Data, Evaluation and Student Success Systems

Australian higher education is entering a period of stronger expectations to demonstrate the impact of investment in student equity and success. Yet student success is rarely the result of a single program or intervention. Students encounter multiple supports, services and experiences across their journey, often at different points in time and in different combinations. What might we learn if we stopped evaluating these in isolation and instead understood student success as a system?

Doing this requires more than better evaluation methods. It requires us to connect data and evidence across programs and services, understand how different supports interact and build the infrastructure, governance and institutional capability to sustain this work. How do we understand cumulative impact across the student journey? How can we work with increasingly complex datasets? And how do we build evaluation capability into the way our institutions work, rather than relying on individual projects or pockets of expertise?

This Constellation brings together equity practitioners, evaluators, researchers, data and analytics specialists and student success leaders to explore these challenges together. Participants will share approaches being tested across institutions, work through real evaluation, data and systems challenges, connect with colleagues doing similar work and identify opportunities for shared resources, capability building and collaborative research. The aim is to build an ongoing practitioner-led community focused on strengthening our collective capacity to understand what works, for whom, when and in what combination.