What’s in a name? Enabling education in Australia
Emma Hamilton, University of Newcastle; Matthew Bunn, James Cook University; Kieran Balloo, Southern Cross University; Sally Baker, Australian National University
Enabling education began in Australia in 1974 with the establishment of the Open Foundation program at the University of Newcastle. It has since expanded, with 48 programs operating in universities across Australia in 2024 and more starting up in 2025. Enabling education has been defined legislatively as a course “provided to a person for the purpose of enabling that person to undertake a course leading to a higher education award” but that does not in itself lead to an award either within universities or in the VET sector. This definition is elaborated upon by the National Association of Enabling Educators (NAEEA): enabling programs are those that “prepare students for undergraduate study”, including by developing their academic preparedness and discipline-specific knowledges. Enabling education operates free of cost to domestic students who do not meet the current entry requirements to enter their chosen undergraduate level program. Therefore, such courses have been identified as key to widening educational participation, especially for students from recognised equity backgrounds.
In 2024, off the back of the Universities Accord recommendations, the Australian Government announced significant changes to enabling programs – which it renamed “FEE-FREE Uni Ready” (FFUR) courses – including $350 million in funding (at a flat rate of $18,278 per full-time student) and increased student places. The government also committed to work with providers to “professionalise and increase the quality and consistency of courses” and improve their “portability”.
Different names, same goal
In the course of this short announcement, the terms ‘enabling’, ‘pathway’ and ‘preparatory’ were used alongside FEE-FREE Uni Ready, while other terms are also associated with this field of education, including ‘foundation studies’, ‘bridging programs’ and ‘access courses’. Different programs also utilise program names that incorporate these terms or others such as ‘steps’, ‘track’, and ‘link’.
Ostensibly, these courses share the same goal. Recent benchmarking by NAEEA highlights that programs usually include explicit teaching of study preparation, communication skills, academic literacies and/or numeracy. However, despite this, providers do not use the same language to refer to the programs offered. Even when they do use the same naming conventions, they are not necessarily referring to the same program types. For example, there is variation across the sector regarding: length of study time; use of fees; and program entry requirements. The variation in terms, and whether the same program name even means the same thing between providers, is mind boggling!
What’s in a name?
So, we ask, what’s in a name? What does it signify that after fifty years of operation there is still no common nomenclature that helps us to classify these programs and share a language about what they constitute? What will the impact of this name change be as the sector is reshaped under this policy directive? While some point out that the distinct historical contexts out of which enabling and particular programs have arisen can account for nomenclature, the diverse terminology can be problematic.
Current benchmarking exercises seek to make sense of the various naming conventions used around enabling education. They rely on the presumption there is a shared understanding of what enabling education is: a pre-Bachelor course of study that enables entry into university. However, we know that this is not the only way that enabling education can be constructed. Some programs sit within or alongside undergraduate level study. Some sit within high school outreach programs to assist students transition out of secondary education, either into a further enabling program or directly into undergraduate study. While credit bearing subjects cannot constitute the majority of enabling education, some programs (e.g., as offered via Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) level 5 Diplomas) do provide credit into later study.
In the eye of the beholder
It seems, then, that what constitutes ‘enabling’ lies in the eye of the beholder and that the diversity of offerings is not necessarily captured in national typologies of enabling education or in benchmarking. Importantly, what is not captured is whether enabling education is best understood as a field of education that assists students not only into higher education but also through an often-non-linear educational journey that continues beyond the entry point of undergraduate study. Particularly, our nomenclature should not limit our understanding of where enabling should (or could) ‘sit’ as a social mobility mechanism to support students and improve their outcomes.
The diverse nomenclature also means that enabling educators themselves often don’t speak the same language about what constitutes enabling education and, importantly, what constitutes best practice. Enabling education is not a term commonly used outside of Australia, and other terms do not adequately translate into an international context. For example, “preparatory” was the term proposed by the Australian Universities Accord to replace enabling education (Recommendation 12), but this can create a problematic and false equivalency to American preparatory schools, whose function is entirely different to ‘preparation’ in an Australian enabling context.
It matters what we call these courses
Within Australia, the use of distinct naming conventions for different programs impacts the legitimacy of enabling education as a particular field of education, taught by those with distinct and recognisable expertise. If we accept that enabling programs represent a particular branch of knowledge with expertise required to teach it, it deserves a consistent name that represents it as a field of education.
It is questionable whether 'enabling education' is adequate for this purpose. However, the conflation of terms like FEE-FREE Uni Ready (a name reserved for particular programs) with a whole field of education or discipline being taught does not help with efforts to identify a meaningful and invariable name. It also inhibits our ability to understand what it is about enabling education as a field that is distinct, and what exists in parallel with other transition pedagogies, or preparatory practices. If these courses are simply about ‘enabling’ students to enter undergraduate study, what exactly do they even need to cover to prepare students and who determines this?
What we call these courses matters for students, both practically and pedagogically. In practical terms, the diverse naming conventions of enabling programs present a barrier to finding and accessing these programs, an ironic problem considering that these programs are particularly aimed at students often marginalised from higher education. Study Assist guidance tells students to “Check your preferred university’s website to see if they offer FEE-FREE Uni Ready courses”. Yet, a cursory search of a selection of Australian university websites for ‘FEE-FREE Uni Ready’ yields zero results. On the other hand, others have already rebranded their institution-specific enabling education course with the name, FEE-FREE Uni Ready.
Pedagogically, naming conventions also matter: they tell students how they are viewed by the university and, also, infer how they should think about themselves. In a New South Wales context, for example, ‘pathway’ is often used to refer to enabling programs, but it is often preceded by the word ‘alternative’ – that is, it is an alternate pathway to the ‘normal’ completion of the Higher School Certificate, and therefore an implied second, less desirable choice. A similar critique could be made of ‘enabling’, encompassing, as it does, both the social justice impetus of the work but also the loaded and problematic inference that students are not already ‘able’.
Terminology matters in framing enabling education, particularly for students who have experienced educational disadvantage.
To 2025 and Beyond…
So here we are. FFUR courses are now being offered this year, though without the promised government-led underpinning work of formalising the sector-wide benchmarks and shared (read: portable) understandings, curricula, and expectations. Further, the desire for the qualification’s inclusion in the AQF as recommended by the AQF Review remains unrealised, further limiting the recognition and portability of this critical, foundational learning acquisition.
According to the Department of Education, on 27 November 2024, Table A Universities were advised of the allocation of 8,211 FFUR places (based on 2022 enrolments), while another 454 places were to be awarded to Table A unis through a “competitive assessment process”. It is understood these further places have been awarded, though details of the allocations are not publicly available. The Department website goes on to state: “For the purposes of reporting, FFUR enrolments are to be reported as an enabling course to TCSI but with CSP load.” The Universities Accord 2024–25 MYEFO Summary, released December 2024, restates the government’s ambition to “increase the number of students studying FEE-FREE Uni Ready courses by 2030 by 40 per cent”.
This expanded access is, of course, very welcome. But the continuing variability limits not only the quality assured portability of certified learning for students, but also any increase in awareness of these programs, even within a program’s own institution. This in turn impacts the critical and evaluative interest of educational researchers both within and, importantly, outside of enabling education.
What enabling education is and is not
Bourdieu (1987, 13) wrote of the “vision of divisions” – of the struggle over naming and classifying at the heart of the relationship between the dominant and the dominated. What ‘enabling education’ is and is not, what purposes it serves and what is superfluous, are crucial stakes in this struggle. Enabling education represents a real space for changing individual fortunes as students develop fulfilling careers. But it is also an opportunity for powerful knowledge and recognition of why access to education matters. It should provide a space for deeper and critical understandings of higher education and its distributive role in society.
Enabling education is a public good, a true legacy of Whitlam-era policies that assert that higher education is for everyone. How we refer to this field of study matters. It dictates what enabling education does, how and when across a student’s journey.
Naming matters in how we continue to “professionalise” this form of education as a set of practices and pedagogies, and operationalise it for educators and researchers who work within in it and the students who seek to benefit from it. It matters to the public, who fund it.
What is in a name? Everything.
—
A version of this article first appeared in the AARE Blog, EduReseach Matters on 17 February 2025
Emma Hamilton, Convenor, Open Foundation (Online) Program, University of Newcastle.
Matthew Bunn, Pathways Programs, James Cook University.
Kieran Balloo, SCU College, Southern Cross University.
Sally Baker, Migration and Education in POLIS, ANU.