Evaluating the effectiveness of university widening participation activities in rural Australia

Abstract

This article explores the effect university widening participation activities have had in improving access to university of students from rural government-run schools in New South Wales, Australia. An effective effort to evaluate the success of widening participation programs in rural Australia, specifically New South Wales, has not been achieved to date. This article addresses this issue in three distinct ways. First, previous efforts to evaluate widening participation effectiveness are explored and their successes and failings are described. Second, a method to rigorously evaluate university-run outreach programs in Australia’s unique socio-cultural context is constructed and explained. Third, this method is employed using a sample of Australian rural schools to evaluate outreach effectiveness. A mixed-method design combining multilevel growth models and in-depth interviews of careers advisors revealed teacher support of university outreach presence in schools did not necessarily translate to an opinion of outreach effectivity in raising university access levels. This was supported by quantitative analyses showing widening participation efforts in rural New South Wales have had little to no effect on the progression of rural students to university between 2010 and 2016.

Keywords:

• Widening participation
• outreach effectiveness
• multilevel modelling
• mixed-methods
• rural students
• Australia

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Sijia (Cica) Chen for her valuable contribution to the data collation and organisation efforts of this project. Thank you to the teachers and outreach practitioners who volunteered their time to assist in this research.

Notes

1 Students in the school who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander (ATSI).

2 An Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) score is given to a school based on the level of educational (dis)advantage of the school’s population relative to other Australian schools. These scores are used by the Australian Government and displayed to the public.

3 The EAS is a federal government operated mechanism to identify levels of school disadvantage. Schools can be assigned one of three types of EAS disadvantage: the first is based on state government identification of school disadvantage (SO1E) and the others are awarded due to having a rural locale (SO1C or SO1R). EAS designation was taken for the year 2016. Note: there were two schools in our sample that did not classify in any EAS disadvantage category.

4 Town population was taken from 2011 and 2016 Australian census results.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Federal Government Department of Education and Training under the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (grant number HEP1600092).