Needs-based funding: Whose needs are missing and what support will make a difference?
Sally Baker, Sally Kift and Sarah Walker
Supporting students to participate and succeed in their studies is a hot topic in higher education (HE) right now. The Universities Accord appeared to significantly shift the goalposts on how universities should organise, offer, monitor and report on student supports, with the policy window presenting an opportunity for the sector to address deficit-framings and assumptions about what students need for learning success. This provided real hope: for an imperative to rethink how, what and where support is offered; and, how to tailor it to the individual needs of students who need it the most.
And yet, shifting the success support dial remains as elusive as ever. The changes recently mandated in Support for Students Policy Guidelines 2023 have a regulatory compliance framing, requiring providers to report on how they determine “what support services should be available for their student cohort… and the efficacy of those support services”, rather than pushing for transformative change.
Now, the Department of Education has created more debate with the release of the equity-focused Needs-Based Funding (NBF) consultation paper, which asks questions about how to close current support gaps to accommodate increasing diversity in a “fairer system that supports a higher proportion of students from under-represented backgrounds through to completion” (NBF paper, p.1). The rationale for NBF is that the existing HE Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) is “complex and no longer fit-for-purpose”; however, the consultation paper is light on meaningful detail and unfortunately ignores the useful Mitchell Institute modelling.
Worse, while HEPPP focuses on all four stages of the student lifecycle — pre-access, access, participation, attainment and transition out — the NBF paper focuses on the last two only. The Accord’s Recommendation 11 for outreach programs to be “resourced separately from the Review’s recommended [NBF] model” is not mentioned. A focus on all four stages is crucial or we risk unhelpful (further) segmentation and fragmentation of the equity effort.
Which equity-bearing students?
In its construction of educational disadvantage, the NBF paper is particularly wanting.
The paper identifies students in need of additional support by the broad categories of low SES, First Nations, students with disability (funding consideration deferred) and “students studying at regional campuses” (see below). Many have argued that, while low SES students are generally less likely to complete their degree, low SES is a poor proxy for educational disadvantage. The Accord Report’s focus on First Nations’ self-determination in funding and decision-making in partnership with First Nations leadership is not addressed.
And what about other precarious cohorts, especially those with cumulative challenges? What about students who have left care, who may be low SES, have mental health issues from childhood experiences, and are without social networks for pastoral or academic support? What about refugee students, who experience similar dislocations, unfamiliarity with systems and networks, may have forced migration-related trauma, navigate racist and discriminatory structures and study/work environments, and speak another language?
If we are going to build a needs-based system, let’s address students’ needs! Many students have acute support needs that have been left unmet by years of reductive thinking about who counts as an ‘equity student’. And students don’t love such labels; one participant at a recent symposium compellingly argued, “I don’t want to be known as a ‘rural boy’”. The NBF paper hints at better (broader?) categorisation of equity-bearing, but with no detail. It may be that equity-bearing postgraduate students are now to be supported, but this is not explicit. We should not miss the chance to get this right; there has been a lot of work done on it!
Cumulative disadvantage
Further, despite extensive scholarship arguing for better ways of recognising multiple factors of compounding disadvantage (eg, care-leavers, refugee students as above), the NBF paper poses the question without further interrogation. This cannot languish in the too-hard basket. Under Gonski’s needs-based Schooling Resource Standard, for example, one student can attract funding under more than one loading.
Rural, regional and remote (RRR) students
In a strange diminution in valuing RRR students’ agency and success, NBF follows the campus not the student: no NBF for regional students attending non-regional campuses. This makes no sense for RRR cohorts whose disparity in HE access, participation and outcomes has been longstanding and well documented, including in a separate chapter in the Accord report itself.
Part-time students, non-ATAR students…
The NBF paper suggests funding per EFTSL, not per head. Part-time students, who are often older, studying online and may also be a member of one of the four NBF equity groups, need individual support as a whole person, not as a .5 or .25. Reduced funding will serve neither students nor universities and is especially concerning given these students are amongst the most vulnerable to attrition and non-completion.
Relatedly, failure to address how funding for non-ATAR academic preparedness will be determined is unhelpful if the sector is to achieve 55% attainment by 2050. Even for school-leavers, Learning Creates calculates that only 26% of university entrants use ATARs to access HE.
What support?
One of the most frustrating aspects of the NBF paper is the constrained thinking about what support and success interventions would make a real difference. ‘Support’ is posited as “direct, academic and inclusion, and indirect student support”, but NBF is not for the delivery of services that providers “are otherwise obligated to provide through existing legislation or [that is]… reasonably funded through an existing support program”.
Does this exclude support provision via critical course (re)design and delivery? The examples provided in the paper’s appendix reinforce a constricted ambition for specific, one-off programs and/or targeted interventions. The importance of scholarships is particularly highlighted. Unfortunately, however effective these initiatives can be, they are
…often ‘band-aiding’ underpinning issues with how institutions deliver teaching and learning. Equity needs to be embedded in all institutional practices to enable every student to succeed… Universal Design for Learning, transition pedagogy, and the enablers of these approaches such as digital and physical accessibility, can assist in achieving this.
(Equity Practitioners in HE Australasia (EPHEA) Accord submission, links added).
What’s needed are comprehensive, integrated and coordinated whole-of-institution approaches that embed equity across the four lifecycle stages; that are universally designed for inclusion, engagement, belonging and mattering across the multiple and continuous transitions students experience. The centrepiece – the universal organising device – must be intentional, inclusive, scaffolded and relevant curriculum design, that is optimally organised and sequenced for efficacy and mental wellbeing, and embeds the contextualised support, academic skills and literacies students need for success. This is a student support ecosystem that delivers embedded just-in-time, contextualised in-curricular academic and non-academic support, with a safety net of specialised, wrap-around support provision for specific and additional needs.
A Manifesto for Student Support
Entrenched educational disadvantage that essentially begins at birth is near-impossible to shift. But there are some key principles that we should all consider at this important moment of possibility. In our Manifesto for Student Support, which was co-designed with students, practitioners, researchers, educators, and senior leaders in HE at an event held at the ANU in May, we identify ten principles that should underpin inclusive and holistic student support provision, based around the five elements of Tronto’s ethic of care: attentiveness, responsiveness, responsibility, competence, and trust. This manifesto is now open for consultation.
Sally Baker, Australian National University
Sally Kift, President, Australian Learning and Teaching Fellows
Sarah Walker, Australian National University