The Importance of Highly Engaged School-University Partnerships in Widening Participation Outreach

Abstract

In Australia, there has been a sustained investment in widening participation activities by the federal government through the Higher Education Participation and Partnership Program (HEPPP) and a sustained effort by universities and their partner schools to create high-quality widening participation programs. However, there is limited longitudinal evidence on if and how these widening participation activities influence the application rates to university by school leavers from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. This article draws on a large mixed-methods study which aimed to investigate differences in university application rates between students from low SES backgrounds in urban versus rural, regional and remote (RRR) schools in Queensland. The research found that widening participation programs had a positive and statistically significant influence on application rates to university in highly engaged schools. We propose the concept of a virtuous circle of sustained widening participation activity to explain the positive results in highly engaged schools.

Can an Index Approach Improve Social Marketing Competitor Analysis?

“…University-led WP outreach seeks to mitigate four key structural barriers: poverty, geographic isolation, school factors and access to timely information about careers and university (Cupitt et al, 2016; Zacharias et al, 2018). These barriers overlap and compound for LSES-R students (Napthine et al, 2019).…”

“…Consequently, LSES-R university students turn to paid employment during their studies which may have affected their academic performance (Napthine et al, 2019). Furthermore, in LSES-R areas universities engage schools, students and parents less frequently than in metropolitan environments resulting in students not always receiving timely information and along with the non-availability of some senior secondary school subjects in some LSES-R schools further constraining university options and degree choices (Zacharias et al, 2018).…”

“…LSES-R students are typically the first in their family to attend university (Dollinger et al, 2020). They can experience mixed messages from their family, friends and significant others, with messages of both encouragement and discouragement making more convoluted an already complex decision (Zacharias et al, 2018).…”

“…Low socioeconomic status students from regional, rural and remote areas (LSES-R) experience a double disadvantage, with poverty reducing access to educational resources and the relatively greater geographic distance between home and university campuses obstructing participation. Those who are considering going to university must navigate a range of challenges different from their metropolitan counterparts (Zacharias et al, 2018). Attending to the national calls for fresh thinking to arrest the inverse relationship between university qualifications, socioeconomic status and remoteness, this empirical paper identifies three key competitor clusters experienced by LSES-R students but not their metropolitan (LSES-M) counterparts.…”

Escaping the Norm: Games for Wider Participation with a Sense of Success

“…Students in the NT often come from less traditional university backgrounds as described by Kearney et al ( 2018) and attend schools of relative socio-educational disadvantage when categorised by the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2011). Engagement with these students at high school, even prior to year 10 ( Dale & Raciti, 2019) in stimulating activities may positively influence students to enrol in university (Mitchell & Zacharias, 2020). Escape rooms are novel, time-limited games where teams of players are tasked to enter a simulated room setting and solve a series of puzzles in order to accomplish a specific goal or 'escape' by solving the final puzzle (Friedrich et al, 2018;Nicholson, 2015).…”