Deb Monteith

University enabling programs provide historically underrepresented students with aspirational gateways and the academic skills and knowledges essential for success at university. Measurement of the efficacy of such programs has been typically neoliberal and quantitative in nature. This article argues for a nuanced measurement of success, exploring the efficacy of enabling programs from the students’ perspective to reduce marginalising the lived experience of enabling students. A phenomenologically inspired, qualitative online survey was made available to students enrolled in two high school enabling programs at Murdoch University, TLC Learning for Tomorrow, and FlexiTrack High, and an interpretative phenomenological analysis was performed on the data. The key findings indicate that enabling students feel well equipped for first year transition, but some barriers endure. The qualitative evidence could give rise to the creation of a more holistic measure of student success and encourage universities to develop stronger transition strategies for equity groups.

Enabling education, a widening participation strategy for university access, has seen significant growth across Australia following the Bradley Review in 2008. Not only has there been enhanced uptake of students, particularly those from non-traditional and equity backgrounds, but the number of program offerings nationally has grown considerably. Currently, enabling education is not governed by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency’s (TEQSA) requirements, allowing differences in these programs both within and between institutions regarding content, duration, structure, and modes of delivery. Recently, it has been argued that all Australian enabling programs should have the same learning outcomes since the endpoint is the same: preparation of students for successful participation in undergraduate study. Extensive research has shown that enabling students arrive with a diversity of learning needs, aspirations, motivations, and past educational/life experiences, often influenced by geographical, community, and contextual factors. Within University Preparation Pathways (UPP) at Murdoch University, we have offered five different enabling programs across regional and metropolitan campuses over recent years, each designed to meet the specific needs of a different target cohort. In this chapter, we elucidate not only the value of common learning outcomes, but as informed by our second-generation enabling transition pedagogy (Jones et al. 2022), also recognize the need for common curriculum design principles that underpin enabling programs, in order to foster socio-emotional learning, accessibility, belonging, and engagement. Although our learning outcomes are consistent across our programs and with other programs nationally, we argue that there is a need to retain diversity and flexibility in approaches to enabling curricula across the sector to “do justice” to the learning needs of distinct student cohorts. Examples from our suite of enabling programs demonstrate how we apply these curriculum design principles to meet the targeted learning needs of our differing cohorts.

In Australia, the traditional entry to university for school-leavers is via the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR), but this system can fail the educationally disadvantaged; keeping university-study out of reach. We outline a unique program of concurrent high school graduation with university preparation, experientially developing skills and behaviours, self-efficacy, and emotional intelligence for future academic success.