Community Engagement Focus

For 2025, HASSE is working to enhance our focus on industry and community engagement activities. This is principally driven by our need to grow [and retain] our student load, improve our income and budget bottom line, and enable us to recruit new staff and plan for the future. We recognise that, across Australia, non-vocational higher education programs are in decline, and no amount of ‘yelling at the cloud’ will have a big impact on a nationwide sentiment. Thus, to what extent can we lean into vocationally-oriented ideas? Where we see the History Council of NSW advertising for a Project Officer to conduct research in First Nations Histories for 15-hours per week, might we be able to work with them to co-fund an academic position in a full-time capacity? Where Learning Links is advertising for a part-time Board Director to help shape the future of child learning development, might we be able to work with them to co-fund an academic position in a full-time capacity? Over the coming weeks I’ll be developing some guidelines for disciplines and departments to consider how they might look to partner with industry and community groups to co-fund these types of academic positions. This will include a process whereby we can work with the UNE Growth Team to explore the viability of proposals, and an agreement drafting process whereby we work with legal to modify a standard financial agreement to meet the specific needs of each partnership.

Tied in closely with this, how might these partnerships, or other initiatives, promote stronger research-integrated teaching activities, including industry/community co-design, student scholarships, and student placements, and how can we utilise and promote these with the ultimate goal of growing our student load? To further help with this, we’ll be drawing on exemplars from across the Faculty to run workshops on how they achieved success in this area. This will help ‘upskill’ us all in the ways of building these partnerships and formulating agreements like the examples noted above.

This will also be at the centre of the HASSE ‘Tamworth Model’. UNE’s Growth Team have advised us there are no new course ideas that will attract a student cohort large enough to be financially viable, nor are any of our current courses viable for on-campus delivery. However, they have advised us that there is a sound market for our existing Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood Education and Care), and our Arts degrees broadly. To address this, our HASSE Tamworth Model proposes recruiting new academic staff, to be based in Tamworth, who will focus the service aspect of their role principally on industry and community engagement, while the teaching aspect of their role will be dedicated towards our existing offerings. This will enable us to enhance our staffing around current or project strengths, while facilitating closer engagement with industry and community groups in Tamworth.

Finally, I do want to emphasise that this focus on industry and community engagement should not take anything away from our current strengths. For example, our Diploma of Modern Languages is one of our fastest growing courses, and applications for our Bachelor of Historical Inquiry and Practice have tripled compared to the same time last year! These ideas are all about exploring new opportunities.

– Professor Nathan Wise
  Acting Executive Dean, Faculty of HASSE