In Reps QT yesterday Andrew Wilkie (Ind-Tas) asked Education Minister Jason Clare if he will freeze HELP indexation until the Accord report is delivered in December. To which Mr Clare replied, “the short answer to your question is no, we have made no change to HECs in the budget.”

The long answer was that Mr Clare wants to expand access to HE.  “This is what we’ve got to fix. The cost of university degrees is important, and the cost of living is important, but the cost of those kids from those communities missing out is important too. This is what we’ve got to fix. This, at its core, is what the Universities Accord will be all about.”

Perhaps Mr Wilkie can ask next about that other Accord-referred issue,  student fees under the Job-Ready Graduate s Package.

Scroll down for Luke Sheehy who huzzahs! for HELP

In Features this morning

There’s talk of the Accord creating a unified tertiary system – New Zealand demonstrates it can be done, just not fast or easily. Roger Smyth’s third report on what we can learn from NZ’s transformation of tertiary ed.  The others are HERE and HERE

plus Sean Brawley and colleagues on how Uni Wollongong is learning to live with risk. Another instalment in their series on how the university restructured to revitalise admin, HERE

and Sarah O’Shea (Curtin U) reminds us that the Accord should address a fundamental purpose of universities: creating better societies. New in Commissioning Editor Sally Kift’s celebrated series, Needed now in learning and teaching

with Karen Gravet, Rola Ajjawi and Sarah O’Shea on the different way students feel they belong, and why they matter. Also a new Sally selection

Back in 2018 Monash U economist Christis Tombazos asked the Australian Research Council for details of Discovery programme applications in economics. The Council said no

The matter ended up before the Australian Information Commissioner, which reports the ARC rejected two requests on two grounds, personal privacy and the documents asked for did not exist – although nearly a year later it advised that there were in fact such documents. But by 2021 the council was still stating it did not have to supply most of the information.

To all of which FOI Commissioner Leo Hardiman recently responded, “I have concluded in the circumstances of this IC review that the public interest factors relating to scrutiny of government activities and oversight of public expenditure outweigh the countervailing public interest in maintaining personal privacy.”

The Commissioner also commented, “the ARC has chosen to engage in a very minimal way with this IC review and has provided very little evidence in support of its exemption contentions,” adding,

“in the absence of sufficient evidence being provided by an agency and absent any other material that is provided by or is relevant to a third party, maintenance of the agency’s contentions in a decision on review may in many cases be significantly less likely than would otherwise be the case.”

Last night an ARC spokesperson told CMM the agency is appealing the decision.

by CLAIRE FIELD

the higher education sector does not have confidence that VET providers deliver uniformly high quality courses

At the Skills Ministers meeting in Darwin on Friday, Mary O’Kane shared the “key themes identified in (Accord) consultations to date and explored opportunities with ministers to support greater alignment between the VET and higher education systems.”

Skills Ministers then discussed how the National Skills Agreement could introduce reforms to “serve a more cohesive and connected tertiary sector”.

Last week Robin Shreeve and I were pondering the same issues, with Robin drawing on his experience leading VET institutions in Australia and the UK, as well as his senior government policy expertise, first as the NSW Deputy Director-General TAFE and Community Education, and subsequently as the CEO of the Australian Workplace Productivity Agency.

He shared a number of very interesting ideas which go beyond the usual set of issues we discuss when considering more integration between the two sectors. He also argued persuasively for better funding for VET and worried that with many of its senior leaders not having an educational background – there is a tendency to view it as “watered down” higher education (which in turn influences policy reforms).

I share Robin’s concerns. I also obviously support better credit arrangements between VET and higher education as one of the mechanisms to better integrate the sectors … . But before progressing with reforms, the Accord Panel and ministers need to ask themselves why credit recognition is much less of an issue for international VET students.

The international education sector is full of VET-HE credit transfer agreements.

Of course there is an additional administrative burden for universities in granting credit to an international VET graduate, BUT they do so,

*  because they have taken the time to get to know the provider and the quality of their teaching and * they do so because the university gets two years (or more) of international student fees – without incurring any student recruitment costs.

When considering granting credit to domestic students there is no financial benefit and there are thousands more providers to deal with – because the higher education sector does not have confidence that VET providers deliver uniformly high quality courses.

And hence it all gets too hard. Which means we need to focus not just on the AQF, but on VET quality and on well-designed funding incentives if we want higher education providers to grant domestic VET students the credit for their studies they deserve.

 Claire Field spoke with Robin Shreeve on the latest episode of the ‘What now? What next?’ podcast

Researchers wanted to know the gender split on research funding so they looked at who got 50 000 ARC and NHMRC awards

They found less total grants for women, especially at senior-career levels –  in part because there were 16,799 fewer women than men in the research workforce (averaged for 2014-17)

The findings are in a paper by Isabelle Kingsley and colleagues*, which includes;

* percentage of awarded grants led by women increased from 28 per cent (2000) to 37 per cent (2020) across all academic levels, field of research, and funding scheme

* percentage of women-led grants decreased with seniority. At professor level, women-led grants doubled to 31 per cent 2000-2020, but remained “well below” parity

* success rates increased with the seniority of lead investigators, irrespective of gender

Overall, “gender differences in awarded grants broadly matched differences in application and workforce participation rates within each field of research.”

But men were in the money: More of them, especially at senior levels meant that over 20 years they picked up way-more ARC  and NHMRC funding, $7.5bn to women-led grants and $19.1 billion to men-led.

* Isabelle Kingsley (Office of the Women in STEM Ambassador), Eve Slavich (UNSW), Lisa Harvey-Smith (Women in STEM Ambassador), Emma L Johnston (Uni Sydney) and Lisa A Williams (UNSW)  “Gender differences in Australian research grant awards, applications, amounts, and workforce participation,” Open Science Framework, HERE

Asanga Abeyaratne (Menzies School Health Research) has the NT Government’s Father Frank Flynn Fellowship for ’23 – on health informatics.

Michelle Gillespie starts next month as Victoria U’s inaugural chief student officer. She moves from business software provider (including for education) Technology One. She has a background in student admin, both at Swinburne U and Uni Melbourne.

 As of July, Rhonda Itaoui will be director of the Centre for Western Sydney and Western Sydney U. Andy Marks continues as centre ED.

The Victorian Premier’s awards for health and medical research include, * Jaithri Ananthapavan (Deakin U): public health research * Shawana Andrews (Uni Melbourne): Aboriginal researcher *Owen Bradfield (Uni Melbourne): health services research * Kathryn Connelly (Monash Health): clinical research * Emily Lelliott (Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute): basic science *