Moving beyond a ‘bums-on-seats’ analysis of progress towards widening participation: reflections on the context, design and evaluation of an Australian government-funded mentoring programme

Abstract

In 2010, the Australian government established the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Programme – a funding agenda to promote programmes that respond to the under-representation in higher education of people from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Many government-funded programmes and projects have since emerged that respond to the problem of low SES under-representation, based on partnerships between higher education providers and other organisations. The arguments made in this paper draw on one such project: a mentoring programme implemented from 2011 to 2013 that targeted the aspirations of Year 9 regional secondary students. We discuss data and documentation that provide insights into the conception and design of the mentoring programme, and the strategies used to evaluate it, in order to discuss how funding and policy contexts influence the possible solutions that might be implemented in response to the under-representation in higher education of people from low SES backgrounds.

Keywords:

• academic performativity
• academic practice
• de Certeau
• equity and access
• evidence-based approaches
• higher education participation

Acknowledgements

The research was undertaken with full ethical clearance from the Deakin University Human Ethics Committee and with permission from the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. The paper was written with support of The Warrnambool Collective. Off shoots of the original project continue at the time of writing with programmes focusing on school students from a number of primary and secondary schools and on vocational education and training students.

Additional information

Funding

The data reported in this paper were collected with funds from the Deakin Unversity Partnerships and Participation Project.