetary investment, that's also structural investment as well, and so how do we incorporate practice that actually considers that balance of aspiration and investment.  
       
ASSOC. PROF. NADINE ZACHARIAS:  I'm going to do the philosophical response to that question and it goes to  so numbers, you know, versus percentages is something that was very obvious in Alan's presentation.  The percentages if you only look at the percentages, which is how we are accounting for equity participation, the share of the undergraduate cohort, the increase was very, very minimal, but when you look at the underlying numbers, the increases were huge, right?  So in terms of the numbers of people from equity groups that are in the system today compared to 12 years ago, it's huge.  
       
So it depends  the response to this question depends on what our aspiration is for the sector, you know, like how large do we want to grow the sector and then what share of the total cohort do we want to be from equity groups, so where do we set the targets, and that will absolutely change the numbers that we are talking about.  
       
And my understanding from, Mary, what you shared at the UA conference and in other fora is that the aspiration for growth and that like the aspiration in terms of equity groups is to get as close to parity as we can, right?  So that's what we're shooting for.  So we're shooting for seriously large numbers and that then changes the game.  
       
And that led me to say, you know, earlier that if we do not address schooling and the pipeline of, you know, young people and then eventually young adults and like full adults that will engage with the tertiary education system and with universities, we're never going to get there.  So that is really the bottleneck is in the schools and this is where the investment has to be for us to get there, plus like the really valid points around integration of the tertiary sector, you know, like can we please articulate, you know, pathways that are consistent at least within the same state, ideally nationally, so that we can do easy pathway articulation, credit for prior learning that we can stack qualifications, you know.  Like it's that conversation.  So I'm not going to go so much into the universities, but what has to happen beforehand and, you know, like we need some guidance around the aspiration, you know, what kind of numbers are we shooting for and that will alter the response.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  And I would argue that as the equity practitioners and as we do our response to government, we should be bold.  It's our job to be bold and to be shooting at the least for parity and then we can always face realities later on, but I think our job really is to be bold and to be pushing for the best we can possibly get out of this process.  Chris?
       
CHRIS RONAN:  I also have a penchant of being bold, to be bold.  But two points probably just to start with.  One is just around I think Alan also in Nadine's presentation around what regional students as an equity group means and it's stagnated for such a long period of time.  When you can go back to the late 1980s and read a policy document from the Dawkins era, it's very similar to how we talk about regional students now and it's far more nuanced and far more sophisticated than that.  
       
So we know that regional students participate in university half as much compared to metropolitan peers and what we've done as a sector is actually go out and ask those students who are already at university how can we support regional students to go and what that does is it actually just embeds that structural inequity because then the same regional student  yes, they're better supported, but it's the same 20%, and in regional communities there's privileged people, there's low SES portions of communities, there's a huge migrant population.  Regional Australia is really diverse and that level of nuance is just missed.  
       
So if we actually want to get regional participation up comparable, we don't have to think about what regionality is, we actually have to look at the marginalisation in communities.  How do you study on country, how do you take those people who have so many barriers and how do you do it cheaper, and they're all things that I can talk for three hours on, and I'm sure we will, but that's something I guess the provocation to begin with.  
       
And just picking up on what Nadine in your presentation around the Queensland consortium, it was really interesting for me to hear that $23 million over three years just wasn't enough money and we need more money to invest.
       
ASSOC. PROF. NADINE ZACHARIAS:  Oh, no, that was enough.  What followed wasn't.
       
CHRIS RONAN:  What followed.  And then to pick up on the 7.1 million for the Regional Partnerships Project Pool Program, another terrible acronym, but when universities  and we were engaged as the Country Universities Centre around that.  When universities looked at that, they said, "Oh, that's not enough money to go and do this."  Across our centres, so 18 centres on three states, they said, "Wow, we can do a bloody damn lot with this."  
       
So when you shift your perspective and actually think outside of the institution and think outside what that interaction in government and get in the cracks with partnerships with universities, that's where the really special stuff happens.  So I'll pan to Kylie.
       
DR KYLIE AUSTIN:  Yes, look, I think that the partnership component and the widening participation policy that we're operating under nationally is flawed from my perspective and from the research that I've done as well.  We're operating in an environment where the funding is coming directly to universities.  Universities have a really strong sense of ownership over widening participation and they're rewarded for the number of students that access their individual institution.  
       
So I think we need to look at how our national policy is set up in order to do basically two things.  The first thing really is to look at the role of schools, and so one of the things that widening participation has done and the national policy context has done over the last 15 years has been to increase the capacity of higher education institutions to engage in this work.  What it has not done is engaged the capacity  increased the capacity of schools to engage in this work.  And Nadine from the research that you've done, and I know my PhD drew a lot on that, but one of the things that we do know is that for us to make an impact in terms of increased access to higher education at a schooling level, those schools need to be highly engaged.  Our university widening participation teams can go in and out, you know, five or six times a year, but at the end of the day, there's 200 other school days that those kids are talking directly to their teachers or community members and it's how do we build that muscle memory and that knowledge in schools to be having these conversations with their students beyond HEPPP.
       
The other part that I think we need to do in terms of changing the national policy agenda is about how do we work together as higher education institutions and how do we achieve a nationally coordinated approach to widening participation.  We've got kids in regional rural areas that are not receiving any engagement in widening participation and we've got kids down the road in Western Sydney where four or five universities are working in one school and so widening participation itself is perpetuating disadvantage in our current policy context.  So those would be the two things from my perspective.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  That's really interesting and I'm very interested in how we better support partnerships in particular, so I might return to that later.  Darlene?
       
DARLENE McLENNAN:  Great, thank you.  As Alan identified, the number of students with disability are increasing in the higher education sector, which has been really heartening, but when we look at currently in Australia it's 18 to 20% of people identify as having a disability and then if you look at western higher education markets like the UK and USA, our numbers aren't that good, even though it's kind of showing it is.  
       
We're kind of looking at the reasons for that and one of the issues that we kind of come up against regularly is about the school and the low expectation of often people with disability to access tertiary education.  There's a really limited coordinated approach to good transition planning, good I suppose, what would we call it, probably high expectations within that kind of pedagogical approach to that transition.
       
One of the examples that I suppose I wanted to show is the Government has done the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which is a massive policy piece that the Australian Government has committed to, which has been fabulous, but when we look at what NDIA are actually saying about tertiary, there is very little.  They did a fiveyear employment strategic plan to try to ensure that people with disability access employment, but very little mention of tertiary education, and I suppose our argument at the moment is 9 out of 10 future jobs are going to require a tertiary education and we have to work to ensure that people with disability aren't left behind.  
       
People also talked about the funding model here and the importance to have really good investment, and an example is the UK Government invests 50 million pounds a year on inclusive initiatives for students with disability.  We currently have 7 point something other, probably gone up to 8 now with CPI, in the disability support program.  I know that the Bradley report recommended 20 million plus, which never came to fruition.  
       
And I don't want to put my pulpit bowl out here, but ADCET, which I work for, we actually receive $150,000.  That's our base funding.  I try to grab money from left, right and centre to try to do the work we do.  But when Kylie talks about a coordinated approach, ADCET works with another program, the National Disability Coordination Officer, to really bring about that coordination because we so often see universities going and getting experts from  I won't mention any of the consultancies, you know, for so much money and if you're actually wanting to produce a Disability Action and Inclusion Plan, which can make great and significant changes within your university, often that's outsourced to somebody.  
       
What we're doing in ADCET is providing advice to actually help you inform how you do that, how you bring about the good practice within the institution, and for that amount of money it's good value, but also I think it's just instead of giving universities some money, this coordinated and consistent approach I think could actually benefit people in the equity space.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Excellent.  So I'm going to jump around a bit in these questions and I'm also going to go to the Slido, so I'm just saying that upfront to the panel, but I won't catch you too much by surprise.  
       
The next thing I wanted to raise was I thought Nadine's insight into the COVID supplement and admittedly locking people in their homes, which I don't think that can be repeated, but having greater financial support, I thought we should talk about that.  One of the questions from the Accord is how can the costs of participation, including living expenses, be most effectively alleviated and that is just so true.  I mean, anyone working in this space knows that honestly the biggest barrier we find is that most of our equity students, our low SES equity students, are working multiple jobs and just don't simply have the same amount of time as other students to devote to their studies.  
       
So maybe to start  I'll start maybe with you, Darlene, this time.  Costs of participation, including living expenses most effectively alleviated.
       
DARLENE McLENNAN:  Thank you for that.  I probably have to change all my pages over.  
       
The challenge often exists, and it's really difficult as a cohort to kind of lump everybody with disability into that same cohort, but we understand as equity practitioners in the room that disadvantage and financial means and stuff can just perpetuate the exclusion and for people with disabilities, often parttime work is not an option because you're actually trying to study and also support yourself with your disability, and often I say to students that I've worked with that you often need to do three units because the fourth unit is actually managing the adjustments and the supports that you might need within your university.
       
So it often is harder for that extra income to come in, but also, yeah, it's that being debt averse.  I think that's one of the challenges is if you don't have a lot of money and then you actually see that there's going to be a huge debt at the end of this, it can be quite challenging to then accept to go on that pathway to further education, which is a barrier in itself.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Kylie?
       
DR KYLIE AUSTIN:  Yeah, look, I think  talking to colleagues in the room today, I don't think we need any data to tell us that our students are probably the most financially constrained that they've ever been.  You know, we were sharing stories about how long the lines are into our student pantry queues at our individual institutions and we've never seen anything like it.  
       
I think a lot of Nadine's recommendations around the role of the Commonwealth in reviewing Abstudy, Austudy, youth allowance and having a really streamlined, easy to access national approach to income is a really key solution in here and making equity scholarships as easy to access as possible.  
       
However, I think  and this kind of jumps into another question, but I think how can we as a sector leverage industry more effectively.  If we think about higher education as a tool for social mobility, you know, access to higher education isn't enough.  It's about strong employment outcomes for students as well and parity in terms of wage outcomes as well.  So I think what's really critical here is how do we provide students with meaningful employment opportunities to earn while they're learning at university?
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Chris, rural and regional areas, that must have an additional overlay?
       
CHRIS RONAN:  It depends in what paradigm you think about it, though.  So the traditional way of thinking is if you're from a regional area and you're going to have to move, there's the cost that comes with it and that's certainly true.  So I invite you all to just park that idea for a moment and just potentially think a little bit differently.  
       
So the tertiary access payment is up to $5,000 that the Federal Government can give to a student who's moving away from a regional area to go to university, so $5,000 just to start with.  The Commonwealth Government evaluated the Country Universities Centre and found that per student to support it's somewhere between $2,500 and $3,500 per supported student, that's it, per year, that's all it costs.  So just on that alone, if we think about it, the cost to government is there's $5,000 for that tertiary access payment, plus then what comes is costs on families, costs on the individual, all these other challenges that we're thinking about, costs for universities supporting scholarships, equity scholarships, other things to move students from their place.  And that's not to discount that because that's a very genuine opportunity, but we can add something in that actually costs the Government less and that student can stay in their community with their support networks, with their parttime jobs, with potential employment into the future.  
       
So that's the type of thinking we need to look at in terms of what's value for money because as a notforprofit sitting on the fringes of higher education, the first question I get from government and universities is you're too expensive.  And then if you compare our budgets to some of the budgets of universities and even on a per student cost, it's a very different comparison.  
       
So my sort of, again, provocation is to invite groups like myself, like Country Universities Centre, like other regional university centres, into the room because we can deliver a different way of thinking, different outcomes and usually do it more cheaply for the Government.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Nadine?
       
ASSOC. PROF. NADINE ZACHARIAS:  Yeah, look, so many things.  I mean, my response to this was literally one word and was Centrelink.  Because we know that the upfront, the student payments of course fees do not have a large deterrent effect.  I think they and again, that's spelt out in the discussion paper.  It tends to bite people in the butt post university when they realise how long this debt is going to stick around and I think in that sense it's tricky.  But as a deterrent to access, you know, like I haven't seen anything that says there's a strong deterrent effect.  
       
Cost of living is very different and that's what we've talked about now.  So costs of living are really the deterring factor and there, as I've argued, the Government through Centrelink has a real opportunity to address much of the problem, and then we layer on parttime work and we layer on scholarships.  
       
But as I said, scholarships is the selected few, so in the three universities that we looked at, it was between 3 and 5% of the cohort.  I don't think we'll ever be able to scale scholarships, so we can never solve the problems with scholarships.  It is the icing on the top.  And then if we say it is around parttime work, and I completely agree with Kylie, you know, can we have different solutions and can we create employment on campus, you know, like can we sort of look into these things in much more systematic ways than we are doing, can we look at in Europe, particularly in continental Europe, it's very common for students to be placed in companies while they are doing their tertiary training.  So again, there's models around like that we could look at.
       
And then finally, for Centrelink, I mean, one of the big challenges we have, so the combination between JobReady graduates or the intersection of JobReady graduates with financial support is that the best thing for a student would be to drop load, but they can't drop load because they'll lose their Centrelink benefit.  So this is where like two policies clash and collide and really don't create the best outcome for the student.  
       
So I think it also needs a look at from that perspective and finally with youth allowance, you know, and the requirement to be independent often puts a barrier in front of those students from regional areas that want to move, you know, that want to go to the city and where that year really sort of puts a bit of a brake on that decision and that momentum.  So I think there's lots of opportunities for us to have another look at.
       
DR LEANNE HOLT:  Yes, and Nadine sort of took one of my suggestions at the end, but just adding to what Nadine said, because I've spoken to Abstudy about this as well, the fact that students need to be picking three subjects to access Abstudy as a fulltime load and particularly for I think any equity students, but particularly Indigenous students, the attrition rates in the first year are the highest.  So what we have found is that students are picking three units so that they can get their Abstudy, but only attempting two units.  So obviously they're failing their third unit, but they see more value in being able to access the Abstudy than actually the value in like attempting the three units and failing.  So they can get their residential cost options, so they can move and live on campus, where they only end up getting about $50 a week to live on after their residential cost options as well, they pick these three subjects and fail, which obviously under the JRG also has ramifications for them keeping their Commonwealth supported place if they then fail more than the one that they're just leaving alone.  So I do think  I totally agree with everyone saying that we do really need to look at the Centrelink processes and structures and policies so that they align to our students' needs.
       
Also, I think the other thing that we need to be looking at is industry partnerships and collaborations.  There can be so much opportunity in partnering with industries and again, I think it follows on from what others have said around industry partnerships as far as industry scholarships, but industry placements as well, paid placements, so that we have industry cadetships and internships.  
       
At Macquarie, it's quite good because we are right in the middle of an industry hub, so our relationships with industry, it's one of the really positive things that we can do and we can build, but we've found it's been very impactful as well, and especially students that have placements, like long placements like teaching degrees where they're going on placements or health and the nonpaid students struggle and that's detrimental to their studies and a lot of them will drop out because of that.  So I think looking at the life cycle as well of students and where the big impacts are financially.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  So I'm now going to go to one of the audience questions.  Now, you don't all have to answer this one because I recognise this one has been sprung out of nowhere, but it's a very good one, it's got the most votes as well, which is what would be the appropriate strategy to bring student voice into equity practice?  Who wants to talk about student voice?
       
ASSOC. PROF. NADINE ZACHARIAS:  I'm happy to have a go.  So we started with that challenge of the student voice is really absent in much of the work that we do for developing the HEPPP Evaluation Framework at Swinburne.  So we absolutely started with the students and in helping to develop the framework, we started with student personas and student journey maps so that from the start we sort of had an understanding of the diversity of the cohort that we had at Swinburne and we constrained ourselves to the undergraduate cohort because this is like the remit of HEPPP, but we had lots of people who would pathway through.  We had a care leaver student who had started in the med section and then had come into Swinburne higher ed and we also have a large through Swinburne online, a very large online cohort.  
       
So it was really sort of this microcosm of diversity that exists in the sector and so we started with what the students gave us and then sort of asked what are the really important services along the way, how do they line up with their needs, like did a bit of a gap analysis, what do you need at this critical junction in your student journey and then sort of thought about, you know, what do we do with students who are very proactive in their help seeking, what do we do with the ones who will seek help if prompted, and what do we do with the ones who really stand back and stand off and, you know, like where help seeking is really not the socially accepted thing to do.  
       
So it really helped us think that through in how we put the framework together that we hit as many of the really critical touch points as we could with the factors that we included.  So that's one way to do it.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Does anyone else want to talk about student voice and equity strategy?
       
DR LEANNE HOLT:  So we have, like most universities will have Aboriginal advisory committees where all of our strategies, plans and programs go through.  We always have a student voice on that level, so we have undergraduate, postgraduate, alumni represented on that committee and they contribute really strongly to what we do and how we do it.  So I highly recommend that.  Like any committee structures that are providing advice on our directions, the students' voice is highly important.
       
DR KYLIE AUSTIN:  I think when we  is that working?  Persist, okay.  So in regard to kind of students as partners and student voice, I think this is an underpinning methodology that is so critical to how any equity work is undertaken.  It's about what we do with rather than what we do to students.  
       
So I think when we think about students as partners and student voice, we need to think about it as a really holistic approach across our institutions, so a number of domains  teaching and curriculum, governance, program design as well.  
       
And if I look at a lot of work that's been done by some colleagues, such as Mollie Dollinger, you know, the concept at a program  you know, we need to have students involved in our governance, they need to be involved in how we develop up our student equity strategies and our institutional approaches.  We've got  at UAW we've actually just launched our review of our student equity framework and we've got an equal number of students on the working group as we do staff and we've got a student as a cochair as well on the working group.  
       
But in addition to that, you know, it's about nuancing who our equity groups are.  Just because a student is a lower socioeconomic student doesn't mean that all low SES students have the same level of need.  So there's a whole range of tools, like collabs, workshops  you know, rather than a process of consultation, it's about designing with and I think that's how we get that nuanced approach and really service the needs of our students, rather than what we think they need.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  I might now return to an Accord question and this one  I might start with you, actually, Darlene, because this is question 5 around how can best practice learning and teaching for students from underrepresented groups be embedded across the higher education system, including the use of remote learning?
       
DARLENE McLENNAN:  Thank you, and I was able to find the number easily, so that was good.  So at ADCET we've been working for a number of years to develop resources for educators which can promote good practice in the teaching and learning space.  One of those is around universal design for learning, which we launched probably a year and a half ago.  We've also got a whole heap of inclusive teaching strategies online on our website and we run a community of practice.  
       
But it still saddens me  I don't know if anybody read the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday or the Age, but there was an article in there of a university I won't mention, but there were still barriers and access issues for those students with disability in that article.  There were some things wrong with the article, but overall it saddened me to hear that once again students with disability are actually having experiences around access.  
       
And I'll give a shoutout for a podcast I've just started called Talking Tertiary, which the first guest speaker was Graeme Innes and Graeme talked about his experience 30 years ago, where he didn't have access to his textbooks, he didn't have access to the information at the same time as students without disability and it just saddens me that 30 years on, we're still hearing about the stories of that from students currently exist.  
       
You know, universal design for learning is one thing that can assist, but it also kind of ends up being a piecemeal.  So we've got that training, but I don't know how many universities have embedded it into their learning management systems, I don't have the funding to find that out.  And we've just also released an ICT procurement guide to ensure universities purchase accessible ICT procurement.  
       
So there's kind of those big picture items that we're trying to change the culture within universities, but without that attitudinal change or shift with universities that disability is positive and seen as  I'm probably rambling here, but one of the challenges I see within the university sector is many universities have got really excited about green credentials, they're actually seeing that they're championing that they're environmentally sound and their procurement processes are green, and so forth.  We're not seeing the same around accessibility and disability and that's my dream, that in five years we can see universities have committed to accessibility and ensuring students with disability can access their learning at the same basis as every other student similar to what's happening within the environmental movement.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  I like that analogy.  Chris, what about you?
       
CHRIS RONAN:  Yes, so from a remote learning background, COVID was the best thing for online education and prior to COVID, students who were studying online by themselves or with the CEC or IUC were the poor cousins, you know, camera in the room of people'S zoom camera.  It's become far more sophisticated and that's really cool, but it hasn't settled yet and there's a sort of tension at the moment and a lot of discourse around oh, we need to return students to campus, no we need to work on line, there's a tension that hasn't been resolved.  That's okay, I think it's important that we sit in the tension and acknowledge that, but what focus from our perspective we're noticing is that we can use this to think differently.  
       
So again, with regional students we're trying to boost participation, right, we're trying to get the numbers up.  But like I said in my opening remarks, we've got to target those marginalised people within regional communities and they will be the ones who are studying online.  So using like the NCSEHE data, it's 2019 I think data, but there's 150,000odd, roughly speaking, regional students.  So if we're going to double those regional student numbers, there's 150,000 potential students for any university who can really lean in to highquality remote learning and online education.  There's a huge business opportunity for an institution to do that.  
       
And the thing that is shifting  and I labour this point every time that I speak at things  is that it's not geographically bound.  The days of a university saying "this is my catchment", and I've sat in meetings where I've had senior executives on a map point to their regions, to their footprints, and say, "These are our communities" and  my response is, "Have you ever asked permission from those communities to be owned by this university?"  
       
And we see that play out in practical numbers.  So if we think one of our centres in Broken Hill, there's 150 students studying in Broken Hill.  They're studying 95 different degrees, so unique degrees, through 27 universities, but they're one learning community.  And that sort of thinking is what's needed.  So the thing about when you're in Broken Hill or Mount Isa or up in Cape York in Cooktown, you don't care where the university is.  You're going to use the word of mouth from your peers around what is the best fit for purpose for me.  
       
So if we're going to boost participation in regional areas and we're talking about remote learning, there's a huge opportunity for universities because those students will come to you and the days of this footprint thing, it really is over.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Do you think as a slight provocation, there were originally maybe this has changed a bit as online learning gets better in its quality, but originally there was a view that online learning, though it was easily accessed for equity groups, didn't lead to great results for equity groups, at least in terms of retention and success.  Do you think that's changing?
       
CHRIS RONAN:  It is because we're thinking about how we support those students.  So as a good example  the IUC project is a good example.  There's an acceptance that online learning is here.  How can we wrap around that student and give them that support?  So when we're talking about the support that we provide, it's not the remit of learning and teaching.  That's universities.  What we provide is the additional support that we know that equity students need and you can wrap around those students in a really personalised and facetoface way.  So that's the difference and that's the value add.  And because also within a university now they're seeing their peers who are on campus doing the same types of learning as them, they feel much more included in it.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Nadine?
       
ASSOC. PROF. NADINE ZACHARIAS:  Yes, and I'm going to pick up on a bit of what Chris said and the presentation that Alan showed us.  So what Alan talked about is that in terms of success rates, students from low SES backgrounds and regional and remote backgrounds outperform their cohort often, right?  And we did a project, so we did a time study at Deakin that showed that the highest completing cohort of any cohort in the university were students from low SES backgrounds with an ATAR of over 80.  That was the highest completing cohort.  Imagine that field day I had, right?  
       
So there is no "unique" teaching and learning need of the low SES and the regional cohort.  That's sort of what we've always struggled with in sort of giving our HEPPP money away to current student programs, right, because you can't really point it out.  So for the students where there is, for students with disability, for Indigenous students, for students from nonEnglish speaking backgrounds, right, there are barriers in how we put the curriculum together and in the pedagogy, you know, like how we teach, and that is where the design needs to go.
       
And again, I go back to the question of who are we designing for?  If we are designing for everybody to access the system, then UDL is the way to go, right, and that's where we start, not where we retrofit.  So that's how you start to design teaching and learning and I think this is the beauty of, you know, the CUCs in that they have this opportunity to set up from a bit of a greenfield site and can really start to think this through, right, if these are the needs of my cohorts, how do I design a support system, which is what you've done, right?  And if university took that sort of attitude and approach, we would get very, very different outcomes.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  Love it.  Kylie?
       
DR KYLIE AUSTIN:  I just have to echo Nadine on that.  And I think if I look at this from a national policy perspective, though, what HEPPP has achieved has encouraged universities to design effective programs for targeted groups.  What HEPPP has not achieved is institutional change to designing for equity cohorts across the institution.  So we have not necessarily changed you know, we've seen the data from Alan in how different our students are to what they were still 15 years ago.  However, we're still modelling off a very, very similar model of higher education.  So I think we need to think innovatively, uniquely about, as Nadine is saying, who is higher education for and what are their needs and how do we design a higher education system holistically to enable us to achieve that?
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Interesting.  Leanne?
       
DR LEANNE HOLT:  Yes, a couple of things and probably just building on what's already been said.  I think that the regional university hub funding was a really great initiative and we are also partners with a regional university hub in SouthEast Arnhem Land and there's been other  we're now getting approached by other communities in Arnhem Land wanting to replicate that model.  
       
It's a slow model, but this is also something that needs to be recognised and as you could hear, I'm a pro evaluation person, but in evaluating outcomes, we also need to sort of look at what is success, which Nadine talked about too.  So I think that because what our students want I think post COVID more than anything is flexible options, flexible learning options, and so with our regional university hub partner we do a semester on country and then they transition on to campus, because Indigenous students really also find value in that facetoface and being in a cohort.  So that's firstly.  
       
The second probably builds on what Kylie said about institutional attention to the needs of students and I really think that we should look at TEQSA's accreditation and go back, and if anyone is old enough to remember ORCA, from an Indigenous perspective there was quite a strong focus on Indigenous student outcomes and Indigenous learning and teaching within that framework, but then when it changed to TEQSA, that was dropped.  So using an accreditation framework that actually gets universities to review what they're doing and how they're doing to a certain standard I think is quite valuable in achieving outcomes.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Can I dig into this part?  This is the thing I'm really interested in how we incentivise partnerships, and bearing in mind that HEPPP of course did have a partnerships component completely separately funded and supported until 2015 and then it was all rolled into one, and I think a number of you have spoken before about the impact of that.  
       
Again, as a slight provocation, I agree, I really like  you know I really like the regional universities model, the Country Universities Centre model.  I agree that sort of taking resources to the community level to have them determine how those resources, I like it has a natural simplicity to me that I think drives better outcomes.  Okay, what about urban areas?  What do we do in Sydney, for example, where we do have five universities and they all are basically competing for this same group of low SES students and not necessarily growing the pie?  Some of them are, but a lot of the time we're not.  We're actually just competing with each other to try to get the equity students to come to us rather than go to another university.  
       
How can we encourage urban university collaborations?  Would there be a possibility of the equivalent of an urban Regional Universities Centre or not, or if not  if yes, tell me about it.  If not, what are the other ways that we can use collaboration partnership funding to drive the lift all boats problem that often happens in this space?  
       
CHRIS RONAN:  Can I jump in first?  Yes, it absolutely can apply in urban areas.  So the interesting about like Wuyagiba and some of the other study hubs, there's so much demand from regional communities, 30 communities in Queensland, heaps in Northern Territory.  We cannot keep up, we're exhausted, because it's working and we're getting places like Noosa, we're getting peri urban areas because they're thinking okay  and it's community groups that are leading it.  They're saying this model works, maybe not exactly how you do it, which is the whole point, it's what's going to work for them.  So they can pick and choose and curate what's going to work for them.  
       
Now, for me as somebody sort of working in that regional space, it's really hard to jump in.  I want to step into that space, but it's a possibility, so the demand is there for the model.  And I'm probably at that point going to handball it to somebody else to talk from an urban perspective I think.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Kylie, you did your PhD on this.
       
DR KYLIE AUSTIN:  Yes, I did.  From a student perspective, having exposure to multiple university environments is hugely valuable and we've seen particularly in the UK, if you look around the results around the University of Campton, what they have done with their other partner universities down in the southeast of England, when students have had access to multiple university environments in that preaccess space, you know, the likelihood of those students going on to higher education is much higher.  
       
So this is not  I think this is probably one of the challenges of the Queensland widening participation consortium model is that yes, they've carved up the region, yes, we've got a nationally coordinated approach statebased coordinated approach, tick, tick, tick, but one of the things that it hasn't done is provided students exposure with multiple different higher education environments, and what's really critical when you talk to students about the value of having those different types of experiences is it's where do I fit, you know.  
       
So if we're talking about a metrobased approach, I think it's about how do we create a separate organisational entity that can help universities have these conversations around a national  well, it's basically like a national widening participation program of work where we basically say UTS, you're doing this component, UAW, you're doing this component, and we're actually working together to have a common curriculum in some of those areas as well that can be nuanced to the needs of that particular region as well.  
       
CHRIS RONAN:  A very quick point, sorry.  The thing that's omitted in a lot of this partnership work is notion of community.  So even in some of the Accord terms, it talks about all the different stakeholders and omits community.  So whether it's in a regional, in an urban sense, that's the core that's needed.  And the question that came online around student voice, I didn't answer it, but what I was thinking was around well, it's actually the community that shapes that as well because especially when you're talking about people from equity groups and students in equity groups, it's community that need that support, so why not include them in the design, and you can do it.
       
DR KYLIE AUSTIN:  Yes, and I absolutely agree.  If we're thinking about a separate organisational entity that can help coordinate partnerships, what it does, it allows universities to be around the table as a partner, not as the lead.  It allows community to be around the table as a partner, vocational education, and so what we end up taking then is a regionally focused approach saying as a group of higher education providers, as a community, as students, we've got responsibility to increase the educational outcomes of this particular region together and we'll achieve way more doing that together than any of us would do as an individual institution on our own.  
       
ASSOC. PROF. NADINE ZACHARIAS:  I agree with all of the above, but I would add is we need the data in order to highlight the problem and to really raise it to the surface.  We have done this in Victoria multiple times, you know, that all of the outreach managers in the different universities came together, collated this big spreadsheet that showed where we all were in which schools and as you've said, there was huge overlap and then there were some schools missing out, right?  And as soon as you look at this and go oh, wow, in my five partner schools there's like six of the other nine universities, what are we doing, right?  So it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that this is not a sustainable model and then all of the above, but we need to start with the data and we need that like system.  I would strongly argue for a national system of collecting data of outreach activities.  At least if we could start there, if we don't even add in the students who we're reaching out to, but if we could just map it all and see what the national effort is, that would be a great starting point.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Leanne, I can sense you want to say something.
       
DR LEANNE HOLT:  I was going to say similar to Nadine about the evaluation, but we've seen like the collaboration and partnerships work so well and from my perspective working in Indigenous higher education, I haven't seen like  I've never been competitive because, as you can see, our participation rates are so low that it's not like we're competing for the same numbers.  
       
And I often think we run two Indigenous camps plus other camps, but we run two Indigenous camps per year and for one of those camps we get over 180 applications and 50% are regional and remote students from across New South Wales, but we can only resource 80 to 90 of those students and we know the impacts are extensive from the evaluations that we do and the data that we collect and so it's a life changing moment for a lot of those students and I often think what other universities are running camps as well so that we can get those other ones to actually get into  because I don't really care what university they come to to have that experience, as long as they get that experience and that creates the opportunities.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Okay.  Another slightly provoking question.  I've just been thinking as I've been listening to this.  Okay, then, one of the things Nadine told us was that where removing the cap worked best was in universities where it aligned with their strategic plan, right?  So universities had already decided we need to grow and so out they went with the cap removed and recruited the low SES students.  But we didn't see that same growth in universities where that wasn't part of their strategic plan.  
       
How do you if we're going to go and actually put money in, public money in, to incentivise a collaborative model, potentially taking money from universities to resource a collaborative model, what's the sweetener in it for them?  How do we align that to their strategic goals and how do we make them  how do we encourage them and make sure that they're participating in full?  I mean, it's a tricky one, isn't it?  It's really tricky.
       
ASSOC. PROF. NADINE ZACHARIAS:  It's an excellent question.  I think the stick there is going to work a lot better.
       
CHRIS RONAN:  I'm glad you said it and not me, Nadine.
       
ASSOC. PROF. NADINE ZACHARIAS:  I think the conversation we need to have with some universities  and I know that this is like a bit of an expectation that comes from Canberra  of we have given you X million dollars over the past 13 years, you know, tell us what you've done with them, you know, and I think you need to  if you address it from that point of view and really put some feet to the fire, I think that might be the more positive preparation to then have a conversation around maybe we take, you know, like a percentage off the top of your HEPPP funding of each university or you take them off the pool.  I think I would take them off the pool rather than each university because it hurts less.  
       
DR LEANNE HOLT:  The problem with that is I was talking about this earlier today because when we were reviewing the Indigenous students' success program a few years ago  well, they're doing a new review, so a number of years ago  we put some eligibility criteria around it to say that you must have an Indigenous workforce plan, you must have a senior Indigenous appointment, you must have an Indigenous strategy, so there were some eligibility requirements, but the problem with that is it's soft because what are they going to do, take away the ISSP and then who suffers from that?  The same take away the HEPPP funding, who suffers from that?  
       
So like what are the ramifications for universities if they don't do all of that and I think that's a really important conversation to be having.  Like it's got to affect not the funding that actually supports the programs of our communities that we're trying to enable.  So I think that we need to really consider that when we're yes.
       
ASSOC. PROF. NADINE ZACHARIAS:  I think the tougher question is what do you do with the universities who do outreach really well?  That is a lot harder.
       
DR LEANNE HOLT:  And I was going to say reputation is the other one.  Like funding is one thing, but reputation.  The two things I think actions universities well is funding and reputation, and I know that  I was in a meeting and Margaret Gardner had said at the time you need to get Indigenous outcomes on the world university rankings and that will move it, like broader equity, how do we get it into a ranking method.  
       
CHRIS RONAN:  Just quickly, from a tangible experience, when the universities don't have the money but they can see that they have an objective that they have to meet, someone else is holding the money, oh, that's nice because that's kind of how we're working with outreach now.  And I say that flippantly, but I do mean it because there's great wellmeaning people in every university and the structures get in the way of those people, but if you can find the right people and if somebody else, so in our circumstance of outreach it was communityrun centre, hold that money, then that sort of incentivises that partnership to work.  So there's things about it like that.  That's just one tiny little example, yes.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Kylie?
       
DR KYLIE AUSTIN:  Maybe this is a step too far, but
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Be bold, Kylie, be bold.
       
DR KYLIE AUSTIN:  I think if we think about what is the purpose of a university, you know, and the Accord talks a lot about the university being for the public good.  So if we have got a  like universities have got a key role in the social mobility and how we work with our communities.  You know, the stick has to be TEQSA reregistration, doesn't it?  I don't know, maybe that's too far.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  There you go, there's a bold move.  No, but I think you're right.  It's always going to be a mixture of stick and carrot and what we require of our publicly funded universities.  Darlene?
       
DARLENE McLENNAN:  I haven't got much else to add, but it is a great conversation to have.  I think the sticks and carrots is something that we have a little bit more about in recent months and I really love that Leanne actually kind of reinforced that that could actually implicate students.  I think we need to keep that in mind when we have these conversations.
       
I struggle sometimes with the competitive nature in the equity space and I think we've got to be mindful of that that we don't compete against each other, that we work together.  Some of the work that we do in the disability area I don't see that competition and it's probably because we don't have a lot of money to compete against, but we've got a really great model of partnerships.  When we do something like the ICT accessible procurement, we actually reach out to the sector and bring a range of people to the table from different universities to actually develop the resource and that to me just seems I get blown away.  I come from the health and disability area before I started at the university sector and I've just loved this sector for its passion and enthusiasm for students with disabilities and other equity cohorts.  It's the greatest sector I've worked for and it's fabulous to see this commitment in the Accord and in the equity agenda going forward.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  I do agree with that.  I think that the biggest  I've always thought that working in universities.  It's very rare you find someone who doesn't want to widen participation.  I mean, people in universities innately think that there is a value to education and that all should have it, but again, that doesn't mean there aren't impediments in the way to achieving that goal.  
       
So in the interests of time, we've only got about five minutes left, I will just go to the last question.  The last question of course is around changes to funding and regulatory settings.  What changes would enable providers to better support students from underrepresented groups in higher education?  So answer that question, but also feel free to sort of give your grand closing statement so that we'll end with that.  
       
But just before we end, I think another thing we should be thinking about, and somebody on this panel may know more of the history than me, but why is HEPPP 4% of the overall teaching grant?  Why is it not more?  How was that figure ever come to, because 4% does not seem a very large amount of the overall teaching grant, and I think there's always been a little bit of confusion about HEPPP about whether or not it's an incentive or it's there to meet costs and I think that that's also something we need to start to think about as we make recommendations to the Accord.  
       
So last but not least I'll start in the middle with you, Chris, radiate left, then radiate right, and essentially you're summing up, but also talking about the fundamental changes to funding and regulatory settings to better support students from underrepresented backgrounds.
       
CHRIS RONAN:  Well, from my perspective, there's some people on this panel who know far more about the funding than I do, but demanddriven funding keeps coming up as something and we've worked in that system and then outside of that system, there's pros and cons.  
       
But the point that I'd make around DDF is that that in and of itself is not a solution here because from an organisation like us, you need the support structures that sits around that type of policy setting or it's just not going to reach the goals that's required.  I mean, something like our organisation is one of those mechanisms that sits around the DDF, you know, just saying.  So I think that's sort of just a point and a bit of nuance that's needed in some of the policy levers being talked about.
       
In terms of vision, I think the Accord's asked us to be bold and when I think around rural and regional communities, and I say "communities" because that is the only solution that I see as solving, I guess, growing participation in regional and rural Australia.  So we have 18 centres in our network.  There's other IUCs all over Australia.  There is absolutely no reason that every regional or rural community and even peri urban and as we've talked about in urban communities can have communityled solutions to higher education that has genuine access irrespective of what university that student goes to.  This centre is open to any student from any university.  That's how you're going to reach those goals.  And for reasons that we've all talked about, it's not expensive.  We're currently doing it already.  It's not that farcical.  So for me when I look back, if I'm 50, then that's what I hope to see because that's actually going to make an impact.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  I am 50.
       
CHRIS RONAN:  I realised I said that and then looked  sorry.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Kylie?
       
DR KYLIE AUSTIN:  Look, I think the DDF has got to be one of the things that we need to look at.  You know, as kind of Nadine showed, the DDF combined with widening participation combined with other inputs into the sector had a significant impact on equity student participation and so I think that that's something definitely that we need to look at.  
       
But I also think that if we look at how we fund and reward universities, for equity student participation, I think we need to move away from funding formulas that just focus solely on access, but also focus on things like completion and graduate outcomes if we truly believe that widening participation is about increasing social mobility.  And I also think we need to  institutions themselves need to be accountable about the level of support services that they offer from a holistic universal approach for all students and so that we've got a minimum standard, I guess, in terms of what supports are on offer from minimum supports are on offer for all students that are funded by universities, so things like HEPPP and that can go beyond funding minimum core supports and instead be focused on addressing the more nuanced challenges around scholarships and learning support for particular student groups as well.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Darlene?
       
DARLENE McLENNAN:  Funding, funding  it's a challenge.  Before I kind of go on to funding, I suppose for us in the disability area we have a legislative framework, universities have a legislative framework under the Disability Discrimination Act and the disability standards in education and have a legal responsibility to provide reasonable adjustments, but the Acts actually don't have a lot of teeth and it's a David and Goliath or a Danielle and Goliath situation and that's a challenge, I think, often students come up against and what we've heard when the review of the disability standards for education happens every five years, we get the same feedback from students it's not working and we just do it again in five years' time and nothing changes.  And disability advocates are actually calling now for review of the DDA.  I know it's out of the scope of the Accord, but if we can actually put it in the Accord that we actually look at a real serious change to disability standards in education.
       
With the funding envelope, you know, I think I've talked about how little $70 million is and how far it goes and we'd certainly like to see an increase in the investment of students with disability.  You know, often government will come back to me and say, "Well, universities have a responsibility to support students with disability, so they should be lucky they get the money", but it's actually what I feel universities can put the barrier up if they don't  you know, that money just gives us some leverage within universities to have that argument that students' costs will be covered around 40 to 50% if they have high support needs, so it gives us some leverage within our communities.  
       
But I think it's really important that we still have that money so that there's no barriers.  I kind of get overwhelmed with some of the barriers that exist for people with disability within the sector, but at the same time, I get very excited about the challenges and the opportunities we have to actually improve access and I'm seeing this Accord as this once in a decade or two to actually make that change for the better at all equity groups and especially students with disability.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Thanks, Darlene, Leanne?
       
DR LEANNE HOLT:  It's okay.  I also reinforce the demanddriven system in the JRG open demand driven places for Indigenous students from regional and remote areas, but I argue for that to be extended to all students.  Also, the removal of disciplinaryfocused student contribution funding, like the highest number of  Indigenous students, our highest number of students sit within humanities and arts.  So therefore we have students coming in in the lowest student  the lowest social economic population in Australia coming into university and going out with the highest debt.  So it was just  yes, I don't think I need to say more about that.  
       
Concentration on articulation  we talk about partnerships between universities and with communities, but also with  like there was 30,000 students come from VET pathways into universities at the moment and a high number of those would be equity students.  So I think we need to look at partnerships with vocational education providers, particularly TAFE.  Some universities already do it well, but probably more the dual sector.  
       
And the other thing is accessibility to higher education is one thing, but also accessibility to employment.  So I'm on a bit of a rant about things like LAN type that actually challenge Indigenous students, particularly remote cohorts, in actually getting to become teachers.  I'm just using this as an example.  I think there's a few different examples I think.  But if we're going to provide accessibility, then that accessibility has to be to employment, not just to higher education, so looking at the long haul.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Last but not least, Nadine.
       
ASSOC. PROF. NADINE ZACHARIAS:  Yes, thank you.  Look, in my mind, what the review is asking us to do is to think about lifelong learning across the entire education ecosystem and we're thinking about universal participation.  So the student cohort is as diverse as the Australian population, right?  That's sort of what we're talking about.  
       
And then if that is the conversation, like yes, demanddriven funding is the necessary but not sufficient condition but it's also  and I think one of the layers that we need to put into the picture and what we try to do in the best chance for all is that we define principles and smooth out the intersections between the different components of the education system, that we literally go and have similar principles from early education into primary and secondary into tertiary or vocational and higher and that we sort of create that into a coherent ecosystem rather than having very, very different rules and regulations and support and funding incentives for each part of the system.  
       
And if we take students with disability, right, they are quite well supported in the school system, they get zero support in Victoria and the vocational system, and then they come into a sort of like reasonably supported higher education system, right, so in that alone it's mad, right?  So when you really put yourself in the position of the students, you know, like we have to improve the attainment levels, you know, of all students, but particularly those in disadvantaged schools in secondary schools, we have to for the adults coming back in, we have to talk about enabling programs, we have to talk about bridging programs so that we enable adults to fully participate, you know, in higher education.  
       
We have to talk about pathways, you know, from vocational into higher and back again, and I'd love to talk about hybrid products, right?  So when we are playing with a course in cyber security that pulls together VET and higher education units into quite a different qualification, plus puts a traineeship around it, right?  That is sort of the stuff we need to talk about to really break this up and at the same time integrate in a new way.  
       
So at that level I think let's not just talk about universities, but talk about the entire education ecosystem and how students move.  Yes, okay, linear, for some, but in other ways really in, out and back again.  
       
And the final point of this is Sarah O'Shea on Friday talked about exit qualifications, right, how do we credential parts of learning when students need to access or want to access for whatever reason.  We really have to get our act together on that as well.
       
THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH:  Wonderful.  Well, thank you, everyone.  I know we're over time.  I really appreciate you all sticking around, particularly with having to leave the building and climb back up again, et cetera.  It's been a wonderful, wonderful afternoon.  I really enjoyed all of your  oh, man, it's just so good.  
       
We are now pulling all of this together.  There will be a submission going into the Accord from EPHEA and we're going to be using all of what's been produced here today.  If anyone has any questions or wants to make any more submissions, Slido will be open for another week.  That's right, isn't it?  So you can continue to put your views into Slido or, of course, you can go back to your own universities and encourage them to put your views into their submissions.  
       
I'm just checking.  Yes, we have until Friday, 31 March to submit the comments in Slido.  And a recording of each of these presentations will be shared to everyone who has registered for today's event.  So we've already eaten afternoon tea, deliberated.  You can go off and see.  Thank you again for coming and we'll see you all again soon.