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This article explores the perceptions of participants following the first International Summer Institute (SI) on students as partners in higher education, a four-day professional development experience designed to foster student-staff partnerships. Approximately 9 months after the Institute, 10 participants were interviewed to understand their perceptions of student-staff partnership, and what role the SI played in supporting partnership working. We discuss the key themes that emerged from our interviews, and analyse these participant responses in comparison to responses collected during the 2016 SI. In evaluating our data, we consider the general efficacy of the SI and offer ideas for academic developers interested in supporting partnership work more generally.

There is general agreement in Australia and beyond that quantitative skills (QS) in science, the ability to use mathematics and statistics in context, are important for science. QS in the life sciences are becoming ever more important as these sciences become more quantitative. Consequently, undergraduates studying the life sciences require better QS than at any time in the past. Ways in which mathematics and science academics are working together to build the QS of their undergraduate science students, together with the mathematics and statistics needed or desired in a science degree, are reported on in this paper. The emphasis is on the life sciences. Forty-eight academics from eleven Australian and two USA universities were interviewed about QS in science. Information is presented on: what QS academics want in their undergraduate science students; who is teaching QS; how mathematics and science departments work together to build QS in science and implications for building the QS of science students. This information leads to suggestions for improvement in QS within a science curriculum.