The 20,000 equity places that nearly weren’t allocated and that will probably never be delivered

February 6, 2023March 7, 2023 Andrew NortonLeave a comment

At the 2022 election Labor promised up to 20,000 new student places in skills shortage areas for members of equity groups. The minister announced high-level allocations last October. The funding agreements implementing the promise for 2023 were published last month, providing additional but not complete detail. This a multi-year program and the current 2021-2023 funding agreements do not include 2024 commencing places.

This post describes the available information on student place allocation, highlighting the policy and legal flaws in distributing funding this way. The policy’s problems are exacerbated by the Job-ready Graduates Commonwealth contribution changes.

Allocations by funding cluster

When universities received their allocations many were surprised by student places they had not requested. These were in funding cluster 1, the law, commerce and most humanities cluster. Just over 30 per cent (3,026) of the 9,851 places allocated in this round are in cluster 1.

The Department of Education’s manoeuvre can be seen in the funding agreements, an example below, which are prescriptive about the use of cluster 2 and 3 places, following information in funding applications, but not cluster 1. Instead, another clause says ‘these [cluster 1] places are to be delivered in line with a separate agreement between the Provider and the Department.’ To stay consistent with the original guidelines the cluster 1 courses need to be in skills shortage fields. Accounting and auditing are on the skills shortage list, although universities could also find other ‘relevant industry needs or shortages’.

The legal and bureaucratic problems of the government’s 20,000 additional student places policy

August 24, 2022March 7, 2023 Andrew Norton2 Comments

Last week the government’s announced the details of how it will meet its election promise of 20,000 additional student places. Many of these details create legal and bureaucratic problems for the government and universities.

General lack of statutory authority

The program guidelines, unsurprisingly given Labor’s election promise, refer explicitly to the allocation of the 20,000 places. While unexceptional in historical policy terms this is not how things work for public universities (‘Table A providers’) under the Job-ready Graduates version of the Higher Education Support Act 2003.

Section 30-10 of HESA 2003, as cut-and-pasted below, does not give the minister the power to allocate student places to Table A institutions except in the case of designation. Only medicine is currently designated. For higher education courses, covering every course except medicine, the unit of allocation is dollars rather than student places.

How can the government steer teaching enrolments to ‘quality’ courses? And what could go wrong?

August 17, 2022August 19, 2022 Andrew Norton4 Comments

The communique from last Friday’s education ministers meeting stated, in part, that:

The Teacher Education Expert Panel … will focus on strengthening the link between performance and funding of ITE [Initial Teacher Education]. This will include but not be limited to advising on how Commonwealth supported places for teaching should be allocated based on quality and other relevant factors. [Emphasis added.]

This post examines how the government might go about doing this and the problems it would face.

Discipline-level funding under Job-ready Graduates

An initial problem is that the government does not allocate Commonwealth supported places to teaching.

Under section 30-10 of the Higher Education Support Act 2003 the government has no power to allocate student places except for ‘designated courses’, of which more below.

Education is not designated. It is funded under a block grant for ‘higher education courses’. Dollars rather than places are the unit of allocation and the entity that receives the allocation is a higher education institution, not a course or discipline. Recipient universities are free to distribute these dollars between courses according to their own priorities.

With its COVID-19 short courses the previous government bypassed the restriction on allocating student places by allocating dollars to specific courses instead. Using the funding agreements to quarantine dollars for education would, however, be a bad move. It is inconsistent with the apparent legislative intent, which is for university flexibility except in the case of designation. We need to restore full operation of the rule of law in higher education policy. Without amending HESA 2003 that means designation.

What can the government do about student associations and free speech?

July 30, 2021July 30, 2021 Andrew NortonLeave a comment

The Australian this morning reports that ‘Education Minister Alan Tudge is considering cutting off funding to student organisations that attempt to stop the airing of views they oppose on campus.’ The trigger is an issue with the ANU student association, and whether an anti-abortion group and the ADF should be able to set up stalls at the association’s market day.

As is usual in these cases, the facts are not entirely clear. The student newspaper Woroni quotes the student association’s social officer as saying the groups were excluded. But the association told The Australian that the groups did not apply and therefore no application from them has been rejected.

Either way, ‘Mr Tudge told The Australian he was considering ways to block student unions that impede free speech from taking compulsory student fees which fund their services on campus, and tying them to a model code of free speech that now applies only to university administrators and staff.’

How can student unions be regulated?

As the minister’s statement acknowledges, if a student union is a separate legal entity to the university it is not automatically covered by the academic freedom and freedom of speech definitions added to the Higher Education Support Act 2003 earlier this year. The government may try to extend freedom of speech provisions to student unions.

The current freedom of speech law is based on applying conditions to grants rather than direct regulation. As student unions don’t receive grants this mechanism cannot be used for them.

While the government does not directly fund student associations, this year the Commonwealth has lent students about $130 million through the SA-HELP scheme to pay their amenities fees.

There is no current power to attach additional conditions to SA-HELP loans, but this could be considered.

How defensible were the government’s JobKeeper decisions for public universities?

July 5, 2021July 7, 2021 Andrew NortonLeave a comment

The Australian Government’s JobKeeper program was intended as a temporary scheme to keep people in jobs during COVID lockdowns and business restrictions. It was originally scheduled to run until late September 2020. With some more limited extensions it finished at the end of March 2021. The government made several decisions that reduced the chance that a public university would qualify for JobKeeper support. This post evaluates those decisions from a public policy perspective. A subsequent post assesses how the various decisions affected public university JobKeeper eligibility.

In the rush to implement JobKeeper, the public university aspects were not well implemented or explained. University hopes were raised only to be dashed, feeding a sense of persecution as well as cutting off potential funding. I will argue, however, that the final policy position reached by the government, except for the time period for comparing 2019 and 2020 cash flows, was not wrong in principle.

More importantly, JobKeeper was never the right response to the higher education sector’s COVID-related problems. It was a short-term program aimed at helping employers maintain staff through domestic lockdowns and restrictions on activity. Regulations affecting the day-to-day activities of people in Australia were, and remain, very disruptive to universities but are not leading to a major loss of income. The financial problem is an international border closure that will last for more than two years. This will cause significant continuing revenue losses from international students into the mid-2020s.

The eventually announced extra government money for research and temporary new student places were more like what is needed. My critique of the government’s higher education response to COVID is that these policies were only announced late in 2020, and largely terminate before borders are predicted to re-open. Additional assistance for 2022 should be arranged.

The ‘model code’ on academic freedom and freedom of speech and higher education law

June 4, 2021June 7, 2021 Andrew Norton2 Comments

In his speech to the Universities Australia conference yesterday, Education Minister Alan Tudge expressed frustration that some universities had still not, after 26 months, complied with the model code on academic freedom and freedom of speech devised by Robert French. He told delegates that:

If it becomes apparent that universities remain unable or unwilling to adopt the Model Code, I will examine all options available to the Government to enforce it – which may include legislation.

This post updates an earlier one on the relevant law and legal options around academic freedom and freedom of speech. It argues that, at this point, the government cannot legally require full implementation of the model code. Additional legislation is therefore needed.

A policy on academic freedom and freedom of speech

The most important legal change since my summary last September is that the Higher Education Support Act 2003 has been amended to remove a requirement for universities to have a policy on the undefined concept of ‘free intellectual inquiry’ and instead have one on ‘academic freedom and freedom of speech’. The amended section reads:

19‑115 Provider to have policy upholding freedom of speech and academic freedom
A higher education provider that is a *Table A provider or a *Table B provider must have a policy that upholds freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Table A means the public universities, Table B is the other universities. The amendment also includes a definition of academic freedom:

academic freedom means the following:
                     (a) the freedom of academic staff to teach, discuss, and research and to disseminate and publish the results of their research;
                     (b) the freedom of academic staff and students to engage in intellectual inquiry, to express their opinions and beliefs, and to contribute to public debate, in relation to their subjects of study and research;
                     (c) the freedom of academic staff and students to express their opinions in relation to the higher education provider in which they work or are enrolled;
                     (d) the freedom of academic staff to participate in professional or representative academic bodies;
                     (e) the freedom of students to participate in student societies and associations;
                      (f) the autonomy of the higher education provider in relation to the choice of academic courses and offerings, the ways in which they are taught and the choices of research activities and the ways in which they are conducted.

This is a revised version of the definition of academic freedom that appears in the French review. It does not, however, include all the issues covered in the model code.

Can performance penalties reduce university maximum basic grant amounts?

May 21, 2021May 21, 2021 Andrew NortonLeave a comment

The current university funding agreements change the nature of performance funding. Previously performance funding was configured as a reward scheme, providing additional funds in exchange for meeting performance-related criteria. Now it is a penalty scheme, deducting money from teaching grants if universities don’t meet performance criteria. The performance benchmarks are assumed to align with the pre-Job-ready Graduates performance funding policy, but this has not been publicly confirmed.

This post explores whether a performance deduction from teaching grants is legally permissible under the Higher Education Support Act 2003. It is clearly not the kind of performance incentive envisaged by HESA 2003, and there are grounds for thinking that a court might find that it is partially or entirely invalid.

The maximum basic grant amount and the performance penalty

The most important grant provision in HESA 2003 is the maximum basic grant amount (MBGA) for higher education courses. This establishes the maximum amount the government will pay from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme (CGS) for Commonwealth supported student places in coursework courses, other than demand driven enrolments for regional and remote bachelor-degree Indigenous students and medical courses. The total value of this grant for 2021 is about $6.8 billion.

Under HESA 2003 each university is to be paid the lesser of the higher education courses MBGA, as set out in their funding agreement, or the total Commonwealth contribution value (relevant discipline funding rates * full-time equivalent students) of student places delivered. Any enrolments above the cap are funded at the student contribution rate only.

The funding agreements include total MBGA amounts for the next three years. The example below is from Macquarie University’s funding agreement, but all agreements have the same or similar formats.

Another clause in the funding agreements, however, purports to take away an element of the MBGA in the event of poor performance. The example below is again Macquarie but all other other agreements have the same format.

New allocations of money and student places in the university funding agreements

April 29, 2021July 7, 2021 Andrew Norton2 Comments

Update 7/7/21: Some of the data in this post has been updated here.

———————————————————————-

Last month I wrote an overview and critique of the new university funding agreements. This post looks at new allocations of funding for student places, while a subsequent post will look at total funding allocations. Not all my numbers match previously announced total funding for the relevant program, so that is a caveat on both posts.

Under Job-ready Graduates universities are free of sub-bachelor and postgraduate student places being allocated by funding cluster, but the funding agreements show that universities have significant additional work to do in applying for and reporting on a range of small programs.

Numbers of universities getting different allocations

Job-ready Graduates introduced several new or substantially revised pots of money. Not all universities receive each of these. As the chart below shows, programs driven by criteria or formulas set out in legislative instruments (NPILF and transition funding) or the legislation itself (demand driven funding for Indigenous students from regional and remote areas) benefit the largest number of universities. Apart from the general grants for higher education courses (sub-bachelor through to masters coursework, except medicine), the ministerial/departmental discretion programs benefit fewer universities.

*Short courses funding*

According to the funding agreements, 27 of the 37 public universities have received once-off 2021 funding for undergraduate certificate and/or graduate certificate short courses. When a university’s funding agreement reported $0 for short courses I cross-checked against CourseSeeker with its ‘short course’ filter on and found three more universities. I am not sure whether this is because those universities adopted the ‘short course’ brand without a specific funding allocation, or because their funding agreements are yet to be updated, or because CourseSeeker is wrong. My adding up of the value of funding agreement short courses gets me to $213 million, out of the $252 million allocated for 2020-21 in the October 2020 Budget.

Academic freedom as a principle and a practice (a review of Open Minds: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech in Australia)

April 8, 2021April 12, 2021 Andrew Norton4 Comments

Open Minds: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech in Australia is an accessible overview of the subjects in its sub-title. It covers rationales for academic freedom and freedom of speech, the current law, historical controversies, and emerging threats.

Its authors are two law academics, Carolyn Evans and Adrienne Stone, with Evans now a vice-chancellor. Jade Roberts, a legal researcher, assisted them.

As a general concept few people are against academic freedom. Nobody is calling for powerful figures – ministers, bureaucrats, or vice-chancellors for example – to direct the detail of what Australian academics research, teach or say. Yet the historical chapters of Open Minds report many cases through the decades raising issues of ‘academic freedom’. People regularly see exceptions to this otherwise widely-supported idea.

In judging disputed situations first principles can help. Yet these are also the subject of disagreement and grey areas. Academic freedom is not a clear and unchanging principle but instead a practice that has evolved over centuries, originally as institutional autonomy from church and state, with the current idea of academics personally having freedom developing from the late 19th century.

Only this year, after Open Minds was published, have the precise words ‘academic freedom’ with a definition been inserted into university funding legislation. Until then, as the Open Minds chapter on law explains, the language was of ‘free intellectual inquiry’, with universities and regulators left to decide what that meant. Even this terminology is recent, dating from 2011 in funding legislation and accreditation regulation, with ‘free inquiry’ used from 2000 in national legal definitions of a university. Australia has had universities since the 1850s.

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