The release of the Australian Universities Accord Final Report in 2024 and call for contextually relevant pathways to higher education continues the widening participation agenda that was introduced more than 50 years ago in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Enabling education continues to contribute to targets with the evolution of…

Transition pedagogy offers a solid foundation for developing whole-of-institution student success strategies due to its holistic approach. Generally, whole-of-institution student success strategies can be challenging to implement at the faculty level because they are necessarily broad. This practice report presents a step-by-step guide to…

Equity students entering higher education through Enabling programs often encounter significant challenges as they transition into the academic field. This transition involves navigating the hysteresis juncture, a moment of misalignment between students' ingrained habitus and the expectations of the academic environment. This study explores the…

Transition pedagogy is a whole-of-institution approach for supporting learning across diverse student cohorts through intentional, integrated (co-)curricular design. However, in large institutions, it is not always possible to enact transition pedagogy across the whole organisation. This action research study examines a multi-year transition…

This paper builds on recent studies of institutional diversity in Australian tertiary education by modifying this model and using it to profile Australian pathway providers. The results offer insight into the role and work of this under-represented part of Australian tertiary education, as well as highlighting key strategic issues for these…

This study uses cultural capital theory as an analytical frame to investigate first-generation students' sense of belonging at university. The purpose of this study was to examine first-year students' perceptions of their sense of belonging by exploring the extent that they perceive a sense of belonging, whether they perceive barriers to their…

Over the last 20 years, the authors have utilised Bronfenbrenner's ecological and bioecological models as a basis for their work investigating children's transition to school, including the place of mathematics learning in this transition. The later bioecological model gave increased emphasis to the role of the individual within contexts, the…

The field of research (FoR) that an academic participates in is both a manifestation of, and a contributor to the development of their identity. When an academic changes that FoR the question then arises as to how they reconcile this change with their identity. This paper uses the identity-trajectory framework to analyse the discourse of 19…

The implementation of a transition model, the flexible integration model, was investigated in a school in Sydney, Australia, using an exploratory single case study design (Rowley, 2002). It is a person-centred model designed to assist students in transitioning from a special school for students with emotional and behavioural disabilities to…

The benefits of higher education to individuals and to society are acknowledged both in Australia and internationally. Increased access to higher education means that greatly diverse students are beginning their tertiary learning journey. We investigate the experiences of a group of non-traditional students undertaking a tertiary preparation…

Student success and retention continue to be of concern for higher education institutions. Wider participation, combined with lower completion rates for non-traditional students, highlights the need for new ways of understanding the student experience to ground policy and practice. This article provides this insight by drawing together a number of…

Schooling transitions are often challenging experiences for students with intellectual disability and/or autism spectrum disorder (ID/ASD), their families, and their teachers. Transition processes, particularly planning, can facilitate successful transitions from primary to secondary schools, and to postschool settings. Bronfenbrenner's ecological…

This report uses Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) data to look at the impact of schools on a student's tertiary entrance rank (TER) and the probability of them going to university (controlling for TER). It shows that the characteristics of schools do matter: although young people's individual characteristics are the main drivers of…

The first year of university has been identified as an area of interest and concern for several decades because, for many students, their first year at university is also their last. The researchers developed a program based on a Sports Education model to influence the engagement and retention of first year students. The program sought to build…

The need for a redefinition of first year experience in higher education is advocated with the aid of two models, which, although focused on a sample of Australian pre-service teaching students, is proposed as generalisable across the first year. Introduction to the mores of higher education is generally supported by teaching institutions during…