The Small Grants Research Program will fund proposals that address equity issues across the entire higher education student lifecycle. This includes proposals that address contemporary developments and challenges in higher education equity policy, practice, and evaluation, including but not limited to, issues raised and discussed as part of the Australian Universities Accord Panel’s Review of Higher Education. Further, there is a particular focus on proposals that do one or more of the following:
- Produce research that can be applied nationally and/or be adopted by universities, including outcomes that are potentially portable across institutions and scalable across Australian higher education.
- Contribute to the existing research and practice knowledge base on equity issues in Australian higher education, building on previous research undertaken or funded by NCSEHE.
- Examine issues of the cumulative and compounding nature of the effects of disadvantage on access, participation and success in Australian higher education.
- Employ innovative use of existing data sources or identify and use new data sources in program design and evaluation.
- Take a comparative and/or interdisciplinary approach to understand equity issues.
All proposals should be able to identify one or more priority groups who are the focus of the research, as listed in the Proposal Template. Proposals are not limited to the stated priority groups listed in the Proposal Template and can nominate other groups experiencing forms of disadvantage and/or underrepresentation in higher education, in addition to addressing the issue of compounding disadvantage where relevant.
To assist applicants with the preparation of their proposals, the NCSEHE can provide, on request, a copy of successful proposals from previous research grants rounds courtesy of project teams who have generously granted the Centre permission to do so.
Applications open on Monday 21 August 2023 and close at 8pm AWST on Thursday 28 September 2023. The NCSEHE will acknowledge receipt of all applications submitted and outcomes of the selection process will be announced in late November 2023.
Open
