<p><font color="#33711E"><strong>Day 3 – Plenary Session IV: Permitting Development</strong></font></p>
Queen's Park 1, 10:30 - 12:30
Community Engagement in Australian Higher Education: Learning from AUQA Audit Reports
Antony Stella
Australian Universities Quality Agency, Australia
From time to time, the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) carries out or commissions analyses of its audit reports to gain an overview of the information arising from the institutional audits. These analyses give institutions, their governing bodies, senior management, staff, students, and other stakeholders useful information on the issues that emerge out of the institutional audits. This paper is based on one such thematic analysis, presenting information regarding community engagement in the Australian higher education sector. It covers all the Cycle 1 audit reports of the Australian universities that were in the public domain by November 2007. AUQA's central responsibility in Cycle 1 audits was to carry out "audits of QA arrangements relating to the activities of Australian universities" (and certain other organizations) and the starting point for the AUQA audit is the goals and objectives of the auditee. Therefore, part of the attention to community engagement in the AUQA audits came from the traditional goals of higher education that have a significant place for community engagement. Community engagement has been one of the major themes investigated by the audit panels, to varying extents, right from the first set of institutional audits. This paper includes comments by the audit panels on community engagement of the Australian universities. AUQA and its auditees do not see the audit as a once in six year event. Attention to quality is a continuous process in the Australian higher education sector, and, to support that attention, AUQA asks the auditees to give progress reports 18 months after the publication of the audit report. This has resulted in many institutional actions and this paper briefly analyses those actions as well.
Download the paper (pdf, 50kb) and presentation (pdf, 430kb)