ACSES Equity Hub: Year-End Exchange

The Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES) invites you to the final Equity Hub Community of Practice (CoP) event for 2025. The CoP aims to bring student equity managers and staff together to provide an opportunity for practitioners to share their lessons learned and best practices in student equity evaluation.

Presentation 1 | Evaluating the Eastern Australia Regional University Centre Partnership (EURUCP)

Dr Jessica Hall, from the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion at the University of Technology Sydney, will present on the evaluation of the Eastern Australia Regional University Centre Partnership (EARUCP)—a collaboration of 23 universities and 14 Regional University Study Hubs (RUSH) across NSW, QLD, VIC, and ACT. Co-led by Country Universities Centre (CUC) and UTS, EARUCP supports place-based, community-led higher education outreach while strengthening the capacity of partner organisations to develop and sustain partnerships aimed at improving equity in higher education.

The mixed methods evaluation, drawing on surveys, interviews, and document review, explored the experiences, characteristics, and effectiveness of the partnership model at both program and sub-project levels. A continuous quality improvement framework, informed by the Student Equity in Higher Education Evaluation Framework (SEHEEF), was embedded throughout to refine the model and activities.

Presentation 2 | The numbers tell the story: Building digital infrastructure to evaluate student equity programming outcomes

This panel brings together key contributors from Deakin University’s 2025 initiative to build digital infrastructure for evaluating HEPPP-funded programming.

In 2025, a cross-disciplinary collaboration between:

• Equity & Inclusion—responsible for HEPPP governance, who brought deep knowledge of HEPPP policy, programming and student equity practice
• Analytics & Insights—a central hub for data analytics at Deakin, who contributed data engineering and visualisation expertise
• Office of the Executive Dean Health—a team of researchers with specialised biostatistical expertise, who provided methodological rigor and evaluation design insights

embarked on a process to structure and consolidate historical HEPPP data in a centralised data repository. This foundational work has enabled the full integration of HEPPP participation data with Deakin’s institutional datasets, facilitating dynamic insights into equity student outcomes and supporting evidence-based project planning and decision-making in line with the SEHEEF.

Join us for a conversation about cross-disciplinary collaboration and laying the groundwork for effective equity programming evaluation.

Presenters:

• Alcy Meehan (Coordinator, Equity, Governance & Planning – Equity & Inclusion
• Dr Tanita Botha (Senior Research Fellow, Biostatistics – Office of the Exec Dean Health)
• Stephen Marshall (Senior Manager, Education Analytics – Deakin Analytics & Insights)
• Timothy Shea (Senior Data Analyst – Deakin Analytics & Insights)
• Anusha Kola (Information Analyst – Deakin Analytics & Insights)
• Amelia Searle (Senior Analyst, Equity & Inclusion – Deakin Analytics & Insights)

Session recording

A recording of the session is now available.