Practising equity: the activation and appropriation of student equity policy in Queensland higher education

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My thesis reports findings from an institutional ethnography of the outreach practices of university-based student equity workers. The study explored the way these equity workers engaged with students, schools and communities from areas in the state of Queensland, Australia, that are categorised as being of low socioeconomic status (SES). The focus of the study is how the ruling relations (Smith, 2005) of current Australian student equity policy have been both activated and appropriated by staff, through their day-to-day use of texts, as they accomplished their outreach work. The practices of staff from two specific universities are explored – the University of Queensland (UQ), and Griffith University – as well as the related activities of a wider, state level body of student equity practitioners and managers called the Queensland Widening Participation Group (The Group). Since 2010, the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) has been the Australian government’s student equity program for funding universities to diversify their student populations to include people from low SES backgrounds. Financial incentives have operated to make these students more attractive to recruit and support, and to increase competition amongst universities to best provide outreach practices that ‘raise aspirations’ among school students in low SES areas. The problematic for the study was to account for tensions observed within student equity outreach practices as staff worked competitively to recruit disadvantaged students to their specific university, while collaborating with staff from other education institutions to expand opportunity for students more broadly and to develop their capacities for higher education more generally. From the standpoint of where student equity outreach staff were positioned within their universities, the study sought to map how the complex and diverse set of student equity outreach activities were being coordinated and standardised by the use of texts. These key texts-in-action that coordinated student equity work included the Memorandum of Understanding forged by The Group that set parameters for competitive and collaborative university outreach in schools; institutionally specific social inclusion targets; and, crucially, HEPPP reporting and evaluation templates that were set by the Australian government for universities to complete on a quarterly and annual basis. As student equity staff activated these institutional reporting technologies in their evaluation practices, they truncated their more complex and nuanced work into the deficit-based categories of HEPPP policy that sought to ‘raise the aspirations’ of ‘low SES’ students. This is how student equity outreach activity became ‘recognizable’ as mandated government policy. Yet my thesis claims that student equity also appropriated these ruling policy relations in various ways and depending upon their university’s position within what I call institutional fields of action for student equity practice in Queensland. Using methods of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003), I demonstrate how UQ staff hybridize the discourses of ‘equity’ and the recruitment of the ‘best and the brightest’ to construct the ‘Young Achievers Program’ that, with the help of school staff, selects and supports high achieving school students in schools in low SES areas. My analysis also works with Bourdieu’s field theory and identifies specific logics of practice for widening participation that UQ and Griffith staff pursue as they appropriate HEPPP policy. In the case of Griffith, I demonstrate that its textual appropriation of HEPPP policy serves both institutional imperatives and the needs of students from Pacific Island backgrounds and students with disabilities. The Group, as a community of practitioners drawn from Queensland’s public universities, appropriates HEPPP policy to distribute a greater share of funds to regional universities and school students, as well as for specifically Indigenous focused projects across the state. Overall, my thesis provides an empirical account of policy enactment as the textually mediated practices of power involving individual people’s activation and appropriation of the ruling relations of mandated policy. The HEPPP policy has both widened the scale of student equity outreach in low SES schools, but also narrowed the purposes for which student equity practitioners’ work is held accountable. While opportunities for students from low SES schools to access university in South East Queensland have increased as well, these university places continue to be unequally distributed across a competitive and hierarchical higher education field.