Partnerships between state stakeholders, researchers, and schools are often idealised as a way to create innovative solutions to persistent problems in education, and portrayed with deterministic histories. This paper argues that these relationships often begin long before they are formalised and are at times dictated by circumstantial timing. A…

This paper draws from a large longitudinal study into issues related to student retention beyond the compulsory years of schooling and gives voice to a commonly-overlooked set of stakeholders, namely those in the community. Although many studies report on students' and teachers' opinions of the influence of the community on student engagement and…

In this paper, the author addresses the circumstances of education research knowledge at this time in history. She begins by referring to the keynote talks by Erika McWilliams and Bill Green, who take up the issue of knowledge-building through research in education and how to regard it productively and hopefully as researchers move forward. She…

This paper was a keynote address at the Australian Vocational Education and Training Research Association (AVETRA) conference held in Canberra in April 2012. The author notes that industry is arguably the key stakeholder in the Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector, but is not a single actor nor a disinterested consumer of…

This paper clarifies the problems of meaning and translation into practice of concepts of "quality" in higher education by examining a quality improvement program at Griffith University (Queensland, Australia). The paper notes that Australian government agencies have advanced a quality assurance (QA) approach concerned with the…