The scale and impact of a system-level academic partnership

AARE’s vision is ‘High quality educational research to enhance the public good’. Its purpose: ‘To promote, support and improve research and scholarship in education to enhance educational processes, policy and practice at all levels’. These statements do not just speak to quality research (which is obviously important), but to the enhancement of education in general. Given the role of education systems in ‘educational processes, policy and practice’, it stands to reason that productive partnerships between educational researchers and education systems could – in a changing world – be one of the key levers of change. In the partnership between the NSW Department of Education and Western Sydney University built around the HSC Strategy, there lies a clear example of the potential of productive academic partnerships to engender and understand change at scale, and to positively impact on teachers and student outcomes.

This paper describes the impact of the partnership upon WSU researchers and the NSW Department of Education. It will utilise findings from WSU’s final report on the HSC Strategy, the Department’s evaluation findings, but also new analysis of qualitative data collected from key stakeholders in the Strategy, including researchers, leaders, evaluators and educators. At 5 years in, this paper will demonstrate the potential for partnerships like this to be ongoing, purposeful and impactful, serving as a roadmap for researchers and systems alike in contexts that will continue to stretch education systems and educational research in meeting the challenges of goof educational processes, policy and practice.