AUSTRALIA: Universities face results-based funding

13 December 2009

Education Minister Julia Gillard has warned universities that she will be looking for results as the government ties new performance funding to teaching outcomes from 2012, writes Andrew Trounson for The Australian. And in line with school reforms, she said details of performance and an individual university's targets will be made readily available to students to drive their choices once student-demand is deregulated from 2012.

"We are committed to looking into new ways of making this type of information readily available to prospective students so that student choice - the centre of our new system - is properly informed by measures of university quality," Gillard told a conference at Monash University on Wednesday.

Gillard said funding needed to be linked to outputs to encourage universities to put greater emphasis on "excellence in teaching". New performance indicators would cover four broad areas comprising: progress in boosting participation; progress in increasing the number of students from poor and under-represented backgrounds; improving the student experience; and enhancing quality of learning outcomes. She said the government would be setting both 'sector wide'' targets and 'university specific' targets tailored to a university's circumstances and strategic ambitions.
Full report on The Australian site

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