Building a collaboration for impact evaluation of student equity programs across Group of Eight institutions

About

This project built capacity for impact evaluation of student equity programs across the Group of Eight. The initiative strengthened evaluation capability and practice by developing a partnership for knowledge sharing about current evaluation approaches, findings from existing evaluation processes, and learnings from evaluations undertaken by senior practitioners and in-house evaluators. The programs that this initiative focused on were:

• Academic preparation programs (both pre- and post-enrolment)
• First-year transition programs for targeted student cohorts

The program comprised a series of capacity-building workshops that provided an opportunity to share the initiative’s design and to discuss insights from existing continuous quality improvement data and evaluations. The workshop series primarily drew on existing information, enabling participants to collate relevant insights from two sets of case studies of comparable programs operating at different universities.

Participants observed that program logics were not yet fully utilised to guide continuous quality improvement or programme design. While institutional contexts and needs vary, participants identified clear benefits in adopting a more systematic approach to design and evaluation—particularly for upskilling equity teams and generating higher-quality data across multiple dimensions.

A key achievement of the initiative was full participation by all eight institutions, which remained engaged throughout and committed to ongoing collaboration. Each institution put forward an action plan to undertake an impact evaluation of a selected equity initiative in 2026.

Participants emphasised the importance of not only bringing institutions together but also connecting equity practitioners with program evaluators in ways that respected both skill sets and specialist expertise, and facilitated sharing across traditional silos.

Timeframe

2025

Funding

This project was funded by Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success under Capacity Building Grants Program

Project leads

• A/Prof Gwilym Croucher, Associate Director, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne
• Kate Flynn, Director, Widening Participation, University of Melbourne
• Dr Mat Hardy, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne
• Dr Nadine Zacharias, Equity by Design

Outcomes

A public report summarising lessons learned from the initiative will be published soon.

Enquiries

For more information on this CSHE project, please contact A/Prof Gwilym Croucher.