This year's conference theme, "Enhancing transition to higher education: strategies and policies that work", attempts to achieve several aims. First, it emphasises the need for improvement. Second, it reminds us that the First Year in Higher Education is an experience of transition to new ways of thinking, working and behaving. Third, strategies and policies that work, relates to the need to place our initiatives within an organisational and policy framework in order to achieve maximum impact. By realising this, we hope that the many good ideas that we have seen operationalised over the years may be consolidated into more enduring, more systematic and more far reaching mechanisms by which the experience of a first year in higher education can be enhanced.

The conference will be held from Thursday 10th to Friday 11th July 2003 with pre-conference workshops and side trips scheduled for Wednesday 9th July. Please refer to the conference program in this brochure for further program details. This year's conference will draw together academics as well as a diverse range of specialists in teaching and learning, counselling and health, tertiary education administration etc to focus on issues that are important to first year students, and to all of us as partners in the achievement of their learning ambitions.