In summary

  • Swinburne has won a Good Design Award for the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) to improve the outcomes of students from under-represented backgrounds. 
  • The award is the culmination of 12 years of work in equity research, policy and practice by Swinburne Director and Associate Professor of Higher Education, Dr Nadine Zacharias. 
  • Swinburne students who participated in HEPPP programs achieved better outcomes in terms of retention, GPA and unit completion rate.

Students from under-represented backgrounds will be the beneficiaries of a Swinburne University of Technology win at the prestigious Good Design Awards. 

Using a comprehensive, human-centred design strategy, Director and Associate Professor of Higher Education, Dr Nadine Zacharias, developed the Evaluation Framework for Swinburne’s Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) to improve student outcomes.   

The HEPPP is a Federal Government program assisting universities to increase the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds enrolling and completing higher education.  

Recognition of excellence   

Swinburne’s HEPPP evaluation framework won a Good Desing Award in the Service Design – Education Services category.  

Dr Zacharias was honoured to have her work in equity research, policy and practice over the past 12 years recognised through the award.    

“Receiving a Good Design Award for that piece of work, which brings together the insights from a number of big projects from the last decade, is wonderful validation of my contributions to the field and the Australian higher education sector,” she said.  

“For my team at Swinburne, it means that we are leading the national conversation around evaluating HEPPP funded initiatives and can share our learnings and approaches with colleagues.”   

Using a comprehensive, human-centred design strategy, Director and Associate Professor of Higher Education, Dr Nadine Zacharias, developed the Evaluation Framework for Swinburne’s Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) to improve student outcomes.

Equitable by design  

In addition to supporting current students through their undergraduate programs, the HEPPP funds partnership activities with schools, vocational education providers, and the wider community. It aims to raises aspirations and build capacity in communities where young people do not necessarily see higher education as a desirable or achievable path.   

Several thousand Swinburne students participate in HEPPP-funded programs and services each year. Evaluation data for 2021 shows these students had better outcomes in terms of retention, GPA and unit completion rate compared to a control group of similar students who did not participate. 

Dr Zacharias developed the Evaluation Framework after finding initial studies of the HEPPP’s influence on student outcomes were unclear. The data became further complicated when the policy focus widened from students from low socio-economic status backgrounds to include students from Indigenous, regional, and remote backgrounds.   

“Students from underrepresented groups often have more complex lives than those from middle-class backgrounds,” she said. 

“That makes the evaluation of equity programs difficult because it must account for the complex individual circumstances of its users. We needed an evaluation framework that gave us guidance for how we could approach these challenges.”  

A multi-disciplinary approach  

Dr Zacharias assembled a broad team from a variety of Swinburne departments to achieve the best knowledge base. These included Manager of Student Equity Melissa Lowe, researcher Dr Jeffrey Waters, PhD candidate Nicole Brownfield, Academic Director of Indigenous Research Dr Sadie Heckenberg, and data scientist Dr Sviatlana Burova.  

The team worked with consultants from The Growth Drivers to complete the project. 

"It was a sizable project team, and it was a really multidisciplinary team. We were very clear around the skillsets that we needed, and we found the right people to execute quite a comprehensive and complex project brief,” Dr Zacharias said.  

The Good Design Awards are one of the longest-running international design awards in the world, promoting excellence in design and innovation since 1958.  

The project embodies the work of George and Ethel Swinburne, who founded the Eastern Suburbs Technical College in 1908, to give people from all walks of life equitable access to higher education.  

Find out more about Swinburne’s work, and efforts across the Australian higher education sector, to improve equitable access to higher education at Dr Zacharias’ public lecture on 27 October.  

Related articles