Search

People from out-of-home care backgrounds are largely absent from Australian higher education equity policy. Compared with the UK, Australia has moved slowly to consider legislative and programme incentives for young people who leave state, foster or kinship care and who wish to access higher education. One major reason for the relative inaction of the Australian higher education sector towards this cohort is the rigidity of the national equity framework established in 1990. This article argues that policy reform is required to improve the participation of people from out-of-home care backgrounds in Australian higher education. Effort could be directed into revising the national equity framework, in particular by including out-of-home care as a specific group to be monitored. In addition to revising the national policy architecture, further devolution of equity policy to institutional level may enable greater engagement with the out-of-home care cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music tertiary educators can foster positive experiences that promote diversity, enhance intercultural and cross-cultural understanding through our teaching. Through findings of interview data of tertiary music educators’ understandings of multicultural music practice at two South African universities and at an Australia university, I used interpretative phenomenological analysis to analyse the data. Two major themes emerged: why is it important to teach multicultural music like that of Africa, and what are some of the effective ways of preparing students to best teach it? The data provides insights into an appreciation of and respect for music and cultural diversity. In multicultural societies educators cannot deliver courses based solely on one’s own identity and cultural perspective. I argue that music education may be seen as an agent of social change where music teaching and learning can occur through exploring, experiencing, expressing and engaging in the music of our own culture and that of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, school sector differences in tertiary entrance performance were examined using longitudinal data from the state of Victoria in Australia for 2011. Analysis of students’ Tertiary Entrance Aggregate, from which the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank is derived, revealed non-trivial effect sizes of sector on performance. Results showed that students in Catholic and Independent schools performed at 0.24 and 0.38 standard deviations higher than their peers in the government sector once socioeconomic status, Year 9 performance in the National Assessments of Performance—Literacy and Numeracy, gender and language background had been controlled for. In other words, the results demonstrate “value-added effects” for the Catholic and Independent school sectors. Quantile regression showed that Independent-government school sector differences decline (moderately) with higher Tertiary Entrance Aggregate scores. For the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, Catholic and Independent school students averaged 6 and 8 ranks higher than government school students, respectively, net of the same set of predictors. First-differences and fixed-effects models—which control for all stable (including unobserved) differences between students—estimated increments of 4.5 and 6.0 Australian Tertiary Admission Ranks, for the Catholic and Independent school sectors compared with the government sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]