Access to quality career advice is important for economic, personal and equity reasons, yet, in many countries around the world, career-education provision is of varying quality and quantity within school settings. Given the inconsistencies in career-education resourcing and provision, what is not clearly understood is how students from low socioeconomic status (low SES) backgrounds experience career-education provision and the extent to which it shapes their post-school futures. Drawing on Australian research, this paper explores the career-education experiences of high-school students from low SES backgrounds. Bourdieu’s tools of field, habitus and capital are used as a theoretical framework to understand how career education can influence students’ imagining and achieving their career goals. The findings reported in this paper contribute nuanced understandings of career education to students from low SES backgrounds and recommends how all students can benefit from an embedded approach to career education in schools.

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The COVID-19 pandemic caused a rapid and unprecedented shift of widening participation and outreach activities to online and remote delivery. The impact of this went beyond practitioners and the university sector; positive and negative implications are felt by stakeholders and the broader community. This shift online is discussed through the lens of a multi-university perspective, using four case studies from university outreach programs in one Australian state. The article provides a holistic view of the lessons learned and discoveries made, informing future program design and delivery. These programs include primary and secondary students, teachers, parents, guardians and carers, and work within a range of low socioeconomic and regional, rural and remote contexts. We argue that the fundamentally necessary shift online created a profound legacy and bears potential to increase accessibility (via diversity and scale), but, simultaneously, that care must be applied if substituting face-to-face engagement with that online. While this article primarily focuses on issues of value to practitioners, it also discusses important implications for academics, support staff, and university executive regarding the access and participation of underrepresented cohorts during times of mass change.

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Co-curricular engagement is an essential a part of the student experience in Australian higher education institutions. Whilst there is wide acknowledgement of the benefits of students participating in co-curricular activities, formally recognising students for the knowledge, skills and experiences that they have gained through co-curricular learning has only recently emerged in the Australian context. This practice paper will describe one Australian university’s approach in developing and implementing a co-curricular recognition framework. UOWx sits at the core of University of Wollongong’s (UOW) student experience, providing holistic and transformational personal development of students. The distinctive features of UOW’s approach include developing a whole of institution approach; embedding the student voice into continuous improvement cycles; and developing an active strategy to embed UOWx with employers and community organisations. This approach has transformed student co-curricular learning at UOW, by increasing the breadth of student engagement and deepening student understanding of the knowledge, skills and experiences students have gained through their co-curricular engagement. Keywords: Co-curricular framework; designing co-curricular recognition; reflection.