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The Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success acknowledges Indigenous peoples across Australia as the Traditional Owners of the lands on which the nation’s campuses are situated. With a history spanning more than 60,000 years as the original educators, Indigenous peoples hold a unique place in our nation. We recognise the importance of their knowledge and culture, and reflect the principles of participation, equity, and cultural respect in our work. We pay our respects to Elders past, present, and future, and consider it an honour to learn from our Indigenous colleagues, partners, and friends.

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You are reading: The impact of a Widening Participation Model on tertiary applications: A regression discontinuity design study

Trial overview

Registered
Users Priority Students: Low socio-economic status backgrounds, Regional, remote, or rural locations
Academic Cap Stage of Intervention: Pre Higher Education
Chart Line Outcomes: Access

What was trialed

The Widening Participation (WP) Model—as led and delivered to secondary schools by the higher education equity sector in Victoria—targets schools with greater disadvantage and invites them to take part in a range of widening participation supports designed to address common barriers that underrepresented students face with engaging in higher education.

Deakin University’s equity team works with school leaders to select the supports most relevant to their student cohorts (the school-directed component of WP).  Once selected and organised, the support is led by university mentors, who are matched to the school for their shared backgrounds, age, and when possible, the same secondary school. These mentors—trained to facilitate workshops alongside staff—model success in higher education and support students in navigating their own questions and aspirations (the student-centred component of WP).

The WP Model aims to increase university applications among students from underrepresented backgrounds. It does this by reaching equity students (by targeting underrepresented school), addressing their psychosocial and structural barriers (through the support topics and school-directed approach), and building students’ awareness, confidence, and motivation for higher education through their student-centered support.

What was found

Results expected in March 2026.

How the trial was delivered

A regression discontinuity design (RDD) is being used to determine the impact of the WP Model on tertiary application rates around the commonly applied threshold for university equity-led support.

Administrative data is being used to determine the impact of this WP Model on application rates. Specifically, application rates are the percentage of Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) students at each school who apply for tertiary places through the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre (VTAC). For our running variable (ICSEA score) and covariates (school size, ‘socio-educational advantage (SEA) quartiles, geolocation), the School Profile will be used, as published by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. Variations in institutions are captured using university administrative data and discussions with university outreach teams across Victoria; these delivery characteristics will be used to describe implementation differences across sites and may be explored in secondary analyses as potential effect modifiers of the impact on application rates.

Not all Victorian universities apply this same strict threshold, and as such, the analysis will apply a fuzzy RDD model to investigate the effects of outreach, and the resulting impact estimate would reflect the effect of support on schools with relatively lower levels of disadvantage.

The trial is being led by Deakin University in collaboration with the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES), with contributions from Victorian universities in 2025 and 2026.